VOLUME 5 ISSUE 2

The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum

______Melting Pot on the Mall? Race, Identity, and the National Museum Complex

NICOLE REINER

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Typeset in CGScholar. http://www.commongroundpublishing.com/software/ Melting Pot on the Mall?: Race, Identity, and the National Museum Complex Nicole Reiner

Abstract: This essay reports on the controversial proposal to establish a National Museum of the American People (NMAP) on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and situates it in terms of the emergence of ethnically-specific museums at the Smithsonian during the past two decades, in- cluding the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), the Na- tional Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and the proposed National Museum of the American Latino. While the latter three museums share a mandate to promote post-colonial strategies and outcomes, and embody museum reform directed toward increasing minority and indigenous agency, access and ownership over the processes of representing their culture in the capital, the NMAP counter-proposal exemplifies an antagonistic model that underscores the great need for further research and debate on the scope and future of the ethnically-specific museum in the United States.

Keywords: Ethnic Museums, Smithsonian Institution, Race and Museums

INTRODUCTION he National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) was es- tablished by an Act of Congress in 2003, making it the nineteenth and newest museum of the Smithsonian Institution, America’s official cultural repository located in the Tsymbolic heart of the nation. Slated to begin welcoming visitors into its purpose-built facility in 2015, it is under construction on the National Mall on a five-acre tract ad- jacent to the Washington Monument. Presently, during the building phase, the museum is producing publications, sponsoring public programs, and assembling collections. It is also presenting exhibitions at other museums across the country and at its own separate gallery in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, located next door to the NMAAHC’s new home. To many, a national museum honoring and promoting Black culture and history in the cap- ital seems long overdue, particularly considering that it took over one hundred years of uphill struggle to win congressional approval. While the current museum is an achievement to celebrate, we should not overlook the difficulties that the NMAAHC’s supporters have faced, or the many reasonable people who continue to assert that ethnically and culturally specific museums are too divisive, prone to politicization, or simply too narrow to be of general interest. This article considers the rise of ethnically-specific museums1 in the United States at a national and federal level, beginning with the National Museum of the American Indian in 2004, the National Museum of African History and Culture in 2015, and the official recommendation

1 Throughout this paper, I have preferred the term ethnically-specific over culturally-specific museum, even though the latter may be more contemporary. For one, the former reflects the language of the formative work on this category of museum, such as that by Fath Ruffins (1997, 1998), Moria Simpson (1996, 2004), Richard Kurin (1997), and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Carl Grodach (2004). But it may also help to facilitate a badly needed discussion of the distinction between group-specific museums that strike a generally celebratory tone, seeking recognition for the

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in 2011 to establish a National Latino Museum.2 While each of these large-scale cultural projects is unique, I suggest that they also share significant connections as agents of progressive museum reform and as major steps in the Smithsonian’s efforts to “decolonize the museum,” by helping to free it from racialist and ethnocentric disciplinary conventions prescribing distinctions between advanced cultures belonging to the realm of History, and primitive ones considered as part of nature. 3 Their existence also springs from a desire to increase Native American, Black, and Hispanic participation, employment, and museum programs at the Smithsonian, and from a willingness to acknowledge historic shortcomings in these areas and to offer varied forms of rectification intended to invest these marginalized groups with the power of self-representation. As I further explain, however, if there is a trend developing at the Smithsonian toward a liberal policy of lending support and recognition to ethno-cultural minorities by building sep- arate museums honoring certain groups, there is also evidence of considerable anxiety and resistance to such museums, which remain contested within the Smithsonian and among the American public. These voices of opposition, which repeatedly stalled legislation for the African American history and culture museum, and even succeeded in shutting the project down at periodic intervals, represent a conservative legacy that continues to view the Washington Mall as a privileged site of whiteness and as a technology for producing cohesive symbols of national unity.4 Notably, this opposition also culminated in 2008 in yet another proposal for a new Mall museum, the National Museum of the American People, a reactionary institution modeled on the monolithic ‘melting pot’ style of multiculturalism against which the ethnic museum movement implicitly argues.

