“The scene takes no more than five minutes of the movie, and the tension between colonial history and race only escalates from that point on. However, we as museum professionals need to talk about the inclusion of this scene, especially regarding its function in a film that was cut from nearly four hours long in its first iteration to a solid two, a film that so many young people will see and one that is poised to become a cultural touchstone. The museum is presented as an illegal mechanism of colonialism, and along with that, a space which does not even welcome those whose culture it displays.
And is there anything incorrect about that?
It is worth considering the aspects of the scene that are realities in the modern museum. African artifacts such as those shown in the film’s museum are likely taken from a home country under suspicious circumstances, such as notable artifacts in real-life Britain like the Benin bronzes which now reside at the British Museum. It is often the case that individuals will know their own culture as well as or better than a curator, but are not considered valuable contributors because they lack a degree. People of color are less represented in museum spaces, and often experience undue discrimination while entering gallery spaces. Finally, museums are experiencing an influx of white women filling staff roles, leading to homogenized viewpoints, and lack senior staff with diverse backgrounds. With these truths represented in such a short but poignant scene, the tension between audiences and institutions is played out to the extreme.”
link to the full article is here btw: https://jhuexhibitionist.com/2018/02/22/why-museum-professionals-need-to-talk-about-black-panther/
Tag: take note
And if you’re afraid of the power Trump already wields, hear this: if we don’t show up in the midterms, the Republicans could get a supermajority in the Senate. That means no ability to filibuster. No recourse. No way to stop them.
We’ve got to make sure the blue states stay blue and try to turn some of those red states blue as well. Don’t count your state out just because it usually votes Republican. Historically, midterms have way lower turnouts than presidential election years. So lets actually show up this time and do some damage.
Oh, and one hopeful note, all the House seats are up for reelection. So let’s take that shit away from Donald Trump and his Republican Party.
Also, remember to vote in local elections! Keep track of when they are, the candidates, and make sure you stay informed on local and state politics. We have to show up in 2018, and at every. Single. Thing.
I dont like adding things but this needs to be said: DO NOT ASSUME THAT THERE WILL BE A HIGH DEMOCRATIC TURNOUT. Do not think that “oh EVERYONE else will show up to vote, I dont have to” Do not do that. Because trust me you wouldn’t be the only person thinking that. Now, if everyone assumes it’ll be a high turn out so they dont go, then nobody goes. Assume always that your vote will be the tipping point, assume that your vote is necessary and needed (because guess what: it absolutely is). Go vote. Keep track of the dates. And just go do it.
Register to vote. Check that you’re registered even if you think you are, even if you (like me) have voted in every election since you were old enough to do so. And then do it.
If you can, volunteer to drive people to the polls.
Re: luciferissatan’s comment – 100% correct – even more correct is that midterms’ low voter turnout? Is because Dems skip the midterms. More Republicans go to the polls for midterm elections, historically, than Democrats.
IF YOU STAY HOME, REPUBLICANS WILL WIN. END OF.
All you high schooler turning 18 in time for the election make sure you register to vote!!
Y’all are woke right now and that is so amazing, but you need to keep the momentum going. Real change happens when you show up and help put people into power the will actually make changes.
15 states—California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Utah—plus the District of Columbia, allow or have enacted legislation allowing 16 or 17 year-olds to pre-register to vote even if they won’t turn 18 before Election Day. So when you are getting your license register so that come election day you don’t have to worry about it. Tell your friends to do the same.
Hey millennials we’re not done yet. Like generations are fake and we’re the same kids they are but gen z is primarily not allowed to vote yet so….. step up your support.
Millennials need to be voting en masse. We need to make record highs. People say this all the time but we need to put our support behind them where it matters and vote.
a5xc:
Survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting announce the ‘March For Our Lives’ on March 24 in support of gun control
‘‘… Not one more. We cannot allow one more child to be shot at school. We cannot allow one more teacher to make a choice to jump in front of a firing assault rifle to save the lives of students. We cannot allow one more family to wait for a call or text that never comes. Our schools are unsafe. Our children and teachers are dying. We must make it our top priority to save these lives…’’
This is so hopeful.
