Further Information
The Race exhibit was developed by the American Anthropological Association Race Initiative and the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), with funding from the NSF and Ford Foundation.
Check out these two excellent Web sites:
- The AAA Race Project Web site provides superb online educational resources as well as information about its aims, the exhibit, and the tour.
- The Science Museum of Minnesota Web site illustrates the inclusive possibilities of educational and outreach programming.
The exhibit opened in St. Paul on January 10, 2007 and will begin a national tour in May 2007. We are fortunate to have moved quickly to secure a fall semester booking to allow maximum involvement with public schools, since the tour is now fully booked with a waiting list.
The exhibit highlights multidisciplinary perspectives on race:
- Biological perspective on human variation that contradict racial thinking
- Sociohistorical perspectives on race as a powerful social construct
- humanistic perspectives on race as lived experience and racism as a major, ongoing issue of our time
Kristina Wirtz’s reflections on visiting the Race Exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota
The “Race: Are we so different?” exhibit at the SMM is beautifully done and very engrossing. It is not surprising that museum visitors are spending an average of an hour in it (a long time in museum terms)—one could easily stay twice that long because it is that absorbing and there is so much to see. The SMM and American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) principal goal in producing the exhibit has been an ambitious one: to stimulate a national dialogue on race. The project evolved as a response to incredible media and public feedback to the AAA’s 1997 “Statement on Race,” which brought a flood of requests for educational materials on this topic. The SMM staff said a lot about the exhibit being the “right thing to do” and praised all the institutions that have committed to bringing the traveling exhibit for our bravery.
The Race exhibit is organized to convey four big ideas: (1) what it means to say that race consists of human-created rather than natural categories; (2) science’s role in the mismeasure of humans; (3) the principle of “separate and unequal” that underlies race; and (4) the relationships between whiteness and privilege. Their philosophy is that the exhibit is not about confronting anyone but to let the exhibit do the talking.
According to SMM Vice-president of exhibits Paul Martin, the museum took on the AAA partnership to develop the exhibit “because it would change us and our relationship to other organizations.” And in fact, he went on to say that the Race exhibit has been “a blockbuster for what it does for our relations with the community.”
For one thing, it has brought in a different museum audience than they usually get. The demographic impact, measured in the museum lobby, has been from 4-6% non-white visitors to about 13% non-white visitors.
The SMM’s experience in spreading the word about the Race exhibit has been that “funding organizations, even the St Paul Mayor’s Office, have been hungry for this.” The SMM contacted corporate diversity officers regarding the exhibit as a resource for diversity training and had a very good response. Other interested groups have included St. Paul judges, the police department and firefighters, faith-based groups, and schools. The media has really grabbed onto the story, providing lots of very thoughtful and extremely positive coverage. As of 2/22/07 there have been more than twenty newspaper reviews, editorials, articles, and op-ed’s about the exhibit, all positive. Minnesota Public Radio has done an hour-long show on the exhibit.
It is not just the exhibit itself, of course: the SMM has put together impressive and broad programming. One intriguing program, designed to get exhibit visitors talking about racial issues, is the Talking Circle, based on a successful local model already used in penitentiary, gang intervention, and other settings where a safe space must be established for dialogue to begin. The Talking Circle is primarily about sharing personal stories and experiences. The SMM has had an overwhelming response and demand for the Talking Circles, by school groups and by corporations who want their employees to get diversity training, and whose fees defray the cost for school groups. Best Buy actually rented out a hotel conference center for a day and sent all of its regional employees to the exhibit, then to Talking Circles at the hotel!
The SMM has also developed many educational materials we will be able to use. There are already long and substantial high school and middle school teacher guides that meet biology and social studies national standards and those for the states of MA, VA, MN. These were tested with 120 teachers at SMM in Fall 2006, to very enthusiastic response, and there are plans to hold additional teacher workshops on these curricula over summer 2007. An eye-catching Family Guide is available at the exhibit and on the website as well. There is not much else for elementary-aged children, so this could be a curriculum need we in Kalamazoo address.
The Web site accompanying the Race exhibit is also impressive. According to web site evaluation data, for the period of January 15-31, 2007 there were 700,000 hits, with an average of 1200 people per day visiting on average 34 links on the site per hit. The feedback has been that it is useful, but teachers and parents want more for elementary-aged children. The American Association of Medical Colleges is using the web site for training medical students. Later this spring: web site will have a virtual tour of the exhibit.
Another way in which SMM really got it right was in creating a diverse, engaged Community Advisory Board. In Spring 2005, two years before the exhibit opened, the SMM started hosting community conversations about the exhibit among cohorts of already existing community advisors—people the museum already had a relationship with. Their Advisory Committee of eighteen people of diverse backgrounds and interests: they asked people familiar with the museum such as prior guest speakers and consultants on committees of Native Americans, families, or other exhibits to join and also invited some people on the basis of recommendations. The SMM charged their community advisory board with helping answer the question, “how can we foster and facilitate community dialogue?” The committee asked the SMM back: Why are you doing this? Why do you want us here? Is this an anti-racist or a multiculturalist exhibit? They discussed this last question intensely and decided it was to be anti-racist. They also hashed out what anti-racism means, and a sub-group wrote a statement that is now posted on the SMM web site. They also helped to define the audience for the exhibit (e.g. that groups would be the main kind of visitors). The community advisory board served a role in providing guidance for programming and helping with promotion, getting the word out to communities they in which they have connections. For example, the Talking Circle idea was a product of the community advisory board being shown a different model for “courage conversations” and being asked to come up with a locally-appropriate forum for dialogues on race. Most impressive, then, was the SMM staff’s delivery on its goal of reinventing the museum’s relationship with the community: they listened to what people had to say, whether the feedback was solicited or not, and they allowed the advisory board in particular to explore avenues for effective programming.
I came away from the St. Paul site visit even more inspired to seize the opportunity presented by the Race exhibit to stimulate public dialogue about this most painful but pressing issue of our shared American history and to build lasting bridges among diverse constituencies and organizations that make up our region.