National Council on Public History

I have begun to think that the relationship between museums and civic discourse is, from the onset, bound to be grossly disjointed. There is a fundamental inability of the “civic of color” to function as a citizen within a nation-system which renders it impossible to view the “civic of color” as a citizen in totality. I write these words with the immediacy of Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland fresh in my mind. Not because these incidents, in a string of incidents, provide opportunities for both museums and museum professionals to do the kind of work that we are working towards; but because these tragedies reinforce the reality that we have lost the understanding of the term, “civic”. How do we bridge the gap between this work as museum professionals and others’ lived realities?

In my thinking, this bridging is critical because we often operate under a vast array of assumptions about the powerful function of memory and how the lack thereof hinders ways to make this work truly accessible for both museums and citizens. When I speak of memory, I speak of legacies of exclusion in this country. How segregation as a daily practice still rests in the psyche for certain citizens. How these stories are passed down. How they become learned behaviors. How these behaviors becomes attitudes. How these attitudes impact sensitivities. How poor proficiencies in these legacies do not inform our understanding of the present. We approach this work with museum professionals who still do not understand why African Americans struggle with regarding both cultural spaces and public spaces as welcoming spaces because they are either unaware or truly cannot connect this country’s history of Segregation with Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland. We say that “museums are for everyone”. We say that we are inclusive. That we are here to empower citizens to act as agents of change. We say we want museums to be that vehicle but there are people working and volunteering in these spaces still not recognizing that while museums benefit from years of integration; Black families are making decisions within the home on whether or not they can purchase toy guns for their children—that the right to own a gun is afforded them; just not the right to be black, a child, and play with a toy gun. These same families instruct their sons on the safe spaces and behaviors which will not have them identified as dangerous or unsafe, thereby, limiting their access to operate in public spaces in the same way as other citizens. Then, we come to work at museums and staff and volunteers make statements like, “Those days are over” or “We invite those people all the time” with no understanding of how the ability to receive the benefits of the totality of citizenship make conversations on museums and civic discourse a tug-of-war.

So yes, let’s point the lens inward because how are we asking our staff and volunteers to move along in the process of working towards dialogue and civic discourse when Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland are not connected to legacies of racial apartheid in America? Let’s do that work first. Let’s examine our own proficiencies so that we can begin to ask the right questions and gain deeper insight. What’s the “why” of this work? Is it relevance? Is it change? What I’d like to see in our emerging future is strengthened praxis which is based on institutional and personal recognition that our past does not rest there; but firmly presents itself in the now over and over again. What are the ways that this moving towards museums as a place of civic discourse are hindered by poor proficiencies of historical and political of oppression? And, I would add that what has concerned me more recently are the ways in which we are failing to define “civic discourse” in our own ways of knowing as practitioners of the field. While other disciplines can and should inform our definitions and ideologies, I would like to see us move toward extending definitions and being bold enough to create new terminologies for new, 21^st century realities and literacies. Past examining civic discourse and museums as two separate concepts which come together to create a movement towards a new kind of museum and a new kind of museum work, I would like to see our emerging future as one where we are crafting new ways to frame our thinking in very practitioner-informed ways—boldly and fearlessly. Let’s stop being tied to dead language. And if we are unable to do that first, we have a moral and ethical responsibility to break down the words that we are using and not only trace them to historical roots/events but to recognize how they function as barriers to the ways in we approach this work so that we can properly evaluate the efficacy of our efforts and genuinely facilitate change.

~ Porchia Moore, University of South Carolina

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