ABSTRACT
Focusing on the first decade of the twenty-first century, this chapter develops a reading of the then newly opened National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the newly enacted National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), as part of a negotiation - or renegotiation - of the Institution’s inherent structures of Whiteness. These negotiations were nevertheless taking place alongside a surge in patriotism and racial hate, in a post-9/11 American landscape. As symbols of progress, new ‘ethnic’ museums were welcomed by the federal government into the Smithsonian family, but, I argue, their anticipated role in alleviating ‘race relations’ was not fundamentally driven by the desire to eradicate racial injustice but to support civic harmony and appease national guilt. While issues of racism and problematic White normativity in museums were increasingly acknowledged within professional circles, including at the Smithsonian, ‘race’ presented a puzzle - a slippery concept - which could be reframed and contained into new sound bites, or sidestepped altogether in practice. It was simply not in the self-interests of the majority of Smithsonian’s professional employees to recognise or address racial structures in their entirety.
