I have visited the “Race” exhibit at Rochester Museum and Science Center twice so far, and both times caught college classes crowding the different stations, with students and teachers strolling in pairs or small groups and discussing with one another — and with community members — the heavy things that we must discuss. I witnessed people coming together in earnest to hear each other and to help each other understand, having halting, carefully measured, and at times awkward conversations. The show is a good stepping stone for the community, but made effective only by the patience and respect we are willing to offer each other going forward.
With its heavy focus on reading and listening, the exhibit skews toward an adult crowd. But with adult guidance it could be beneficial for young children as well. The show offers a wealth of information about variations in the human race, covering a lot of ground, from how geographic location has affected human variety, to race as a social construct used to control and shape human society throughout history. People from countless different backgrounds and combinations of cultures convey their experiences via video and in quotes.
One section holds instruments once used to measure differences and define us into ever-increasing categories. Another station discusses slavery and servitude, exploring the literal and legal ways that racial definitions have shackled humans. Yet another offers the historic horrors of segregation and Apartheid, which endure as open sores in American and other cultures, but which we overlook in current situations around the world. Videos playing in a newspaper stand tackle the hideous twin issues of racism and classism and the increasing divides between citizens as they struggle and throw one another under the bus. Viewing the exhibit will be uniquely complicated for each visitor, as well-meaning openness wars with insidiously ingrained prejudices and all manner of memories.
A wall of photographs of people wearing t-shirts defining their full, complex ethnic heritage is positioned near a stand about the U.S. Census, which asks viewers to vote on whether they think the demographic questionnaire’s question on ethnic background should include these complexities, be more simplified, or omit the question of race altogether.
Other interactive parts of the exhibit include an individual opinion-based survey on which people around the world we deem as “white,” as well as two stands where visitors may look at their own skin under a magnifying camera. At one of these, information is provided about how sunlight and vitamins, not race, determine our skin pigmentation. At the other, a photograph is taken of our flesh, which is added to a digital mosaic of the human prism.
The exhibit vaguely explores how we are still manipulated by the idea of race in a section about the first race-specific drug, BiDil, a prescription drug used to treat African Americans with congestive heart failure, which was approved by the FDA in 2005. At this section, quoted doctors debate whether there is any concrete evidence to support race-specific medicine and treatments, and after reading what they had to say, it seems far more likely that pill developers are just trying to sell pills.
But that’s about as far as visitors are guided with regards to how the concept of racial differences manipulates our thoughts and actions today. Missing from the exhibit is an exploration of how ongoing prejudices guide each of us in sneaky ways even today, not only those we deem backwards souls, at whom we can shake our heads. Also not addressed is scripture-based racism, and how perceived rights to specific scraps of land and their resources are bolstered by the concepts of “chosen people” and “manifest destiny.”
The ever-increasing problem of classism is touched on in various spots throughout the exhibit, but the connection isn’t quite made about the ongoing usefulness of racism by the financial elite to help maintain classism. Racism is a big facilitator of classism; the people hurt by racism are also hurt a great deal by classism as well. We pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, we fight amongst our impoverished selves over scraps. Of particular interest is a wall on which people weigh in about the significance of electing a black president vs. the reality of racism in modern America.
Lacking from the exhibit is a clear delineation between personally learned and practiced racism and institutionalized racism, and the reality that while both must be fought, we cannot defeat one by defeating the other. We cannot feel good about eliminating racism from our daily lives if we uphold racist laws (for example, the disparities in the standards of punishments for the possession and sale of certain substances put in motion by the Rockefeller Drug Laws), merely because they are laws.
Institutional racism makes us incurious about the discrepancies between neighborhoods within the same city. It makes it easier to swallow the story of extremism in the Middle East and Africa and ignore our own. It reduces the innocent casualties to our aggressive resource-grab from whole lives to an unfeeling number. We can easily find anecdotes from soldiers who have said that once in Afghanistan, it became clear that racism was the tool by which our politicians took us to war. Ongoing racism dulls American citizens’ sharp awareness of our own selfishness, as well as the bigger threats to us in authority at home.