The National Museum of the American People Among those who object to separate ethnic identity museums, an oft-prescribed solution is that the current roster of museums should incorporate the stories and cultural accomplishments of those who have been left out of traditional narratives more effectively. In the case of the Smithsonian, this line of thinking is encapsulated by the view that, instead of promoting a new museum, the Smithsonian should have added an African American Wing to the existing American History Building.5 But another key solution put forward is that “an even bigger building, with the whole American experience in total, would be better.”6 This is the position favored, for example, by Sam Eskenazi, former Director of Public Information for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Eskenazi has advanced a proposal for another new Mall museum, the National Museum of the American People, which would be “devoted to telling the story of how the world’s pioneers interwove their diverse races, religions, and ethnicities into the strongest societal fabric.”7

contributions and achievements of individual groups, and those which also seek restitution for previous misrepresent- ation or denigration by the dominant group in mainstream institutions. 2 The Latino Taskforce was formed in the early 1990s to study the treatment of Hispanic peoples within the Smithso- nian. The committee’s 1994 report, Willful Neglect, called for significant increases in staffing, collecting, and program- ming relevant to Latino Americans and recommended the creation of a new museum (Washington, D.C., National Museum of the American Latino Commission Fact Sheet, May 6, 2011). 3 Remarks by Joshua A. Bell, Curator of Globalization at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (New York University, March 28, 2012). 4 From 1994-1995 Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) singlehandedly prevented the passage of legislation for an African American Museum on the Mall through a number of tactical maneuvers intended to cause a filibuster, such as raising more than two dozen questions about the mission and costs of the museum late in the process. Delays caused the bill to fail to gain approval before Congress let out in 1994, effectively killing the bill. 5 This view was initially advocated by National Museum of American History Director Roger Kennedy in statements he made to the first African American Museum Study Commission in 1991. 6 Statement of an interviewee cited in the Smithsonian Office of Policy and Analysis Summary Report of Exploratory Interviews about the NMAAHC (Washington, D.C.: 2007), 8. 7 Jim Moran, “Telling the Story of All Americans,” Politico, 6 July 2011, 1.

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According to the picture that is emerging, the National Museum of the American People (NMAP) would distinguish itself from the current National Museum of American History through its emphasis on technology over artifacts, viewing its role as that of a “storytelling museum” utilizing “dramatic documentary” to tell a story of “immigration and integration,” in the language of the museum’s official website.8 Pursuant to its unifying aims, the centerpiece of the museum’s interpretive program is a permanent exhibition that will attempt to tell the full story of the making of the American People from the beginning of the first human migrations to the continent twenty-thousand years before the present, to the modern influx of immigrants from Mexico as well as others from Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. The giant swath of time is divided into four neat chapters, each representing and distilling the story of a discrete episode in the overarching drama of “all the peoples who have come to this land and nation.”9 Thus, the narrative will unfold through a sequence of highly condensed vignettes with encapsulating headings such as, The First Peoples Come (containing the subtitle Indian Migration and Settlement), The Nation Takes Form (containing the subtitles The Near Extinction of Indians, English and Western European Settlement, and The African Slave Trade), The Great In-Gathering (containing the subtitle A Century of Immigration), and finally, And Still They Come” (containing the subtitle The Ongoing Story of American Immigration).10 Through this framework, the darker events in American history—such as the displacement and subjugation Native Americans, the African Slave Trade, and the “punctuation of the Civil War”—are subsidiary episodes in an absorbing and advancing storyline. Implicitly, those struggles and conflicts are presented as resolved, conquered, and vanquished—set safely in the past at an ever-retreating distance from visitors in the present.11 American history and identity are portrayed not only as coherent and assimilated, but as internally reconciled and conflict- free. Using the technique of backward construction, the past is linked together in a sequence leading from the beginnings of time to the present, and the harmonious integration of the country’s various and fractious ethnic and racial minorities is cast as the telos of American nationhood. This facile and monolithic tale, which glosses over so-called difficult histories in favor of a unifying effect, embodies an adversarial institutional model founded on the assumption that ethnic politics, often maligned as identity politics, is too often a de-stabilizing force, under- mining democracy and development. Yet, as of this writing, the National Museum of the American People can boast that one-hundred and fifty three ethnic, national, and minority or- ganizations have signed on to a coalition advocating its establishment and location on the Mall. Conceived by Eskenazi in 2008, reportedly as he strode between government buildings near Capitol Hill, the NMAP proposal undoubtedly constitutes a rejoinder to the recent up-cropping of ethnically marked museums at the Smithsonian. In the words of Democratic Senator Jim Moran, the drive to promulgate NMAP legislation is intended to serve as a pre-emptive measure helping to “stem the trend of groups having their own individual, separate ethnic museums.”12 In a public statement announcing his support of the NMAP, Senator Moran described, for in- stance, how “the last remaining places on the National Mall are becoming filled with museums that deliver stories of a specific group—like the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the proposed National Museum of the American Latino.”13 If this “trend” continues, he warned, “we threaten to make our already heavily concentrated Mall overcrowded,

