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The Casual Bigotry of Elite Black Americans: National Museum of African American History & Culture
Today I came upon a tweet by Byron York that startled me. York’s tweet included an attachment from the National Museum of African American History & Culture describing what they call “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture in the United States”. Let me post Mr. York’s tweet below.
The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more. (via @RpwWilliams)https://t.co/k9X3u4Suas pic.twitter.com/gWYOeEh4vu
— Byron York (@ByronYork) July 15, 2020
This is just stunning. This handy little flyer is available at the National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) website under a section called Talking About Race. This Talking About Race section is pure toxicity and, in the parlance of the Left: hate speech. It hits all the shibboleths and jargon of the woke mob we’ve been seeing and hearing in the last couple of months of “mostly peaceful protests” which have resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars of property damage and the direct deaths of dozens of people. If one did not know any different one might think the NMAAHC Talking About Race section was from Black Lives Matter – in this section are matter-of-fact definitions and discussions of white supremacy, white fragility, white nationalism, white privilege, systematic racism, and institutional racism as if these were long established and agreed facts, presentations by race hustlers such as Robin DiAngelo and the flyer that started this post, speaking of which let me post a larger copy.
It should be noted that the NMAAHC, which was established in 2003 and opened in Washington, D. C. in 2016, is a part of the Smithsonian Institution. Therefore, it is part of the federal government and financed by our tax dollars.
Taking a gander at the flyer, here are just a few of the attributes and behaviors the NMAAHC ascribes to white culture, and therefore I suppose are bad: 1) the nuclear family, 2) hard work, 3) objective, rational, linear thinking, 4) respect for private property, 5) delayed gratification, and 6) being polite when communicating with others. Well alright, then. Those really are diabolical, aren’t they? And, in fact, they have little or nothing to do with whiteness or white culture; rather, they are attributes of Western Civilization and the bourgeois culture that evolved therefrom. Western Civilization with its Judeo-Christian foundation is open to anyone of any ethnic or racial background who is willing to buy into it. It is these values and behaviors which generations of parents, teachers, and mentors have attempted to inculcate in their charges and any individual or society accepting these values has increased their prospects for success and happiness.
In point of fact Americans who accept these bourgeois values regardless of race or ethnicity are overwhelmingly successful in our country. Per the chart below, non-whites of many stripes are better at “white culture” than are whites at least based on income.
Before moving on I want to briefly mention one thing from the chart. In the last 20 or so years, about 2 million black Africans have immigrated from various African nations to the United States, and by and large, have thrived here.
In the post title, I specifically mentioned the casual bigotry of Elite Blacks in current-day America as evidenced by this NMAAHC exhibit/display. However, in this regard, they are no different than Elite Whites. It is society’s elites, the majority of whom are progressive or liberal, who control education, media, the entertainment industry, silicon valley and increasingly our biggest corporations who are both at the forefront of and the most militant enforcers of this Social Justice Warrior/Cancel Culture which is so toxic to and destructive of the core values of the greatest society the world has yet seen.
Finally, since I took the time to run down the bios of the main directors and curators of the NMAAHC, I might as well briefly list them.
Dr. Spencer Crew, Crew, Interim Director – BA – Brown University, Phd – Rutgers
Joanne Hyppolite, Curator – BA – Univ of Pennsylvania, MA – UCLA, PhD – Univ of Miami
Michelle Wilkinson, Curator – BA – Bryn Mawr College, PhD – Emory University
Mary Elliott, Curator – BA – Howard University, JD – Catholic University of America
Lonnie G Bunch III Founding Director- BA & MA American University
William Pretzer, Senior Curator – PhD – Northern Illinois University
Judging by their bios, the leaders of NMAAHC are elites in our society, educated at some of our top colleges and well paid in their chosen field. Yet, they are either fools or bigots, or just maybe, both. There are no other options to explain the idiocy and bigotry of Talking About Race. The idea of a NMAAHC is a fine and noble pursuit, and there is much to document and tell of the black experience in America – slavery, segregation, discrimination, military service in all of our nation’s wars, success in entertainment, sports, business and enrichment of our culture and society in numerous ways. However, if Talking About Race is representative of NMAAHC I question whether it should continue to receive taxpayer funding.
Rugged individualism vs. community focus. It takes a village, remember? It’s I vs. We. Remember how Obama, our one Black President always was inclusive, saying “We” and never focusing on himself as an individual and saying, “I”?
Nuclear family vs. extended family with grandmas raising kids.
Okay, the base level data of that came from a consulting firm surveying on attitudes in 1990. It isn’t deranged, although it is thirty years out of date. (Thanks to our university system, white values are now Marxist/Maoist.) The source isn’t what you think it is. The museum just used the data for a graphic specifically on “whiteness.”
The people who compiled the data had very good jobs at the time. Speaking as a consultant, that doesn’t mean they were working all that hard.
@arahant
Hi, sorry maybe we are talking past each other. When I say source, I mean the museum. Other people have said it so I’ll repeat it, because I believe it’s true: Had Tucker Carlson or Josh Hawley suggested hard work is white value people would have lost their minds.
The people writing the flier and running that museum have good jobs and would never behave that way in their own life (again, this is the source I’m talking about).
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, I’d be happy to hear whatever differences you have with my post once we get on the same page. I looked up the source document and the author with some very quick google searches and well, I don’t see any data or research design, this holds for the Jones and Okun citation as well. It’s actually all very circular, as this type of research usually is. It simply can’t support the argument that it needs to make, which is that blacks don’t hold these views.
http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/RSJI/GRE/whiteculturehandout.pdf
Support for the general beliefs about the efficacy of hard work tends to represents the plurality blacks in surveys more often than not. Generally, however this can be masked by black support for group benefits, which is confounded by class, not race.
