Fox News offers a recent example of this phenomenon in which a professor and a museum curator claim that all museums are racist.
“Sociology professor Tukufu Zuberi claimed on "PBS Newshour" Wednesday that museums are foundationally racist because they were built to "justify” empire, colonization, and marginalization.
“Zuberi currently curates the redesigned Africa Galleries at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, or Penn Museum, where he seeks to ‘transform the narrative’ of museums and their connection to African history.”
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Zuberi’s ambitions go much further than the museum for which he works. He wants to transform museums everywhere, all over the world. He said, “If we‘re going to tell the story of human civilization, we must reconfigure these spaces to speak to various audiences in ways that remove the race bias and prejudice, which are the foundation of museums everywhere. These museums were [made] to justify empire, they were to justify the colonization, the marginalization of certain groups of people. We have to challenge that.”
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Zuberi did not provide any specific examples in his interview, as revealed by the Fox News article.
December 10, 2022
The conversation turned to the current trend of some museums returning artifacts to the countries from which they were taken, sometimes over a century ago. The Smithsonian, for example, returned several artifacts to Nigeria. Zuberi warmed that these forms of restitution were not enough.
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“Restitution can become whitewashing the issue if we forget that these objects came with people, that the enslavement of Africans, the enslavement of Africa and the colonization in Africa are part and parcel of what we are looking at when we see these objects. So, you can‘t now just sever that relationship…That would be bad. It is bad where people are doing it, because they are not creating a conversation. It is too late to say you will put things back the way they were, because they are not like they were.”
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Zuberi did not indicate what kind of conversation he was looking for, any more than he could point out instances of “racism” at museums. His relating the exportation of historical and cultural artifacts with the transatlantic slave trade perhaps clarifies where the professor is getting at.