Race: Are We So Different?

A Conversation

AAA and the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) recently opened RACE: Are We So Different?, a major exhibition on race, racism and human variation. To get a sense of the collaborative effort between AAA and SMM, two of the principals involved, AAA President Alan Goodman and SMM exhibit lead Robert Garfinkle, recently sat down for an interview moderated by SMM exhibit developer Juliet Burba.

Juliet Burba: Alan, could you please talk about AAA’s initiation of the project and the motivation for doing it?

Alan Goodman: Collaboration among a diverse group of eventual project advisors, including Michael Blakey, Faye Harrison, Robert Hahn and Carol Mukhopadhyay, started a decade ago when Yolanda Moses was the president of the AAA. All of us recognized that anthropologists had lost their public voice around issues of race and racism and Yolanda pushed us to try and recapture it.

JB: Robert, could you talk about the partnership of the Science Museum with the AAA?

Robert Garfinkle: After securing funding from the Ford Foundation for an exhibit, the AAA selected SMM to be the exhibit developer and funding from the National Science Foundation was secured. SMM was excited to take this on because we saw it as a great opportunity to challenge ourselves as an institution. We liked the challenge of creating an engaging, interactive exhibit about this topic.

JB: What messages do you think are important for the exhibit to convey?

AG: As a biological anthropologist and scientist, I felt that my first duty was to clearly present why the idea of race is a ghastly poor fit with the reality of human genetic variation. The second message is sometimes seen as paradoxical, which is seeing how race and racism are real. What is particularly fascinating is the juxtaposition of these two messages: the first that race is a poor fit to human genetic variation and the second that the lived realities of race and the consequences of institutional racism are very real.

The exhibit includes a display on the structure of genetic variation and close by on accumulated wealth. In this “science” display, one sees that race poorly maps onto genetics. But, then in the “lived experience” display on wealth one sees that race is very real in terms of accumulated wealth, among latino, black and white families.

RG: I’m thinking back to writing the exhibit plan. We had to ask ourselves, “What kind of experiences are people actually going to have that aren’t just reading copy? What kind of experiences will be engaging and emotionally moving?” Interactive experiences turned out to be hard to come by; many that come to mind essentially re-create or reify race. Then there were another set of ideas that were experiential in that you try to experience what it’s like to be in the other person’s shoes, or to test your level of prejudice or ignorance. But in the end, we dropped those too, because we didn’t want to put people into the role of being the oppressor or the oppressed. This has been by far the hardest exhibit I’ve ever developed.

An interactive map tells the story of humans’ African origins. Photo courtesy of Robert Garfinkle

AG: The tensions I had from the very beginning involve those that one bumps up against in going from academics to more public spheres. As someone who theorizes for a living, I like figuring out how ideologies about genetic differences, for example, have consequences for daily life … in the dentist’s office, the doctor’s office, the pharmacy, in finding and identifying victims of crime. But I’m not so sure that those who do not do this sort of thing all the time can so readily connect the dots.

One of the complexities of race is that it is ingrained, historical and cultural, it’s broad—a worldview and a social contract. But then it is also profoundly personal and fluid. And so, how do you capture that in an exhibit?

Robert, you came into a group of anthropologists who were “experts” on race. I’m very impressed with how well your exhibit staff got up to speed and translated without watering down, turning our ideas into something people would want to know about.

RG: I see the development of an exhibit as a translation process from expert to novice. To that end, not having particular expertise in a topic is a good thing, because I want to align myself more closely with visitors than with experts. Exhibit developers tend to be good at translating and synthesizing ideas.

Through this process I felt, especially early on, that the advisors overestimated what we could do and how much information we could convey. Not just in quantity, but also in depth. We tried to convey to the AAA that exhibits are more effective at influencing attitudes than conveying structured information. I think of this exhibit, at its best, as a provocation. You need information to provoke people, but it can’t come too fast or thick that people walk away. I suspect that was probably a hard thing to hear, and I think it was met at times with the sense that we were aiming too low. But I think what we were looking for were big ideas and memorable points that people could attach to, could grasp enough to then wrestle with them. We need to trust visitors and we trust them to synthesize different ideas through the process of experience.

AG: Working with the AAA must have been difficult. While we had a solid general sense of what we wanted to accomplish, we often disagreed on specifics and how to accomplish what we wanted to. We all see race and racism from our specific locations. For examples, some individuals wanted a more comparative and global perspective on racial systems. Others wanted more of an introduction to contemporary genomics. As a “whitifed male,” I certainly missed a whole lot. The project was one huge negotiation among experts within the AAA and museum staff, as well as between these two groups.