I’m not arguing that it is wrong. I’m just saying this nonsense goes back further: thirty years.
We go back to “consultants” and “hard work.” 😁 Never the twain shall meet.
I grew up in a tiny mining camp in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico. And, as a “gringo,” I was very much in the minority. Some Mexican-American kids definitely objected to the color of my skin. Some tried to beat me up and some succeeded. So, don’t make any assumptions about me or my experiences because of the color of my skin.
Try telling Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, or Thomas Sowell that hard work and delayed gratification are unique to white people. Try telling scientists like Charles Drew or George Washington Carver that “objective, rational linear thinking” and belief in “cause and effect relationships” are “acting white.”
A few above me have gone there, but media critiques of this really need to call this out for what it is: racist.
I’m feeling some Boss Mongo-level blind rage, here.
I can’t get any coherent or useful thoughts together. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, tigerlily.
Sure Charlotte.
You, too? I don’t even know how to start with something this stupid coming out of a major institution. Maybe it is too late for our country.
Just to note, Steven Hayward at Powerline, who I like, did a takedown of the project, but declined to go with a direct accusation of racism. I suspect others, in a misplaced effort at gentility, may also shy away from the term. But I think it’s time to go there.
In a sense, we shouldn’t have been too surprised at this as the Smithsonian, once referred to as “America’s attic” has been edging further and further to the left.
I still recall the Enola Gay (the plane dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945) controversy in 1995 when it was announced that the exhibit was to be accompanied by a script that said, in part, “For most Japanese, it (World War II) was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism.” I couldn’t help but laugh, while thinking, “Did the 300,000 citizens of Nanking who were shot, bayoneted, or decapitated appreciate that it was being done by folks who wanted to defend their ‘unique culture’? For that matter, what about any of the other countries that fell under Japanese rule?”.
Thankfully, in 1995, we still had enough “adults in the room” that saw the stupidity in this and had the guts to do something about it. Veteran’s groups and the Air Force Association soon began a campaign to combat the idiocy of the Air & Space Museum leadership and the wording in the exhibit was changed to reflect the reality of the situation.
This, and the present situation at the National Museum of African American History & Culture, is just another reason to appreciate the wisdom of George Orwell’s observation:
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them”.
Given the “affirmative action” culture, how many of the people at that museum got their jobs through hard work? Shows how the “affirmative action” culture hurts blacks rather than helping them. When you meet a black CEO, do you ask yourself if he or she really earned that job, or was just promoted because they had a “diversity quota” at their company? Even if there was NOT such a quota, you still might think that.
Gee. What was shown is a blueprint for success of any culture. Once again, “acting white” is a sin . . .
@charlotte, pro tip: Don’t ever go full Boss Mongo.
You have to think about your health.
I’ll just go ahead and say it; this stuff, this “critical race theory”, “privilege”, “intersectionality”, “white fragility”, “1619 Project”, etc. stuff is just evil. Pure divisive, hate-seeding, nation-killing evil.
Watching this poison being taught to kids is like seeing toxic sludge being pumped into the veins of America.
EDIT: I wish that white guy at the online school meeting in NYC who was being screamed at for having a baby of the “wrong” race on his knee had responded to demands that he read “White Fragility” with, “I’ve read that book, and it’s pure evil. And I refuse to live my life according to it.”
I no longer even bother to concede that it comes from a good place. It’s effect on the world is simply too negative for that to make a whit of difference.
Well, apparently it didn’t contribute to the “productive conversation” they were hoping for and it has been taken down: https://www.foxnews.com/us/african-american-museum-removes-whiteness-chart-race.
I don’t know. I thought our conversation was pretty productive.
The NMAAHC Talking About Race page still links to a (less spiffy) document that contains the same information. It’s at the Resources page. It’s linked several times (see “Some Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States” on pages 4, 5, & 6). Here’s a direct link:
http://www.cascadia.edu/discover/about/diversity/documents/Some%20Aspects%20and%20Assumptions%20of%20White%20Culture%20in%20the%20United%20States.pdf
What sort of person would teach black children that things like hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, respect for authority, delayed gratification are “whites-only” traits and, by implication, things that black people don’t or shouldn’t do?
Uh…..a Progressive?
But why? Do they want black people to fail?
A feudal lord who wants his black serfs to stay in line?
It’s truly disgraceful. And it explains a lot. As far back as the 80s, I’ve read of inner city kids ostracizing anyone who stayed in school and spoke standard English and accused them of “acting white.” I have always known that this is the wrong way to look at things, but I never knew until now that the adults are espousing it. But I guess these adults were those kids in the 80s. It’s irresponsible and reprehensible.
They consider it to be helping the underprivileged.
And controlling them.
Before the Civil War, many of the Southern states outlawed teaching slaves how to read. The fear was that slaves might be able to coordinate uprisings or read abolitionist pamphlets smuggled in from the north. When slavery ended, the freed people had a desperate hunger for education. Now, being well educated is considered by some blacks as “acting white.” Ironically, they’ve taken up where the slave masters left off.
Ah geez (and I wasn’t trying to make light of your initial question), things have spun out of control so far that I don’t think that it can ever be answered.
What’s important now is that Republicans/Conservatives MUST take each one of these “acts of idiocy” and make them part of the 2020 campaign for the Presidency, Senate and House of Representatives.
The Progressives are giving the Republicans one gift after another if the Republicans are smart enough to take them.
Yep.
And that should be a prime campaign issue for the Republicans….
Regarding the “edit.” I saw that clip. I wish I knew more about how that was resolved. That video was crazy and I’m surprised the lady got away with it. She should, at minimum be asked to name names as to who is offended at white people holding black babies.