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FLOTUS: Museums Not Welcoming to ‘Someone Who Looks Like Me’
New York’s elite dedicated a $420 million building for the Whitney Museum on Monday. The event featured various luminaries and politicians, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, celebritect Renzo Piano, and Michelle Obama. [Editor’s note: Welcome, Rush listeners! if you’re reading this article, you ought to be a Ricochet member. Join up here today].
Instead of merely congratulating the museum staff and praising their mission, the First Lady decided to lecture them about diversity. One of her claims struck me as quite odd:
“You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood. In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum. And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself.”
In a story on her speech, public radio station WNYC identified the vast majority of American museums as “white spaces” that are inherently unwelcoming to minorities.
I have been to several Chicago museums on many occasions. Whether I was at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum, Adler Planetarium, or the Museum of Science and Industry, the bustling crowds were made up of every ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Buses brought in schoolkids from each neighborhood in Chicago and every ‘burb surrounding it. I’m sure a young Michelle Obama participated in similar field trips many times.
And it’s not as if she grew up in poverty, relegated to the South Side’s infamous housing projects like some of my friends. The First Lady had a thoroughly middle-class upbringing in a stable, nuclear family. Her excellent grades got her into Chicago’s superb Whitney Young Magnet High School where she was given one of the finest secondary educations in the state.
Did this smart, successful student actually think Chicago’s many popular museums were closed to “someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood?” Did she “never in a million years dream” she would be welcome in these cultural centers, even though her school must have had field trips to most of them? I find this very hard to believe.
Michelle Obama has had a remarkably successful life. From all accounts, she was a happy, high-achieving child, earned degrees at Princeton and Harvard, was the wife of a U.S. Senator and now lives in the world’s most famous mansion. She graces magazine covers, is lauded on television shows, and even gets invited to speak at the dedication of high-end art museums.
So why does she continue to identify herself and “people like her” as oppressed, aggrieved victims rather than strong, capable winners? I know it’s de rigueur to make every issue a “teachable moment,” but is there any indication that America’s many museums are “off-limits to people of color?”
Published in Culture
Is she saying that museums are intrinsically opposed to women who wear floral print dresses and wag their fingers in other peoples’ faces?
Oddly one of my first memories of museums back in the 70s were of the ones in Chicago. The ones we went to had very few whites and they made it very obvious that we were not welcome. I remember a few of the thugs calling my mother a white C-word, which my father would not tolerate and me an mom herding him out of the museum to keep him safe. It was 30 years before I ventured back into the Chicago museums, they seemed much better now, more in control of their crowds.
That’s a good point. I did not include it in my discussion because I think most museums are doing that already. In this area, we have a lot of exhibits on topics like African-American arwork, Hmong experience in MN, and the like. My kids’ choir group can’t go a concert without having an African song included even though they don’t cover the truly great works of Western Civilization as thoroughly as I think they should.
In my opinion, I think the museums and musical venues are doing their part to bridge that divide, but the moms and dads are not being given the same message. So, I think this speech is an easy one to give because the audience has already demonstrated its commitment to correcting that problem. The other half of the problem (inner city families) is not addressed.
So, I think this is yet another example of stirring up resentment without any hope (or even an attempt) at correcting the remaining source of the problem.
You know, it just dawned on me that this could in fact 100% true and we’re just looking at it all wrong. Anybody want to draw straws for the job of telling Mrs Obama that it’s not really “someone like you”….it’s just you they don’t like.
Why should they? I don’t feel like I am valued as a human being or an American. At least in the areas of rioting the low income people get money regularly from the government to at least show some worth. I on the other hand receive no such validation but instead I am robbed (tax) regularly so America can shower its love upon them.
You should go to the Oprah Museum in Cincinnati, aka “The Freedom Center.” Three floors of white guilt disguised as as a tribute to the Underground Railroad. It accomplished in three floors of exhibits what it could have accomplished in one.
After great fanfare at its opening it has struggled financially. Suggestions that they expand the scope of “freedom” beyond the slave experience of the 18th & 19th centuries has been met with derision.
That’s only what non-rich liberal whites do. For the gentry liberal, the “cheap grace” of voting Democrat is fantastic. They immediately get a pass for writing big checks and voting Dem. They get to nod in agreement about what “bad whites are doing” while their donations reap the benefits of crony capitalism. They get to stay rich while complaining about the system and promising to help fix it by writing another check. They aren’t worried about the pogrom either – money solves that too.
I have a great vision of a red rubber ball and duct tape.
Quite. You are experiencing the reverse side of the same coin. You feel put-upon by a government that confiscates an unreasonable portion of your property, and then squanders it on programs you consider ineffective and ill-conceived.
Your reaction to feeling alienated from your society may take a variety of forms; perhaps you will engage in tax-evasion. Maybe you will flee to another country by whom you feel more valued and renounce your U.S. citizenship. Perhaps it will be limited to complaining on web boards. In any case, your disaffection also undermines your buy-in, and diminishes your contribution to society in a similar, but different way than rioting does: it is the observable symptom of your perceived marginalization.
To answer your question (“Why should they?”), it is desirable for the function of any society to have the maximum number of members feel valued by it, so that they in turn shall value it and strive to support it. Both your disaffection and that of the rioters’ must be remedied for us to succeed. We have much to do.
Would you consider marrying a guy like me?
Sure, as long as he’s not too much like you.
Last I checked, museums cost more than a movie ticket. Those kids aren’t spending their weekly allowance (ha!) to look at paintins.