8 Sam Eskenazi, quoted in Manuel Roig-Franzia, “On the Mall, Homage to the Melting Pot?,” Washington Post, 30 September 2011, 2. 9 “Story of the Making of the American People,” National Museum of the American People, http://www.nmap2015. com/story.html < accessed April 10, 2012>. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Jim Moran, quoted in Manuel Roig-Franzia, “On the Mall, Homage to the Melting Pot?,” Washington Post, 30 September 2011, 2. Senator Moran sponsored the resolution that calls for a presidential commission to study the es- tablishment of the NMAP. 13 Jim Moran, “Telling the Story of All Americans,” Politico, 6 July 2011, 1.

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leaving future generations no room to honor their heroes and causes, while severely burdening the Smithsonian’s budget… It is a matter of how we depict the American story and where do we stop?”14 On this view, national, federally-funded museums devoted to particular ethnic identities raise intractable questions concerning who and what determines which groups should be honored on the Mall by their own freestanding buildings. But a more fundamental issue pointed up by Senator Moran’s comments concerns whether it makes philosophical sense to build new museums for different ethnic, racial and cultural groups, a question often conflated with historically-specific integration-versus-separation debates. A number of articles published in the Washington Post during the mid-1990s, for instance, argued that a separate African American museum would be a step backward. Was this museum idea not just a new form of segregation or ‘ghettoization’? To quote one author, “what kind of message are we sending to our children… by developing a separate museum for those who have so long struggled to be recognized as part of our mainstream?”15 For many Americans troubled by the history of segregation, the great narrative of African American life has much more to do with integration into and acceptance by the mainstream of American life; for some, it is even the most important African American story. In this context, recognizing Black separ- ateness becomes comparable to segregation. Celebrating African American inclusion is therefore crucial, since that is a story which all Americans can be proud of.

De-colonizing the Smithsonian Crucially, however, new, free-standing museums constitute one response to a problematized past of collecting and interpreting indigenous and minority material culture and histories in American museum institutions.16 The development of the core historical and anthropological collections that comprise the heart of the Smithsonian Institution museums occurred on the back of American colonialism, during what has been called the museum age of American an- thropology. During these formative years, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the collection and display of American Indian and African materials was guided and justified by racialist and ethnocentric ideologies that were deeply embedded in the disciplinary structures of the museum complex itself. Until quite recently, for example, the most reliable location to encounter African and Native American indigenous and diasporatic culture on the Mall was the in the National Museum of Natural History. This unfortunate fact is a legacy that stems largely from colonialist notions that only some humans are part of nature. As American Anthro- pologist Ira Jacknis noted in 2006, separate museums for anthropology and human cultures and for natural history is actually the norm in most parts of the world.17 Further, these ethnic minority groups have not fared much better within the institutional past of the Smithsonian’s history museums. Until the late 1970s, the National Museum of American History’s exhibitions tended to include Native and Anglo-American objects in a single narrative, often supporting a tale of conquest and disappearance, or they were not included at all. And when the American History museum opened in 1964 as the National Museum of History and Technology, it included barely a mention of African Americans in its interpretations, and its collections included no objects made by or representative of enslaved people, nor was

14 Jim Moran, quoted in Natalie Hopkinson, “Will White People Go to the National Black Museum?,” The Root, 20 May 2011, 1. 15 Donna Ridenour, “Separate but Equal History?,” Washington Post editorial, 16 October, 1994. 16 I borrow this phrase from Miranda Brady, who argued persuasively (2009) that the NMAI developed as “a dialogic response to a problematized past.” See her essay of the same title in Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives, ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 133-155. 17 See Ira Jacknis, “A New Thing? The NMAI in Historical and Institutional Perspective,” American Indian Quarterly Special Issue: Decolonizing Archaeology 30.3/4 (2006): 528.

