{"id":5630,"date":"2023-12-10T01:43:28","date_gmt":"2023-12-10T01:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/?p=5630"},"modified":"2023-12-10T01:43:29","modified_gmt":"2023-12-10T01:43:29","slug":"how-do-we-reckon-with-our-racial-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/?p=5630","title":{"rendered":"How Do We Reckon With Our Racial Past?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How can we reckon with a racial past if we don\u2019t know it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a Mon., November 27 Ethnic Media Services Briefing, leaders from the Smithsonian Institution and three cultural centers in Los Angeles \u2014 where the Smithsonian is launching its national initiative, Our Shared Future: Reckoning With Our Racial Past \u2014 discussed how past racism relates to present racial inequality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

National experiences of race, racism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Deborah Mack, director of the Smithsonian\u2019s Our Shared Future, said the initiative came about to address the history of racism and its present legacy in the U.S. after the murder of George Floyd and subsequent nationwide protest movements. \u201cThe United States is, more than at any other time in its history, a globalized society, and many of the concepts of race that are portrayed in mainstream media have often limited application to the communities they\u2019re intended to represent.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the city\u2019s diversity, she saw Los Angeles as \u201cone of the strongest places to express the full breadth of histories of racism as an American national experience,\u201d and so the Smithsonian worked with three cultural institutions that have long focused on that work in marginalized communities: LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes<\/a>, the Chinese American Museum<\/a> and the Japanese American National Museum<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although even reflecting on the racial past \u201cposes political challenges in many parts of the country, we don\u2019t see reticence nearly as much as we expected,\u201d Mack said. \u201cWe\u2019ve particularly seen a lot of response from educators who have been punished for raising these issues, who use our work to say, \u2018If the Smithsonian is doing this work, why shouldn\u2019t we?\u2019 \u2026 If we don\u2019t talk about our history of inequity, we won\u2019t be able to move forward from it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The role of museums in reckoning with the racial past<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Far from being limited to preserving this past, the role of museums is to \u201cspotlight where we\u2019re now moving as a culture through the history of our communities,\u201d said Leticia Buckley, CEO of LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes. \u201cWe don\u2019t just collect artwork, we collect stories, because it\u2019s important that they are told by us and not for us. The past isn\u2019t just 100 years ago \u2014 it\u2019s last year, last month, last week.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSince we\u2019re working within systems that were not meant for us to be working within,\u201d she continued, \u201cit\u2019s not just about dismantling the systems itself, but creating our own. You can\u2019t address racism without difficulty; that\u2019s why it continues and is perpetuated \u2026 it\u2019s hard, but we can\u2019t move forward unless we reconcile ourselves to the past.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alongside more traditional museum exhibitions, this reconciliation takes the form of \u201cmusic, dance, culinary demonstrations, multigenerational art making, and in-person storytelling,\u201d highlighting the experiences of LA Mexican Americans \u2014 most recently the East LA student walkouts of 1968, the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, and the experiences of Afro-Latinos, Buckley explained. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese stories are filled with trauma and defeat, but also joy and success,\u201d she added. \u201cWe look at the past to address the harms that our communities have endured, but also to reckon with the harms that we may be guilty of inflicting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Racial stories as American stories<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In telling these stories, museums must be a place \u201cwhere we unite rather than divide people \u2026 by telling these racial stories as part of a broader American experience of U.S. history,\u201d said Michael Truong, executive director of the Chinese American Museum. \u201cChinese Americans are not only part of a larger community of Asian Americans, but also of Americans in general.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The need to tell these stories is as pressing as ever given rises in Asian hate over the past few years, but extends throughout a century and a half \u201cof forgotten history of Chinese Americans in LA\u2019s Chinatown,\u201d he continued.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One such undertold history recently highlighted by the Museum is the LA Chinese Massacre of 1871, an act of mob brutality among 500 white and Latino Americans who killed 19 Chinese immigrants \u2014 over 10% of the LA Chinese population at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow do we reckon with our racial past and heal from our racist past, if we don\u2019t even know the history, if we don\u2019t know what to heal? Our work is not just to remember the past, but to make sure we\u2019re learning from it,\u201d Truong explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contemporizing the past<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

James Herr, director of the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy at the Japanese American National Museum (JaNM), said the 20 years since the center\u2019s founding has affirmed the need for its aim. \u201cWhen you\u2019re telling the truth about America\u2019s racial past, it can often bring up feelings of hatred and resentment and bitterness towards those in power, so we want to tell and share these stories to avoid reliving the past.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the museum\u2019s location speaks to the way this past is contemporized and these lessons relearned, he continued, as JaNM was \u201cfounded in what is now the first Buddhist temple in LA \u2026 It\u2019s also on a plaza that used to be Central Avenue at First Street, which is where Japanese Americans in LA were ordered to report before being incarcerated in internment camps.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These issues of racially marginalized American citizens \u201cstripped of their rights and due process\u201d continue to arise so long as they are \u201cdenied the right to write their own history,\u201d Herr said. For example, \u201cafter 9\/11 there were public calls for the incarceration of Muslim Americans,\u201d and more recently in 2017 \u201cthere was the Muslim travel ban, against which we were among the first organizations to speak out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen our communities have been marginalized in the past, that marginalization leads to them not wanting to come together and have these conversations about it in the present, and that compounds the issue,\u201d he added. \u201cIf we contemporize that racial past\u201d by seeing how it affects us today, \u201cwe see ourselves for who we are \u2014 Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: Published without changes from Ethic Media Services<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Selen Ozturk How can we reckon with a racial past if we don\u2019t know it? At a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5606,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,232,24],"tags":[66,78],"class_list":["post-5630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-black-history","category-civil-rights","category-regular-column","tag-african-american","tag-racial-discrimination"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5631,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5630\/revisions\/5631"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}