This post is part of a series examining the concepts of the Museums & Race Report Card. This series is intended to help readers more effectively use the Report Card by increasing their understanding of each key concept in light of justice and equity work. Each post has been written by a member of the Museums & Race Steering Committee with feedback from the group.
Many who work in or adjacent to the museum field devote their professional lives to dissecting the history of white supremacy, understanding its continued presence and impact on people today, and taking concrete steps towards overturning it and building a truly just and equitable world. Regrettably, the existence of initiatives like Museums & Race, #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, The Incluseum, plus countless thought pieces on the subject, proves that museums and museum practitioners are not yet fully united in building it.
The Museums & Race Report Card identifies institutional transparency as one of the ways museum professionals can evaluate whether their institutions are, or are not, contributing towards building that world.
In this context, transparency means whether your institution’s leadership sees value in and has a codified process for its decision making, and communicating those decisions both internally to staff and externally to community partners. This is true at any level of leadership but has the distinction of being most impacted by the decisions of executive leadership.
An example from recent history demonstrates how impactful moving along the Report Card’s rubric towards an “A” grade can be to your institution.
In an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History that opened in 2008, a section on presidential impeachments became outdated when President Trump was twice impeached in 2019 and 2021. To address this, in September 2021, the Smithsonian added a label “intended to be a short-term measure to address current events” according to a spokesperson quoted in a PBS News report.
The Smithsonian is widely regarded as a trustworthy institution, and this may be the reason why the temporary label did not engender any significant attention at that time.
People may have continued to presume the best of the Smithsonian had it not been for the 2024 election and former President Trump’s return to power.
Emboldened by the return, he issued an executive order in March 2025, so-called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that falsely characterized both the National Park Service and the Smithsonian as coming “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
Sometime near the end of July 2025, the Smithsonian quietly removed the temporary label acknowledging Trump’s two impeachments.
Word spread, and a backlash ensued. Media attention, alongside comments from museum professionals on discussion boards and listservs, questioned whether the Smithsonian was kowtowing to pressure and intentionally rewriting history.
In response, in early August, the Smithsonian issued a statement stating that they were “not asked by any Administration or other government official to remove content from the exhibit,” and that the removal was initiated because the temporary label “did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation.”
Was the label’s removal an outcome of a regular content review with innocently poor timing, or were they faltering under increasingly hostile political pressure?
Whether people believe the Smithsonian’s statement or not hinges greatly on their previous levels of transparency and the trust they have built, pitted against the increasingly recognized lack of transparency and trustworthiness of the current Presidential administration.
Knowing the scrutiny directed at them, both from those seeking to censor history and from those looking for the Smithsonian to resist, what potential danger could arise from crystal clear transparency? It is absolutely reasonable to acknowledge some limits.
Protecting individual staff members against public exposure is a completely fair line to draw, for example. Perhaps disclosing plans for a controversial exhibition topic might lead to imbalanced and unwelcomed public pressure from highly partisan individuals or groups. Again, the Smithsonian serves as an example in their aborted 1995 exhibition on the full impact of the two atomic bomb attacks in Japan.
Despite the potential pitfalls, codifying a decision making process that allows museum leaders to strive towards as much transparency as each situation allows provides significant benefit to your institution’s strength and longevity. Transparency breeds trust, and trust—both internally with staff and in the institution engaging and supporting its community—is crucial.
As you evaluate your own institution and advocate for increased transparency, here are some points to consider along that journey:
Codifying and communicating a process for key decisions:
- If you work in a hierarchical institution (as most of us do), who is responsible for making key decisions? Those individuals, and the people they seek input from, should be representative of the community impacted by the decision. Additionally, there should be a clearly defined and clearly communicated process for how decisions are made. Best yet, consider advocating for flattening or eliminating hierarchies. If that is not possible, at the very least, expand those invited to the table and ensure their input is listened to and acted upon.
- How are key decisions communicated to those impacted? Leaders should engage in open conversations where a sincere effort is made to create transparent understanding about the implications of a decision. Top-down communication where an email or a memo is sent dictating a decision may count as codified, maybe even transparent, but it does not allow for adequate response from those impacted. Staff and community partners deserve to be treated like rational adults capable of conversing about a decision, even if they do not agree.
Codifying and communicating feedback from staff and community partners:
- Can staff members from marginalized identities communicate issues and experiences at their institutions safely and anonymously? The staff positions to communicate these issues with, and the process for review and resolution, should be clearly known. Your staff should feel able to be transparent in communicating their issues without fear of reprisal, being edged out of future leadership opportunities, or otherwise re-marginalized.
- Does your institution have one or several community advisory committees? If so, its members deserve to be compensated for their time and for their input. Those individuals should feel that their input is heard by those with decision making authority, and that decision makers will implement as much community input as they are capable of. Community advisors and museum staff should have a warm and mutually respectful relationship where advisors feel the museum is theirs. Ideally, ideas should flow upward from the community and not be dictated downward by staff or board members.
Codifying and communicating feedback from guests:
- Does your institution have a pathway for guests to share the impact the museum has had on them, whether positive or constructive? This feedback should be communicated regularly to staff so they can see, review, and act upon it when generating future educational programming, exhibitions, at the front desk, or any other sphere of staff action.
Codifying, communicating, and acting upon institutional values:
- Transparency is not just about the institution’s values, but the actions it takes based on those values. Has your institution worked to create a value statement? Is that statement posted publicly, either on the institution’s website or, better yet, prominently within the institution for guests to see? Staff and community partners should be able to clearly see that the institution’s actions are matching its values. When there is a disconnect between actions and values, staff, community partners, and/or guests should have a clear path to communicate and hold the institution accountable.
It is certainly fair to acknowledge that every staff member, community partner, or guest will not agree with each decision an institution makes. Even if your institution has a fairly homogenous staff and user base, there will be diversity of opinion within it.
That being said, having a transparent method for everyone to understand a decision and its implications, knowing who is responsible for making the decisions, and the process decision makers go through to seek input and arrive at a conclusion, all goes a long way towards building trust and reducing public controversy.
To quote famed poet Pablo Neruda, “Hate is like a swordfish, working through water invisibly…but transparency disarms it.”
Museums & Race 