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there any mandate to acquire any.18 And in both institutions, of history and ‘natural’ history, curators tended to arrange Native American and African artifacts into typological displays il- lustrating evolutionary progress from simple to advanced, or according to colonialist geographic survey with a distribution of types in space or across territory. Perhaps not surprisingly given these histories, over its long life, the Smithsonian has had a very poor track record of recruiting and hiring individuals of African American, Native Amer- ican and Hispanic heritage. On March 14, 1989 the House of Representatives held a hearing on the virtual exclusion of minorities in high-level cultural and artistic, as well as administrative positions at the Smithsonian’s museums and research centers and solicited testimony from a range of individuals knowledgeable about the subject. In her opening remarks, Chairwoman Cardiss Collins noted that, throughout its nearly one-hundred-and-fifty year history, there had only been only one minority Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian. She furthermore added that “that same minority under-representation extends to curators, researchers, and to the Smithsonian’s Board and its main committees and councils.”19 In his prepared statement, the late John Kinard, then director of the Anacostia Museum (1967–1989), was equally direct in communicating his opinion that the Institution’s inclusion of minorities in the Smithsonian’s decision-making was insufficient. He also asserted his belief that resistance to minorities at the Smithsonian “has historically caused unnecessary friction, hostilities, poor working relationships, acrimony, and emotional stress, especially between white and African American males.”20 Beginning in the mid-1960s and intensifying in the 1970s and 80s, the Smithsonian came under attack for this lack of cultural diversity and sensitivity throughout each stratum of the Institution. In response to this activism, in the 1980s, the Smithsonian began to come to grips with the coverage of peoples, cultures, arts, and histories in its museums, and has since initiated an array of programs intended to redress these grievances. In the same timeframe, museum practices and associated legislation have been expanding to reflect newer understandings con- cerning the importance of self-representation and the exhibition of the cultural other. The Na- tional Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the Amer- ican Indian, and the proposed Federal Museum of the American Latino carry the this work much further, and have great potential to amply its effects. All three institutions understand themselves as platforms for giving voice to marginalized perspectives and multicultural dialogue, and as vehicles for questioning dominant history narratives in the United States.21 They are also particularly enacting inclusive policies such as affirmative action and training programs to involve and accommodate the diverse publics constitutive of society, consistent with trends toward more plural public spheres (and museum audiences) and a greater cultural shift from assimilation to multiculturalism since the 1970s.22

18 Fath Davis Ruffins, “Revisiting the Old Plantation: Reparations, Reconciliation, and Museumizing American Slavery,” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, eds. Ivan Karp, Corinne Ann Kratz, Lynn Szwaja et. Al (NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 409. 19 Congress, House, Government Activities and Transportation Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Op- erations, Smithsonian Institution Minority Employment Practices: Hearing before the Committee on Government Operations, 14 March 1989, 1. 20 Ibid., p. 8. 21 The NMAI for example developed policies to ensure that the museum functions as a vehicle for Native self-repres- entation and self-definition, in contrast to the previous treatment of American Indians as the passive subjects/objects of museum activities and analysis. Policies have included a law guaranteeing majority representation to Native Amer- icans on the museum’s board and in the directorship, and a multiyear program of community “collaboration and consultation” build into the museum planning process that resulted in the landmark document titled “The Way of the People” (1993), which continues to guide the NMAI in its planning for the future (NMAI website, accessed August 15, 2012). 22 Kylie Message, “Meeting the Challenges of the Future? Museums and the Public Good,” reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia 2.1 (2007): 81.

