What is the state of the museum field, particularly as it pertains to racial justice?
That’s a question that is too big for any one person or blog post to cover. There is so much happening all over the country and all over the world. Every person that works in a museum comes from their own unique place and has their own unique view. A few members of the volunteer Steering Committee for Museums & Race were trying to share their experiences at the 2024 AAM annual conference because, well, let’s face it: most of us don’t have the money or the time to attend. The conference also doesn’t capture everything going on in the field, and one or two people’s experiences don’t quite capture everything at the conference. It’s just too large for that.
So we’d like to ask you: What do you think is the state of racial justice in the museum field? What’s getting better or worse? What are you hopeful about or what is keeping you up at night? We’d like to ask you to share your own thoughts, and we’d particularly like to give voice to those folks who don’t always have a platform. Are you from a small museum? Maybe you’re in the department of a larger museum that’s often overlooked. Come from a non-traditional museum background? Maybe you’re inspired by something you saw online or an event you attended or just things happening in your community. Whatever it is, we’d like to hear your voice and share it here. Drop us a line and we can post your message. We’ll start off with some of our personal experiences and hope you can share some thoughts too.
Museums & Race 
*Comment below is from Gretchen Jennings*
Hi, Museums and Race folks, thank you so much for asking this question, and asking it widely. As I mention in the paragraph below, I have a general sense of dissatisfaction with the field, especially after their response to Covid, but don’t have a lot of evidence to back it up, so it will be good to see what you find with this question. I am including as my answer a post that I just made to Facebook, announcing that I have created a site that collects not only my blog posts but other writings and exhibitions. In that post, which I copy below, I reflect a bit on the decade between 2011 and 2021, more or less bracketed by the murders of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, and the response of museums at that time. I hope this is helpful, and I look forward to hearing about your findings. All best- Gretchen
Dear friends and colleagues,
I’m happy to announce that I’ve fulfilled a longtime retirement goal. With tech help, I’ve expanded my blogsite beyond my posts to include my articles, and descriptions of exhibitions I helped to shape. You can find it all at http://www.museumcommons.com http://www.museumcommons.com
Reviewing a decade (2011-2021) of posts and over two decades of articles was a bit like reading my own memoir. I could see my thoughts about museums and their purpose shifting and expanding.
That period, which was more or less bracketed by the murders of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, stimulated dialogue, and sparked perceptual changes in many White Americans, including me. We became aware of realities in our communities and in our institutions that our Black neighbors and colleagues of color had known all along. I think in the future, with some perspective, historians of museums will find this decade to be especially important in the expansion of thinking about what museums can be and why they should exist. The more open discussion of race and its role in American culture forced reflection not only on racial inequities but on the nature of museums themselves, with their roots in the colonial era. After years of reading and listening to our Black museum colleagues about the inequalities in the field, but taking little action, the White-dominated museum field was awakened by initiatives like the Joint Statement from Museum Bloggers https://museumcommons.com/2015/12/joint-statement-museums-ferguson-first-anniversary.html; the Empathetic Museum; the #museumsrespondtoFerguson project; the MASSAction initiative; Museums and Race; and #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, to name a few. https://www.aam-us.org/2021/01/01/a-watershed-moment-lessons-from-museumsrespondtoferguson-and-mass-action/. Was this an especially fruitful decade that will disappear into the history books? Were museums changed substantially by these movements? From this close perspective, I would say that some museums have changed; the field has become more aware of issues of diversity and inclusion. But the widespread fundamental change that many of us envisioned has not been realized. Perhaps it is just that transition from practices and attitudes developed over centuries will take longer than a decade or two.
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