JB: Alan, you just made reference to being a white male. Alan and Robert, could you talk about what you bring to this exhibit and leave out as white men?

RG: This has been a key issue for me and for SMM. We have traditionally been a white institution, and many people in our community asked us and asked me, “what exactly are you doing working on this? What is your agenda?” And their skepticism is well-founded, given how often the discussions about race have been manipulated by whites to their advantage in the past. I believe, as I know Alan does, that race is something we all have, and something we all have to wrestle with. So in that way it’s appropriate for me and for SMM to be involved. And I hope people view our work with a healthy skepticism, because it will be all the more useful for it. I hope we’ve been honest about race and racism, but I leave it to our visitors to ultimately adjudge that.

A display illustrating wealth disparities between ethnoracial groups is a popular discussion piece. Photo courtesy of Robert Garfinkle

AG: Yes, as Robert said, we all have a role to play. I had a gradual awakening earlier in my career that I needed to be involved in debunking myths of race as natural and biological. I was watching my colleagues of color carrying the load. Always, I came to understand that as a white-ified male, I may be less threatening to a predominantly white audience. Fortunately, the AAA, although not a diverse organization, was able to put together a group of advisors that are diverse in race, ethnicity and expertise. I have had the great privilege to learn and hear from those who have lived with race in ways that I can only imagine. As a white person, no matter what expertise you have, you’re always a novice on race.

JB: Do you think that this exhibit is doing something that academic articles can’t do?

AG: Absolutely! The museum provides a space where you can wander around and make connections in unexpected ways. It was a lot of fun thinking and working in this new medium.

RG: I think this linearity that you pointed out is important. Academics are usually doing lectures and classes and lining up arguments, and making sure what goes first and which comes after what. We had many discussions where the AAA advisor would say, “Well, this idea, this story should come first in the exhibit” or, “Visitors must see this before they see that.” And I’d have to say, “Well, you know, you really can’t control people’s movements in a traveling exhibit.” Visitors come to exhibits and they vote with their feet, and they’ll stay if it’s engaging. So that provides a different opportunity than a college or classroom setting.

JB: Could you say more about the process of turning theories into museum experiences and how that process works in practice for you? Did this exhibit perhaps provide a stepping stone between academic theorizing and public use and practice?

AG: While academic anthropologists are educators, we tend to educate a very select audience: fellow academics that share our worldviews and the students that select our classes. Our audiences are selected and far from “typical.”

RG: I think that the collaboration issues and, in fact, the content issues, and the perspective of visitors, in many ways come down to control. Museum developers are more comfortable with letting go of that and making the museum visitor a partner in what they discover. But that was very tough on this exhibit because a key part of the historical story of race has been about confusion and misinformation. So your instinct is to describe things carefully so there is no room for misunderstanding. But we also have to trust visitors to bring themselves and their prior knowledge, even if it is flawed. We tried to balance these two approaches.

AG: I agree that control of the message was extremely tricky, and for me, it still is. First, as an anthropologist, one knows that experiences of racializing and racism are fluid and specific. Those experiences differ by place and time and are experienced differently depending on a myriad of factors. We want to validate individuals’ highly personal, lived experiences. Moreover, for learning to take place, they have to be taken into account.

But this fluidity of experience then bumps up against the broad sociological sweep and the histories and sciences of race. Race is such a great example of that because everybody experiences it; in a sense, everybody is an “expert,” and then here we are, the scientists coming in and saying, “Ah-ha, we have the ‘Truth’ about what race is and what race isn’t.”

JB: Talk about what you hope the exhibit will accomplish?

AG: I hope the exhibit gets as much public discussion as possible. I hope kids come, and I hope they bring their parents who are policymakers, educators, doctors and lawyers. I hope individuals visit multiple times, and they bring their family and their friends, and get a conversation going.

RG: I hope that RACE provokes all kinds of conversations and that we can go from conversations to actions, something that can create change in the world. Here in Minnesota, we’ve developed programs to go along with the exhibition, one of which is the opportunity for groups to meet together after seeing the exhibit and reflect on their experience. We’re doing a particular form of conversation, called “Talking Circles.” These are a key piece for me as to what the exhibit can accomplish. Those conversations can be held in peoples’ homes, but I hope it isn’t just a family event. I hope that there is just as much conversation in community settings of different kinds, in faith communities, community organizations and corporations.
I think that kind of momentum could make a big difference, and I hope it does.

This interview is an edited and abridged version from one published in Museums and Social Issues vol 2(1).