We’re a culture, not a costume

I visited the Arab American National Museum this afternoon. It’s in nearby Dearborn, which has a large Arab community. The whole Detroit metro area has a large Arab population, which I hear is the largest outside the Arab world. The museum is not a very big place and I was there about two hours.

I’ll start with what prompted me to visit. The special exhibit is THEM: Objects of Separation, Hate, and Violence. As I tend to do, I visited it a couple days before it closes. This a joint exhibit with the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University.

The exhibit isn’t all that big, it’s much smaller than I expected. It contains a wide variety of items that promote prejudice, including items that are excused as “harmless fun.” Here are some of the things I saw:

Costumes that appropriate another ethnicity. I think it was students at Michigan State University who put up posters saying, “We’re a culture, not a costume.” That’s especially important since most costumes are derogatory towards, or at least trade on stereotypes of, the people depicted.

Games that degrade an ethnic group. This is similar to sports teams that appropriate an ethnic group for their mascot. The exhibit also included a computer game titled “Ethnic Cleansing” though definitely not set up on a computer to allow you to play.

Whites who performed in blackface. The characters were usually shown to be bumbling and subservient and in contrast to the competent white characters.

Attempts at humor in signs. One showed a woman with a cork in her mouth, implying women say way too much (men aren’t accused of this) while having nothing to say.

Magazine advertisements.

Slurs at military enemies, such as Krauts and Japs.

Material from Holocaust deniers.

Some of the groups depicted:

Blacks, such as Aunt Jemima who neglected her own family to serve the white family.

Native Americans, usually depicted as savage.

Arabs.

Polish people (when I was growing up Polack jokes made the rounds – eventually replaced by blond jokes).

Women.

Gay men.

Irish. In the 1800s, there were lots of signs saying, “No Irish Need Apply.”

There were also a couple pictures of a concentration camp and of the death of Emmett Till. These were covered with a black cloth so that you couldn’t see them just by glancing in that direction. You had to consciously want to see them. Beside them were content warnings.

Many of these items have as a central message: They frighten us. They are menacing and lack civility. They are coarse and vulgar.

From the view of my favorite topic: All these items have to do with ranking. They have the purpose of distancing someone else, of reinforcing stereotypes, of describing someone as less than human. This allows the oppressor to feel less bad, to rationalize superiority, when he oppresses.

On to the rest of the museum. The first floor has a few displays about the contributions Arabs have made to global culture. There is architecture and modern music. There is also a great deal of mathematics, medicine, and science. These flourished in Arab culture while Europe was going through its dark ages.

The second floor features three permanent galleries. The first is about coming to America. The first known Arab immigrant was a slave to the Spanish in the 16th Century, though he did a lot of traveling on his own. There were lots of Arab immigrants between 1880 and 1924 (when immigration laws were tightened). There was a wave of Palestinians after Israel was created. Then more came starting in the 1970s when laws were loosened. A lot of the presented stories read like lots of other immigrant stories.

The second gallery is about living in America. Again, like other immigrant stories, they worked from menial jobs to better jobs, to making a big impact.

The third gallery is displays of notable Arab Americans. I recognized perhaps a couple dozen names, the rest unfamiliar. One that surprised me was Christa McAuliffe, the teacher selected to go up in the space shuttle, the one that exploded shortly after takeoff. With a Scottish name I would not have guessed her ancestry is Arabic.