I hate why this is happening, but I’m so proud of them.
Of all the tweets I saw on the subject, this one hit me the most.
The Trump administration just shut off all food and water aid to Puerto Rico
The secret service needs that extra money to be able to rent golf carts on the presidential golf course, you see.
Now is a good time to consider donating to charities helping with the relief effort, as they seem to be the only ones interested in actually helping the people of Puerto Rico. If you don’t have the funds, then spread this news around. Don’t let them get away with this.
JANUARY 29, 2018
https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos
https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos
https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos
https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos
https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos
https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos
https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos
https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos
https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos
help my people. please.
The Trump administration just shut off all food and water aid to Puerto Rico
I feel like a major percentage of all disagreements on this dang site are based on half the combatants shoring up an argument based on respecting individual choice and the other half throwing their banner behind acting based on large-scale patterns, without realizing that both can exist simultaneously.
Like, if a woman decides to quit her job and start a family, I think folks can generally agree that the right thing to do is to not be a jerk and to respect her choice and to even make sure plenty of resources and support are available for people like her wanting to make that transition. But if, at the same time, a lot of the women in a field are quitting, that’s a large-scale pattern, and that’s a problem where you have to start looking at the societal factors and pressures at play—is there harrassment? What’s going on in this field that’s pushing women out? What can be done to prevent that?
You get friction when “this is a problem at a large scale” gets filtered down to the individual scale, when “it’s a problem that so many women quit this field” becomes interpreted as “it’s a problem that Mary’s quitting this field and she should stay no matter what”. When you look at the individual, there are endless factors that come into play, some of which may legitimately give an airtight explanation for why Mary should get the heck out of Dodge. But that shouldn’t necessarily be the conversation in the first place. When you look at larger statistics, those smaller individual explanations start to come out in the wash and the major issues (and major players!) can be tackled head-on.
It’s like how there always seem to be incredibly long-winded explanations for why it’s okay that such-and-such specific film failed the Bechdel test: because it’s not meant to be a single point, it’s meant to be a statistic summarizing a whole dang dataset. The productive argument often isn’t that a specific movie didn’t pass, it’s that so few movies pass at all. Examples are helpful and illustrative and enlightening, but they generally have to be part of a larger discussion for anything to be accomplished.
Just, you know, be wary of filtering the general down to the specific, and recognize that if someone takes offense at your having pointed out a larger pattern, they may be doing just that: feeling the need to defend a specific example (”but it snowed today!”) when the problem and the conversation should usually be based around the larger-scale pattern (”sure, but the world’s climate is warming overall”).
To my colleagues, on the death of their students’ grandmother(s)
It’s entirely possible that I’m just not cool enough to enjoy this “humorous,” “fictional” take on the the phenomena of students manufacturing dead grandmothers during finals week. Maybe it’s because my own grandmother died while I was in college, my grandfather died while I was in grad school, or another grandmother died in while I was in grad school (are you keeping track? That’s two grandmothers). I missed her funeral to go to a postdoc interview, which is what she would have wanted (I got the job). As the child of divorced, remarried parents, I had four grandmothers, so if I was so unlucky as to have more than one die during the course of your class, then, gee, I guess I’d be in a pickle!
But seriously, I do not get the mentality of seeing your students as adversaries. I don’t get the need to dehumanize them with your disdain, to the point where you need to mock them in aggregate in public. There is a time and a place for venting your frustrations with students being dishonest to get a little extra time on the final (even though it never seems to actually bring their grades up, so seriously, let it go). I get that finals week is stressful for faculty, too (even though your future is pretty certain and you have a job, so it’s not like everything is riding on this one grade). But this idea that we need to single out even fictional students for daring to have a life experience that interferes with your routine?