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Debating Ethnically-Specific Museums Though far from exhaustively treated, the question of whether we should build new, ethnically or culturally specific museums to further the inclusive aims of our national institutions has been systematically addressed in a number of settings since the 1990s, providing a rough picture of public opinion and the Smithsonian’s official stance. In 2007, the Smithsonian’s Office of Policy and Analysis surveyed a sample of Smithsonian users on the question of whether “separate ethnic museums [are] desirable.”23 According to researchers’ findings, which were published in a Summary Report of Exploratory Interviews about the National Museum of African American History and Culture, while some Americans seem empathetic that such museums are not only justified as gestures of the nation’s respect for its various ethnic-minority sub-cultures, and could serve to promote better understanding among different races and people, other “in- terviewees expressed a level of discomfort with such museums, seeing them as exclusionary, divisive, prone to politicization, or simply too narrow to be of much interest.”24 Indeed, contrary to fears of a limitless proliferation of ethnic museums, as have been aired by politicians like Senator Jesse Helms when he denounced the African American museum project on the Senate floor in 1994 and by Senator Jim Moran in numerous public statements, support for the creation of federal ethnic museums has been highly contingent and stubbornly partisan. Neither has the idea of creating additional ethnic museums been fully endorsed by the Smithsonian. In 1995, for example, the Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents commis- sioned a group of representatives to consider “how the Smithsonian might evolve in the coming decades” and published its Report of the Commission on the Future of the Smithsonian Insti- tution , the first such report since 1946.25 The document plainly states that, “to assure the fu- ture,” the Smithsonian should “assume a moratorium on new museums, other than what has already been approved [i.e., the NMAI],” adding that “continued capital expansion in the early decades of the next century at the rate experienced over the past three decades is out of the question.”26 A few years earlier, in July 1992, the Smithsonian’s Office of Museum Programs (now the Center for Museum Studies) sponsored a debate for minority interns resident at the Smithsonian on the question of whether we should establish new, culturally specific museums.27 Amazingly, it appears to be the only time that the question has ever been formally debated within the Insti- tution, and it is unclear that any similar debate took place among personnel. The mounting evidence therefore suggests the ambivalence of the Smithsonian toward the ethnic museum genre; while it sponsored a debate and a research survey on the subject, Smithsonian officials have not to date endorsed the concept, and some have even expressed serious reservations. Speaking on Diane Rehm’s syndicated radio talk show in 1994, for instance, I. Michael Hayman, then Secretary (CEO) of the Smithsonian, questioned whether it is a good thing to have museums dedicated to particular groups at all:

My own view down deep is that what the Smithsonian really can do is to try to underscore the commonality of people. Whether or not that justifies separate museums for separate ethnicities is a real question. I really don’t have to face up to that at the moment, because

23 Smithsonian Institution, Office of Policy and Analysis, Voices/Visions: Summary of Exploratory Interviews, Wash- ington D.C., 2007, 7–9. 24 Ibid., 7–9. 25 Smithsonian Institution, E Pluribus Unum: This Divine Paradox: Report of the Commission on the Future of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., 1995, iii. 26 Ibid., 26, 27 Richard Kurin, Reflections of a Culture Broker: A View from the Smithsonian, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 95.

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it is pretty clear we are not going to get funding for separate museums -- at least in the short run. But I think it raises a philosophical question that is a very important one.28

Heyman’s statements are all the more significant when we consider that the National African American Museum bill was then facing Congress, and that other groups, including Hispanics, had begun lobbying for similar facilities.

Conclusion As large-scale, federally-supported ethnic museums located on the symbolic turf of the Wash- ington Mall, the newest additions to the Smithsonian Institution national museum complex share a mandate to promote post-colonial strategies and outcomes, which they must balance with their more traditional roles as nation-builders. They also embody museum reform directed toward increasing minority and indigenous agency as well as access and ownership over the process of (re)presenting their culture and history in the capital. Despite their progressive mis- sions, however, the National Museum of the American People counter-proposal reminds us that national museums focused on particular ethnic groups are still a contested terrain. Not only was it an especially lengthy and arduous journey to congressional approval for each ethnic museum project, particularly the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Latino Museum project, but the headway gained is open to conservative re- trenchment on the grounds of national unity and security. While the recent groundbreaking of the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a moment to celebrate, and an occasion to elaborate on the scope and potential of the ethnically-specific museum in the twenty-first century, this category of federal institution remains embattled, as well as under-researched and only shallowly debated. For the ever- growing number of individuals calling for more inclusive, post-colonial narratives of American history, the emerging NMAAHC should present a fine example and resource. For scholars and museum professionals, its maturation over the next decade can contribute enormously to our understanding of how and whether national museums are preparing to meet the challenges of the future, and grappling with the colonial ideologies that guided their development.

