Wallace, a small town in New Orleans, has gotten unprecedented national attention as of late due to the opening of a new attraction: the Whitney Plantation. The plantation was home to many slaves in the antebellum period and has now been repurposed as a sort of museum that brings an American history of slavery to life in order to remind and educate.
The project was commissioned by one John Cummings, who is a wealthy white lawyer. This is not necessarily unexpected, as it is just another instance of a white patron commissioning Black production. Even during the Harlem Renaissance, which has been regarded as the re-birth of a Black artist culture in America, much of the work produced was funded by white patrons.
There are a number of promising and exciting aspects of this museum and its aims. It is the first slavery museum in America, which is no small thing. Furthermore, its position in the South is hugely significant; it allows for southerners to address an awful piece of American history that people, particularly south of the Mason-Dixon Line, sometimes romanticized and regard with an air of nostalgia. Having such a museum in a place where the Confederate flag is still flown on a regular basis and sometimes in public places is a step in the right direction toward coming to terms with the uglier parts of American history.
However, there are also lots of problematic things about the museum itself, as well as with the circumstances that enabled its creation and opening. Thus, it is unclear whether the combination of intent and impact make the project wholly appropriate.
It almost seems like this museum just kind of happened or stumbled into being. Its commissioner didn’t have any direct or tangible connection to the topic or related materials before the project began. It could have just as easily ended up being some other sort of attraction, since this was almost just a whim of Cummings. He only even became interested in this idea after purchasing the plantation and reading about its history.
It is also concerning that something like this museum was only able to be created after the efforts of a rich, white, man. As a result, it feels like this project needed to play the game of respectability politics to get an inherently important message across and reignite a valuable dialogue around this country’s dark past. Something with such significance shouldn’t need a stamp of approval from a “respectable” party to come to completion. This situation implicitly reinforces that stories of Black lives are irrelevant unless they’re affirmed by whites.
Questioning the context in which the museum came into being implies that intent behind actions, not just the outcome of the actions themselves, is important when making an ethical judgment of a situation. If we were to evaluate based on a utilitarian framework, none of these intent arguments would be salient, as we would only need to evaluate the impacts of the action, in this case the creation of the museum, to determine its moral rectitude. To attend to this mode of thought, we must critique the outcomes and the impact of creating this specific museum.
There are certainly outcome-based critiques to be made. The commissioned sculptures of slave children present in the museum are so exaggerated that they approach the status of caricatures. This is deeply troubling because it allows for people to distance themselves emotionally from the figurines, stunting the potential for empathy.
Furthermore, there are also problematic issues with the language we use when discussing the museum itself. Cummings has said that the goal is to “recreate an authentic slave experience.” If this were really the case, the museum would be constructed to give visitors the experience of what it would be like to actually be a slave. This would not only make the museum wildly unpopular, but would literally be torture to anyone that would choose to visit. As a result, the re-creation of an experience is from a white perspective, because visitors simply watch everything happen. They do not participate.
Recognizing these problems is not to say that having a museum to remind us of the atrocities of American slavery is a bad thing. In fact, it’s something that has long been missing from national discourse. It simply indicates that we can and should do better. Representations should be realistic and we need to be honest with ourselves about the exact kind of experience that we’re getting by walking through this plantation: one that is nowhere near what it would have felt like to be a slave. It is no less important, and perhaps more productive: a space and set of visual representations that will catalyze important conversations about the history of race and race relations in America.
Contact Mina Shah at minashah ‘at’ stanford.edu.