“RACE: Are We So Different?” Opens at the National Museum of Natural History

Note: Exhibition scheduled to end Jan. 8, 2012

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History will open “RACE: Are We So Different?” Saturday, June 18. The traveling exhibition, a project of the American Anthropological Association in collaboration with the Science Museum of Minnesota, encourages museum visitors to explore race from a personal, scientific and historical perspective. The exhibition will be complemented by a number of public programs for adults and children throughout the Smithsonian to engage visitors in a broader dialogue about race and identity in America.

The exhibition is divided into three categories: Science, History and Lived Experience. The overall theme of the exhibition is: Advances in genetics research show that while human variation does exist, the concept of race is not rooted in biology. This exhibition of personal videos, interactive stations and informational panels provides the opportunity for visitors to explore race and racism and the profound effect they have had on everyone’s life, from experiences in the school cafeteria to buying a home.

“New scientific understandings about human variation demonstrate that human populations are not clearly defined, biologically distinct groups that some people call races,” says Mary Jo Arnoldi, chair of the anthropology department at the National Museum of Natural History and curator for the exhibition at the Smithsonian.

The exhibition’s lead curator is Yolanda Moses, anthropologist and vice provost at University of California, Riverside. “One of the things that we all worked hard to do in designing this exhibition was to make the section ‘The Lived Experience’ come alive in the personal stories of everyday citizens,” said Moses. “We wanted students in the video of the school cafeteria to speak in their own voices about their experiences, and we wanted people from all walks of life in America to be able to talk about how race is both personal and systemic in their lives.”

Highlights include displays and activities for all ages:

• “Who’s Talking?” interactive station invites visitors to match voices they hear with photos of people of different races to see if they can identify a person’s race by their speech.
• “The Colors We Are” allows participants to scan their skin and see the photo appear alongside the scans of other visitors’ skin, creating a colorful mosaic of skin tones.
• “We All Live Race” is an emotionally compelling video with many people talking about the role race has played in their lives, including an interracial couple living in the Midwest, a Korean girl adopted by a white family, a black woman raising two sons, a white man growing up in a small town in Mississippi in the 1950s and a Mexican girl who says she “passes” for white.
• Three videos are shown on a screen built into a newspaper vending machine. These focus on racism in the housing market and disparities in wealth between blacks and whites in the U.S.
• A “Youth on Race” video features high school students of different races honestly discussing their experiences in the classroom, cafeteria and after school.

A set of four lockers decorated by students from Washington-area elementary, middle and high schools will be part of the exhibition at the Smithsonian. The customized lockers are created by the students themselves to tell the story that race has played in their lives.

Overall, the exhibition takes visitors through difficult subjects in a way that is accessible and personal: the Science section traces early human migration from Africa using current research to
re-evaluate widely held beliefs about the origins of physical attributes such as skin color or resistance to disease; the History section traces racism from the pre-Columbus era to modern genetic studies; and the Lived Experience section features voices and images of people who share their experiences of race, identity and racism.

The Smithsonian’s unique addition to this exhibition will be to provide visitors an opportunity to participate in a variety of public programs, including activities specifically tailored to help families begin the discussion on the often-complex topic of race.

The Smithsonian will host programs related to the “RACE” exhibition and its themes throughout the second half of 2011. This will include family programs at the National Museum of Natural History, Anacostia Community Museum and other locations and a discussion series sponsored by Smithsonian Associates. A Director’s Lecture in November will be hosted by Johnnetta Cole, director of the National Museum of African Art, with guest Kwame Appiah, a professor at Princeton University and author of a number of books on Africa and African American history and culture.  

Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, will provide an overview of how the museum (scheduled to open in 2015) will treat issues of race. Clement Price of Rutgers University will moderate a panel discussion in October titled “America in Black and White,” with several scholars, including Nell Irvin Painter, professor emeritus at Princeton University and author of The History of White People, Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meaning and Southern History Across the Color Line.

A public symposium at the National Museum of the American Indian Sept. 16 will explore the blood quantum theory based on the 19th-century notion of biologic race to calculate the percentage of American Indian blood in a person. This remains a factor today in determining citizenship in many tribal communities. “Blood quantum policies have become a powerful agent for Native Americans today, and understanding how this evolved is key to determining the future of this controversy in Indian Country,” said Kevin Gover, director of the National Museum of the American Indian.

The Museum of Natural History will offer a number of programs during the run of the exhibition, including:

• The museum will host a panel discussion and book signing July 21 for Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed-Race America. Co-authors Mike Tauber and Pamela Singh will join several Washington-area residents depicted in Blended Nation.
• Family programs will feature activities Oct. 22 led by Katie Kissinger, an early childhood education specialist and author of All the Colors We Are: Todos los colores de nuestra piel/The Story of How We Get Our Skin Color
• Visitors to “RACE: Are We So Different?” will meet the museum’s corps of more than 100 volunteer facilitators, people from all walks of life and from across the Washington area. They will engage visitors in the exhibition and encourage them in dialogue, interaction and reflection.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is located at 10th Street and Constitution Avenue N.W. in Washington, D.C. The museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with extended hours during the summer (until 7:30 p.m.). Admission is free. More information about the exhibition and the museum is available at www.mnh.si.edu or by calling (202) 633-1000, TTY (202) 633-5285.

Tweet: The Smithsonian opens the exhibition “RACE: Are We So Different?” June 18 at NMNH. http://www.mnh.si.edu/exhibits/race/ #sirace

# # #

SI-203-2011