Acclimatrix is not having any of that, thank-you-very-much.
Let’s set aside the fact that grandmothers die for a second (they do, as I’ve already established with my n of 1). Let’s start instead with the premise that students are people, and bad shit happens to people all the time. The problem is, we don’t usually hear about it. This might blow your mind, but: dead grandmothers aren’t always dead grandmothers. Grandmothers, as the universal symbol of love and goodness and plausibility, are an un-challenge-able event in the life of a young person. We accept that grandmothers die (at least, we did until the Chronicle updated us on that!). So dead grandmothers may actually be stand-ins for things we won’t accept, can’t know about, shouldn’t know about, or won’t otherwise believe. Sometimes, dead grandmothers are [CW: a diversity of bad shit coming]:
The time I got assaulted and couldn’t tell my teachers, because I couldn’t tell anyone, and I needed a reason to explain why I disappeared so suddenly.
The time I had to take three days to go to Canada to have an abortion and was going to miss the midterm, and I didn’t know if you’d be okay with that.
The time my boyfriend of six years dumped me and I couldn’t stop sobbing, or even take a shower, so of course I couldn’t come to class.
The time the person who actually raised me instead of my parents died, and I knew if I said “Patty died,” you wouldn’t know what that meant.
The time I thought I might have cancer, and had to go home to the family doctor to get a biopsy from my uterus.
The time I had to drive my little sister to the gynecologist for the first time because our mom wouldn’t go with her.
The time I had a miscarriage and I couldn’t tell you I was pregnant because I was afraid you would change how you thought of me.
The time I had to testify for my roommate, for a crime she asked me not to talk about because she was afraid she’d lose her scholarship.
The time I had to work because if I didn’t pay my bill, I wouldn’t get to graduate on time.
The time I spent the whole semester barely treading water because of a deep depression, panicked when I realized the exam was a week sooner than I thought, and needed a way out.
Not all of those are real, of course. I used a fictional “I” as a literary device, to draw you in and make you feel empathy for me. You know, like those kids with dead grandmothers do.
If students are lying, you have no way of knowing if it’s because they spent the entire semester playing drunk Candy Crush, or their grandmother actually died, or the dead grandmother is a stand-in for what they cannot tell you. Being a somewhat optimistic person, I would guess that the vast majority of students are telling the truth, at least in one way or the other.
When you mock students because life happens, and they react, you diminish them. And if that student has already struggled — because they don’t have a supportive family, or financial resources, because of mental illness or a disabling condition, because there is no one in the classroom who looks like them, or for any other reason — they take double damage.
Students see us. They see how we talk about them. They see how we treat them. They hear us when we say we do not believe them. And when you publish those diminishing thoughts in the Chronicle, even as a “joke,” they see the authority of the Academy behind you.
That piece should never have been published (it’s a tired trope that literally adds nothing to our discussions of classroom management), but I’m especially upset that it ended up in the Chronicle. I even have enough empathy to understand the sentiment behind it — I get frustrated, too. But I choose to err on the side of believing in my students’ humanity, because I would not be here if someone had not believed in mine, over and over again. Even when I wasn’t telling the absolute truth.
ETA: I got so mad I forgot to talk about documentation policies! My take? Don’t. Because sometimes the dead grandmother needs to be a stand-in. And even if she’s really dead, don’t make your students cut out their obituary from the town paper. Just don’t be that person.
Source:
Thank you for ranting/being passionate with me about academia @existentialsiren !!!!!! (thank you @evolution-is-just-a-theorem for introducing us!!!!)
a jewish kid was murdered by a nazi last week in california and almost none of the articles about it are mentioning that he was jewish or that his murderer was a nazi
he was taken into the woods by someone he thought was a friend and killed. hits pretty close to home bc multiple relatives of mine, including my great-great-grandfather, were taken into the woods by their own neighbors and killed during the holocaust
Jewish and openly gay. This article is the most frank about it that i’ve seen.
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