I left the second visit to the museum curious if any other animal group on this earth has showed signs of discrimination against members of its own species based on physical trait variations. Then I struggled. This is certainly something that we could set forth to study, but to what end? We could try to determine what survival purpose prejudices might serve, but we already know we don’t want to live like animals, so we can find no excuse in brutal nature.
We live in a time with more open access to information than ever before, but we have been lazy with it. We already know that technology’s potential to connect us has failings, that the explosion of information has also created an illusion of understanding and a new breed of narcissism. Our patience for cultivating depth in our relationships and especially beyond the home, into the community, is steadily slipping. Which is not to say that efforts toward these ends are not being made — this very exhibit is a step in the right direction — but individual initiative needs to catch fire and spread.
Left: A photo from the “Race” exhibit demonstrates how racial categories have changed throughout American history. Right: A young visitor adds her skin tone to an ever-changing palette assembled from visitors’ contributions.
PHOTOS PROVIDED
This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2013.
I will be going back to see the exhibit again this weekend. I found it to be quite challenging, but not for the exact reasons that you gave.
I found it challenging because it is difficult to talk about race in the context of an exhibition that makes the case that “race” does not exist except as a human construct. It is as though we do not have an appropriate language to use, because that human construct has so defined how we talk, think and make laws that we do not know what words to use to think in any other way.
The exhibit, heavy as it is in the use of text and words, seems to be moving us toward something that is unexpressed or perhaps inexpressible, given the limitations of the box we have constructed.
If it is an error for me to define you as black or white, because there is no objective basis to that distinction, it is also an error for you to define yourself that way, though of course you have the right to be wrong! Are we really willing to go there?
If race is a simply a human construct and the diversity of human traits are a continuum of colors of beige and brown or slight variations in shape of skulls and bones, then there is a potent message for all of us, racists and non-racists alike.
If there is no reality to our identities of “white” or “black” or “Asian” other than the invention we bring to it, then that preposition calls into question not just the ignorant abhorrent words and actions of those who spread hatred in the name of racial superiority, it also challenges the rest of us for whom that racial identity has been a means to gather political strength, unity and means to oppose that hatred through organized action.
In effect, if race does not exist, then “White Power” and “Black Power” are equally invalid.
It seems to me that the exhibit seeks to define “racism” not simply in the pejorative sense of the Ku Klux Klan or the local Republican Party. Instead, racism is defined as a system of classifying people, whether it is how others define us inappropriately, or how we define ourselves through identity politics. And that is a big difference.
What we need to invent now is a new truly inclusive language that will allow us to discuss these issues more broadly and in a way that does not posit human beings in oppositional relation to each other.
How will that happen? I don’t know, but this sort of change can happen over time. At one time, we divided ourselves into pools of hard laboring serfs or lords of luxury. Though we may feel sometimes that we still live in that era, we do not define ourselves in that way anymore. But the future is risky for all of us, if we truly want move beyond race. But it certainly is a risk worth exploring.
–Larry Champoux
Thanks very much for your comments, Larry!
I think we should clarify that while race is a cultural construct, the construct does have real effects in the world. The ways in which people have decided to define themselves are a defensive reaction to being defined, often by an oppressor. It’s a way to navigate a world that has been constructed in the oppressor’s image. People adopt the definitions and tweak them, as a way to exist within the label that is thrust upon them.
This goes for any “underdog” group you can find. There will always be a push for defining an identity for oneself after those in authority or those who think of themselves as the majority created categories and shove people into them.
That being said, I do think that all existing categories fall short of defining the reality of people, even the good categories. When sitcoms such as Will and Grace hit the air, it simultaneously served to ingratiate “gays” to mainstream America, defining “them” in a much nicer light than they had been, while also severely limiting the definition of “gay.” Many, many, many people did not see themselves reflected in those characters.
For now, the language we use, the categories we form, serve to unite people and hopefully create a positive movement, but are no more accurate definitions of who each person is as an individual than simply calling someone a man or a woman. I hope we can get to the point where we describe people in terms of how they are to each other, which is all we really need to know about a person.
The temptation is just to laugh off such mindless ideological claptrap—but it is a real scandal that the scarce resources of such an important local educational institution would be squandered so foolishly.