ABSTRACT
This chapter explores new museum discourses of the early 2010s, as the American political landscape shifted towards one of ‘hope’ for imminent racial justice and social change in the wake of Obama’s presidential election. Within professional museum circles, the twin discourses of fast-changing demographics and post-racial ideas produced a new confidence in museum work. While prejudice and discrimination continued, race was seen as an outdated frame of reference for museums. Museums defined along racial lines - so-called culturally specific museums - had long been seen as divisive for a vocal minority; yet the early 2010s saw these ideas absorbed effortlessly into the neoliberal White mainstream of museum discourses that was ready to move on from the uncomfortable challenges of the past decades. Across the political and cultural spectrum, and before race-consciousness was recharged on a national scale with the Black Lives Matter movement, museums of Black empowerment were rendered as increasingly irrelevant and undesirable.