.

28 “African American Museum Is Stalled,” Washington Post, July 30, 1995.

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REFERENCES Brady, Miranda. “A Dialogic Response to a Problematized Past: The National Museum of the American Indian.” In Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives, ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith, 133–155. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Hopkinson, Natalie. “Will White People Go to the National Black Museum?,” The Root, 20 May 2011, 1. Jacknis, Ira. “A New Thing? The NMAI in Historical and Institutional Perspective.” American Indian Quarterly Special Issue: Decolonizing Archaeology 30.3/4 (2006): 511–542. Kurin, Richard. Reflections of a Culture Broker: A View From the Smithsonian. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia, and Carl Grodach. “Displaying and Celebrating the ‘Other’: A Study of the Mission, Scope, and Roles of Ethnic Museums in Los Angeles.” The Public Historian 26.4 (2004): 49–71. Message, Kylie. “Meeting the Challenges of the Future? Museums and the Public Good.” recollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia 2.1 (2007). Moran, Jim. “Telling the Story of All Americans.” Politico, 6 July 2011, 1. Robinson-Hubbuch, Jocelyn. “African-American Museums and the National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity.” Public Historian 19.1 (1997): 29. Ridenour, Donna. “Separate but Equal History?,” Washington Post editorial, 16 October, 1994. Roig-Franzia, Manuel. “On the Mall, Homage to the Melting Pot?,” Washington Post, 30 September 2011, 2. Ruffins, Faith Davis. “Culture Wars Won and Lost, Part II: The National African-American Museum Project.” Radical History Review 70 (1998): 78–101. ______. “Culture Wars Won and Lost: Ethnic Museums on the Mall, Part I: The National Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian.” Radical History Review 68 (1997): 79–100. ______. “Revisiting the Old Plantation: Reparations, Reconciliation, and Museumizing American Slavery.” In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, eds. Ivan Karp, Corinne Ann Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 394–434. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006. Simpson, Moira G. “Cultural Reflections.” Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Eds. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004. 628–635. ______. Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era. London: Routledge, 1996. Smithsonian Institution. African American Institutional Study Final Report. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1991. (Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 07–172, National Museum of African American History and Culture Planning Records, 1991–1993, 2002–2003, Box 1/1). Smithsonian Institution. E Pluribus Unum: This Divine Paradox: Report of the Commission on the Future of the Smithsonian Institution. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu- tion, May 1995. http://sirismm.si.edu/siahistory/pdfs/strategic_plans/1995_Re- port_of_the_Commission_on_the_Future_of_SI001.pdf Smithsonian Institution. Final Report of the National Museum of African American History and Culture Plan for Action Presidential Commission. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2003. http://nmaahceis.com/documents/The_Time_Has_Come.pdf Smithsonian Institution. National Museum of the American Latino Commission Fact Sheet. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, May 6, 2011. http://americanlatinomu- seum.org/assets/nmal_factsheet.pdf

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Smithsonian Institution Office of Policy and Analysis. Voices/Visions: Summary of Exploratory Interviews about the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, October 2007. U.S. Congress. House. Government Activities and Transportation Subcommittee of the Com- mittee on Government Operations. Smithsonian Institution Minority Employment Practices: Hearing before the Committee on Government Operations. Tuesday, March 14, 1989.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicole Reiner: Nicole Reiner is a New York-based independent researcher and museum professional. She holds an M.A. in Museum Studies from New York University and a B.A. in Art History from Grinnell College. Her research interests include the politics of museum and visual representation, cultural theory, and critical studies.

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The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum addresses a key issue: In this time of fundamental social change, what is the role of the museum, both as a creature of that change, and perhaps also as an agent of change? The journal brings together academics, curators, museum and public administrators, cultural policy makers, and research students to engage in discussions about the historic character and future shape of the museum. The fundamental question of the journal is: How can the institution of the museum become more inclusive?

In addition to traditional scholarly papers, this journal invites case studies that take the form of presentations of museum practice—including documentation of organizational curatorial and community outreach practices and exegeses analyzing the effects of those practices.

The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

ISSN 1835-2014