But today, I have a good addition to the Sick Phoque Club: various staff and visitors at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. A field trip to said institution was supposed to be a reward for good grades and excellent behavior.
Instead, chaperones say, students from the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy Charter Public School in Dorchester, Massachusetts, left in tears last week after they were subjected to racial profiling from museum employees and offensive comments from visitors. On the 24th, the museum again apologized to the students and the middle school, where the majority of students are black or Latino. The museum said in a statement that, following an investigation, it had banned visitors accused of making racist comments and is retraining staff and security. "These young people left the Museum feeling disrespected, harassed and targeted because of the color of their skin," said the museum's director, Matthew Teitelbaum. "And that is unacceptable." The 26 seventh-graders who went on the school trip are students of color, according to school officials, and the allegations have prompted a larger conversation about how museums and other elite cultural institutions can be uncomfortable spaces for people of color. Security guards closely shadowed the seventh-graders throughout their visit and followed them from one gallery to another, Marvelyne Lamy, an English language arts teacher at the charter school, told local media outlets. She and her students noticed that their group seemed to be subject to more scrutiny than predominantly white school groups that were touring the museum at the same time. "We were instructed not to touch any of the artifacts in the museum, yet the white students there touched the displays several times while security looked on without saying anything," Lamy wrote on Monday in a Facebook post, where she first detailed her frustrations with the museum. "The minute one of our students followed suit, the security guards would yell at them that they should not touch exhibits." A staff member who was explaining the museum's rules allegedly told the group, "No food, no drink, no watermelon." Lamy told the Globe that she did not hear the comment herself, but students who were upset by the apparent reference to a well-known racist trope told her about it. One 13-year-old told the Globe that the remark left her feeling angry, uncomfortable, and disrespected. The middle-schoolers also reported hearing disparaging remarks from other museum visitors. One student told Lamy that she had been dancing to music played as part of an exhibit when a museumgoer said, "It's a shame that she is not learning and instead stripping." Another seventh-grade teacher at the school, Taliana Jeune, described the remark differently, telling WCVB that the student had been warned, "I hope you're paying attention so that you don't become a stripper.'" The remark about stripping was the last straw, Lamy wrote on Facebook, and told the seventh-graders that they were leaving right away. As they were making their way out of the museum, some students paused by the entrance to an African art exhibit. Lamy said a woman walked by and commented, "Never mind, there's f---ing black kids in the way." Lamy said she never planned to set foot in the museum again, and I don’t blame her. Museums are boring as hell anyway. Apart from the occasional special exhibition, it’s the same old shit each time you visit. I can’t tell you how many times I had been to either of the two in Dunedin during the mid-2010’s and looked at the same exhibits that were there last time just to kill 90 minutes. And Canterbury Museum won’t be much different on my next visit.
No comments:
Post a Comment