I imagine that the people who run museums in this country tend to be “progressive” as are most of their contributors. What, I wonder, is their response to the First Lady’s allegations? Do they resent the implication that they are racist, or have they so bought into the Left’s “narrative” that they believe that while their museums are inclusive, the majority must be discouraging minority visitors because America is so “evil”?
Check your privilege sweetie. Last time I went to the Met in NYC, it was awash with every nationality and color imaginable. Perhaps she was thinking of the art itself not being welcoming to folks in the ‘hood. But even then, one can go to ANY prominent art museum in the country (can Michelle spell Art Institute of Chicago) and find mixed media new age art that would delight every graffiti artist and hip hop connoisseur.
I think most museums, like almost any institution, want patrons. Museums that are not visited tend to get shut down, either because they are not selling tickets or because donors are not going to favor an institution that is not being used. As Milton Freidman etc. have pointed out, if you want to discriminate, it’s going to cost you.
I’m 43 years old, and I know from experience that most black people are not thugs. I think most museum administrators know that too. Yet Michelle Obama, and so many Democrats, are determined to persuade us that we actually don’t know this and that we are racists. The real racists are the ones who think that rioting is just a normal thing for black people to do, so if you call rioters “thugs,” you’re really calling black people in general “thugs.”
I am white and have 3 black (teenage!) kids. We travel on vacation with them quite a bit and have been places where they are the only black people around. They have never said they feel unwelcome anywhere and I can only guess what they actually think. I have not perceived any unwelcome vibes, but I’m not looking for them. Do we get bad service or the cold shoulder at times? Sure, but I get that when they are not with me too. Walk into a fancy restaurant with 7 kids and you’re bound to get some withering looks.
That is so much more tame than the words that came into my head.
A homeless person these days could walk into a museum and see the most beautiful works of art created by humans, works that were originally intended only for aristocracy. It’s amazing to think about that fact. I do not know what universe Mrs. Obama and her left-wing ilk live in.
Gaah. Stop with the “FLOTUS.” There is no office called “First Lady of the United States”, never was. Frankly, the term is undignified.
On the contrary, Barfly, undignified suits this particular one, perfectly…As do her ‘designer’ dresses. Gaah, too…
I might be able to live with “Flo,” only because the twit would fold under mild ridicule. Or perhaps “Flout-us.” But seriously, y’all, the term smacks of fangirl throne sniffing.
Ah, but you have to concede its similarity to a medical term for a rather unpleasant occurrence (at least to my ears), and, thus, its supremely appropriate character.
It’s interesting that her claim to impoverishment is some sort of twisted “victimization envy” that many liberal elites feel. Something similar led Hillary to claim that all four of her grandparents were immigrants when in fact only one was.
Suppose that Michelle really believes what she is saying, and that she gets this idea that black kids don’t feel welcome in museums from actual black kids who have told her so, or from her own childhood experience.
Let’s also suppose that these hypothetical kids really do feel unwelcome at museums. What might be the cause?
According to pretty much every white person I know who has ever spoken to me about race issues, nothing makes them happier than to see well-behaved black kids in a museum, or studying in a library, or gainfully employed and showing a good attitude toward their work and their customers. Such black kids would have no reason to feel unwelcome. In fact, the welcome they receive would be genuine and heartwarming.
But suppose certain black kids are not well-behaved in the museum. Suppose they are noisy and run around bothering people. Now, it is a stereotype based on a lot of truth that the typical inner city black kid has a much more aggressive public persona than his white suburban counterpart. I saw it every day at the university where I taught and in the city where I grew up.
Such kids are not going to get the same welcoming response from other museum-goers. They might be sensitive enough to feel the animosity, but might not know why it is directed towards them, since to them their behavior seems normal. They may conclude that the reason is their race.
Finally, something conservatives and liberals can agree on: Defund the racist NEA!
More seriously, this is a woman who won admission to Princeton, benefited from its educational opportunities and resources for four years, and then wrote her senior thesis on how hard it is to be black at Princeton. When someone in Target asked her to reach something on a high shelf, she attributed it to racism. Heck, America put her in the White House, one of America’s elite cultural symbols. It’s hard to imagine there is anything further that can be done to persuade her that American (white?) culture genuinely welcomes her (and by extension, any and all black Americans too).
Cat away.
But I’ll just say that I’m happy to see her in an decorous outfit, where the key ‘takeaway’ doesn’t seem to be how toned her abs are, or what great shoulders she has, or how with-it she is by wearing clothes that look like they scraped the bottom of the barrel at Target.
So, regardless (or is it irregardless) of the fact that she looks like a piece of walking chinoiserie, I’ll take it!
Because the alternative is worse.
Aw, c’mon now. Sasha and Malia designed that for her! Let’s leave the kids out of this. ;-)
Wait.
Wait.
Did Nanda – Nanda! – just make…a fart joke?!
Completely agree. Can’t find the office of “FLOTUS” anywhere in the Constitution.
But, if we have to have one (and it seems, for some reason, that we must), let’s at least have one who’s articulate, committed and passionate, and who can deliver the message, without self pity and whining, off the cuff and convincingly:
Next week, if you’re in PA, vote:
JAY HAY for FLOTUS!
To your ears?
Yes, Charlotte…That woman drove me to it (Grin)
What level of success or prominence would teach this woman the lesson that her fundamental understanding of America is mistaken? I’d guess none, as that chip on her shoulder isn’t just her meal ticket, but rather her identity.