I posted this here in December 2008. It was not received well. Many people said I was being unreasonable. Given the important conversations we have been having about monuments and how those monuments can encode white supremacist ideas, I thought I would post it again. To see if anything has changed.
"Bring something to the culture fair that is important to people with your heritage or ethnicity." The teacher explained. The room buzzed with noise. One girls hand shot up: "But I don't have an ethnicity! I'm just normal."
Several of the students had come to this conclusion. I remember listening and wondering if "having an ethnicity" meant that you were abnormal. You could spot my ethnicity from a mile away. I wondered what it was like to be "just normal" --what did that mean? I don't remember how the teacher resolved it, but of course all of us have an ethnicity and a culture. No on is "just normal."
When I was older I went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. You could not get me out of that place I loved it so much. Though I did find the various "halls of people" a bit confusing. At the time they had hall for African people, Asian people and Native Americans-- But no hall of "European people" and no "Post 1650 American people" --- no wonder some people don't think they have an ethnicity! Really the more I think about it most of the non-prehistoric human artifacts in the Museum of Natural History should be in an Art Museum instead. The displays of the people of the world didn't do a vary good job showing the historical progression in those places-- it made it seem as if in Africa time had stopped. There were no eras, no revolutions no kingdoms to rise or fall just a static collection of masks and headdresses-- The Hall of Asian people was not much better. It was also very static. And none of this is what I'd call "Natural History." Natural history is the history of animals and rocks, evolution and such-- Human history, while intertwined, has a very different scale and character.
It seems that not much has changed. This kind of organization of the human history encourages the view that some of us are normal while others "have an ethnicity." It's the view that lets one think of Mexican markets and Japanese markets as ethnic, but Stop-n-Shop is just "normal." Stop-n-Shop is normal only in the local sense-- On a global scale it is ethnic. This view is built in to our cultural institutions, and our education system. It is critical for a multicultural nation like the United States to work to try to improve the balance and of our historical perspectives. I focus on the US because we must do this or our education system will continue to alienate and divide young people who have "an ethnicity."