Racist Museums: A Twitter Story

As most people reading this will know, I’m this weeks’ (16–22 January 2017) @Netherlanders. This is one of those relay-accounts where people from (or connected to) The Netherlands get to curate an account to share what they do, think, and like in their daily lives.

It’s a pretty big account too, almost 8000 readers. That’s why I thought it would be nice to share the following tweet by a Digital Humanities program coordinator at UCLA and a media & visual culture scholar:

I added the simple question: “Any suggestions for Miriam?”

To which the reply from @Sebadjas was to say:

Miriam, no fool, didn’t dignify this with a reply. She just went straight for the block. Me, a giant idiot, decided to share my two cents on this situation. I thought it was simply a bit of trolling by Sebadjas. Turns out he was serious.

According to him, a university professor asking for some interesting anecdotes to make a lesson connect with her students needs to delete her account, because there is no such thing as racism in museums.

To which a lot (like, you know, 8) people said: “Please explain to me what racist museums are.”

To them I say: Please read this and this and this and this and this and please stop getting so defensive whenever anyone mentions white privilege. It’s an actual, real, and destructive thing, and the fact that you might not be acutely aware of it does not mean it doesn’t exist.

Try looking at the world through the eyes of people who may have experienced this society and this world differently from you, dammit.