Museums have become temples to ignorance

Have you noticed how nowadays, whenever you visit a museum, you get hit by a clunking giant ideological hammer? Once upon a time, we went to museums to feed our curiosity and sense of wonder. Today, the people in charge of them seem to believe their job is to make us feel as guilt-ridden and tormented as possible.

Last year, the National Trust replaced the term ‘ethnic minority’ with ‘global majority’ – thereby implying the 80 per cent of Britain’s population who are white should think of themselves as a minority. In March this year, the Royal Institution announced it will be adding ‘context’ to its biographies of its most significant members. (It turns out, for example, that Humphry Davy, one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century, held views on race that would get him reported for a non-crime hate incident today. Quelle surprise.) And at the oldest public museum in Scotland, the Hunterian in Glasgow, pride of place has been given to Curating Discomfort, an exhibition that aims to challenge – wait for it – ‘white supremacy’ and ‘colonial systems’. Don’t all rush at once to see it.

If it seems our museums have been taken over by wild-eyed devotees of Black Lives Matter, then that’s because many of them have been. It’s all to do with an organisation few outside the museums sector have heard of: the Museums Association (MA).

Unfortunately, in 2020, the Museums Association went more than a little bit mad. In the wake of the death of George Floyd, it was seized by guilt about events 4,000 miles away. As a result, it pledged to become ‘anti-racist’.

‘Anti-racist’ sounds so similar to non-racist that most people assume it means the same thing. After all, one might think, what could be wrong with being the opposite of a racist? But it turns out that an ‘anti-racist’ isn’t the same thing as opposing racial categorisation. In fact, it is very much in favour of it. It posits that all white people are inherently racist, and therefore morally inferior.

According to this view, it is only when a white person acknowledges they actively benefit from white supremacy, and commits to fighting their own bone-deep racism, that they can be considered anti-racist. That goes for any organisation created or run by white people, too. If white people or white-run institutions deny they are beneficiaries of white supremacy then they are, supposedly, upholding white supremacy.

You would think the people we pay to protect our heritage give this kind of nonsense short shrift. But no such luck. Proving yet again that no idea is too dumb for an intellectual, at the high tide of the Black Lives Matters contagion, the Museums Association didn’t just take ‘anti-racism’ seriously, it enshrined ‘anti-racism’ in its Code of Ethics.

It turns out, many museums could barely wait to bend their knee in fealty to this new code. Take the Hunterian. In 2021, the museum appointed Zandra Yeaman to become its ‘curator of discomfort’. In an interview on the Museums Association’s website, she said her job was ‘to identify and dismantle white supremacy’, which she defined as ‘an economic and cultural system in which white western ideals control the power of the text, the material resources and ideas of cultural superiority’.

You and I may wonder when we decided that we wanted museums to ‘dismantle’ our past, instead of preserving it. But Yeaman had no such doubts. She promptly recruited another seven race activists who knew even less about history museums and the past than she seemingly did.

These racial-justice agitators were asked to audit the museum’s collection. Specifically, they were tasked with identifying objects they believed were implicated in the never-ending conspiracy of white supremacy. They would then exhibit them with new signage, presumably to make sure Glaswegians, who are overwhelmingly white and working-class, feel the discomfort they are supposed to feel.

The effect of this group of amateur-hour race agitators (only one of the members appeared to have any academic credentials in history) being set loose on a priceless historical collection was as you might have expected. An 18th-century navigational invention, for example, was slammed as a tool of ‘racial superiority’. ‘Scientific instruments like this Hadley’s Quadrant’, the audit said, ‘were used to navigate empire. The science behind them was used as part of the justification of European racial superiority.’ It was beyond the Curating Discomfort brains trust to explain how the instrument actually worked.

The Museums Association can’t be held solely to blame for such blatant truth-twisting, but it has positively encouraged it across the UK wherever it has appeared. Nothing shows just how deep is its own commitment to the nostrums of critical race theory than its choice of host for its annual conference, which was held earlier this month.

Evidently, in keeping with the doctrines of anti-racist teaching, the conference had to be lectured not by an expert (perish the thought), or by someone who had experienced success in the museum sector. It simply had to be by an anti-racist activist.

Lo and behold, the host of Europe’s biggest conference for heritage professionals was a man by the name of O’Molemo Thamae, who the Museums Association described as ‘an activist and digital creator’. It goes without saying he has no background in museums to speak of. In fact, if his social media and website are anything to go by, Thamae seems to be little more than an amateur photographer with a meagre output. The company this ‘digital creator’ puts his work through, according to Companies House, had an annual turnover last year of less than £4,000.

Why would an organisation representing Britain’s leading museums give this relative non-entity a gig ahead of thousands of hard-working, ambitious and genuinely talented young people? The only explanation offered by the Museums Association was that Thamae organised BLM protests in 2020 before volunteering for various ‘racial justice’ organisations.

The Museums Association is clearly no longer fit for purpose. Far from helping to protect the precious material evidence of the past, it now trashes our history, derides expertise and amplifies ignorance. Can our museums survive this much vandalism from within?

Malcolm Clark was LGB Alliance’s head of research from 2019 to 2022. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.