The Role Of Museums In Unmasking Society’s Inequities
- 2017-12-28
- Huffington Post
Thoughtful museums and historic sites can fill the inequity knowledge gap by connecting the past to the present. In her book, “Artifacts and Allegiance, How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display,” Brandeis University graduate and sociologist Peggy Levitt ’80 reveals how “museums create citizens.” Maybe we can hope that museums create informed caring communities as well.
Sites such as the Robbins House have the unique opportunity to teach audiences about centuries of persistent inequity that either produced or prohibited transgenerational wealth and health. Often museums must inform audiences of what they were not offered in school: that inequities in citizenship, home and land ownership, education, employment and labor, justice and health have persisted by race, ethnicity, gender and lineage, to the present.