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Tag: Race and Ethnicity

  • Trump Takes Aim at Smithsonian, Wading Into Race and Biology

    Trump Takes Aim at Smithsonian, Wading Into Race and Biology


    When President Trump issued an executive order claiming that the Smithsonian Institution had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” he singled out a sculpture exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.

    The exhibition, called “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” explores how, for more than 200 years, sculpture has both shaped and reflected attitudes about race in the United States.

    The president’s order noted, among other things, that the show “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”

    In interviews, several scholars questioned why the executive order appeared to take issue with that view, which is now broadly held. Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written about scientific racism, said that “the executive order is troubling and out of step with the current consensus.” He added that pseudoscientific attempts to create a hierarchy of races with white people at the top were seen “in places like Nazi Germany or within the eugenics movement.”

    Asked for comment, the White House referred a reporter back to the executive order. Mr. Trump said in his inaugural address that he would stop efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”

    The quotation about race as a human invention appears to come from the wall text in the show, which notes that humans are “99.9 percent genetically the same” and introduces part of a statement on race and racism by the American Association of Biological Anthropologists.

    “Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.”

    “It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,” the statement says. “Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences.”

    Mr. Trump’s executive order came after he moved to purge diversity, equity and inclusion measures.

    The executive order took issue with a number of other things about the show, including that it noted that societies, including the United States, had “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement” and claimed that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism.”

    Museum officials declined to comment about the order and the show, which opened just a few days after the presidential election in early November to positive reviews and runs through Sept. 14.

    James Smalls, an art historian who advised the curators of the exhibition and wrote for its catalog, said there had been clear examples in the past of sculpture being used to suggest that some races were superior to others.

    He pointed to the 1930s bronze sculptures of Malvina Hoffman made for a “Races of Mankind” exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago that attempted to show “racial types” from around the world. (Hoffman, who died in 1966, was skeptical about the biological notions of race she was hired to illustrate, seeing her subjects as individuals, not types.) “By the time the exhibition was deinstalled more than 30 years later, more than 10 million people had seen it — as well as its misguided message that human physical differences could be categorized into distinct ‘races,’ ” the Field Museum wrote when it brought some back for a 2016 exhibition.

    Smalls said it was important to confront this part of history. “What bothers me most about the executive order is that it shuts down the whole conversation, not allowing for any discussion,” he said. “It also imposes that there is one view of American history, and that the country is a history of greatness. No country is great all the time.”

    Artists with sculptures in the show questioned the White House’s contention that it was divisive.

    Roberto Lugo, a 43-year-old Puerto Rican artist whose sculpture was featured in advertisements for the exhibition, said that the curators wanted to promote connection and understanding.

    “My art is not about divisiveness but trying to find my place in the world and connect with others and represent my culture, ancestry and community within the context of American history,” he said of his sculpture, which was made from a cast of his own body, painted in patterns that describe different aspects of his heritage. “I feel like the exhibition was an honest interpretation of people’s lived experiences.”

    Nicholas Galanin, a 45-year-old artist whose work is inspired by his Indigenous heritage, contributed a 2016 sculpture to the exhibition called “The Imaginary Indian (Totem Pole),” which includes a wooden totem disappearing into floral wallpaper.

    “Museums, monuments, and public institutions should be spaces where these stories are held with care, not suppressed for political convenience,” he said. “When we interrogate systems of power and challenge historical narratives that center whiteness and colonial dominance, we do not divide, we restore balance.”

    In an essay for the exhibition’s catalog, Stephanie Stebich, the museum’s director at the time, wrote that “our goal is to encourage visitors to feel invited into a transparent and honest dialogue about the histories of race, racism, and the role of sculpture, art history, and museums in shaping these stories.”



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  • Under Pressure, Psychology Accreditation Board Suspends Diversity Standards

    Under Pressure, Psychology Accreditation Board Suspends Diversity Standards


    The American Psychological Association, which sets standards for professional training in mental health, has voted to suspend its requirement that postgraduate programs show a commitment to diversity in recruitment and hiring.

    The decision comes as accrediting bodies throughout higher education scramble to respond to the executive order signed by President Trump attacking diversity, equity and inclusion policies. It pauses a drive to broaden the profession of psychology, which is disproportionately white and female, at a time of rising distress among young Americans.

    The A.P.A. is the chief accrediting body for professional training in psychology, and the only one recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. It provides accreditation to around 1,300 training programs, including doctoral internships and postdoctoral residencies.

    Mr. Trump has made accrediting bodies a particular target in his crusade against D.E.I. programs, threatening in one campaign video to “fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics” and “accept applications for new accreditors.”

    Department of Justice officials have pressured accrediting bodies in recent weeks, warning the American Bar Association in a letter that it might lose its status unless it repealed diversity mandates. The A.B.A. voted in late February to suspend its diversity and inclusion standard for law schools.

    The concession by the A.P.A., a bastion of support for diversity programming, is a particular landmark. The association has made combating racism a central focus of its work in recent years, and in 2021 adopted a resolution apologizing for its role in perpetuating racism by, among other things, promulgating eugenic theories.

    Aaron Joyce, the A.P.A.’s senior director of accreditation, said the decision to suspend the diversity requirement was driven by “a large influx of concerns and inquiries” from programs concerned about running afoul of the president’s order.

    In many cases, he said, institutions had been instructed by their legal counsels to cease diversity-related activities, and were worried it might imperil their accreditation.

    “The Commission does not want to put programs in jeopardy of not existing because of a conflict between institutional guidelines” and accreditation standards, Dr. Joyce said.

    He would not describe the tally of the March 13 vote, which followed about three weeks of deliberation. “Nothing about this was an easy decision, and not taken lightly,” he said. “The understanding of individual and cultural diversity is a core facet of the practice of psychology.”

    The commission opted to retain another diversity-related standard: Programs must teach trainees to respect cultural and individual differences in order to treat their patients effectively. In reviewing each standard, the commission weighed “what may put programs in a compromised position” against “what is essential to the practice of psychology that simply cannot be changed,” he said.

    A spokesman for the Department of Justice said the A.P.A. had taken a good step, but would have to take further steps to eliminate diversity mandates, which he said “encourage or require illegal discrimination.”

    “Suspension is a welcome development, but it is not nearly enough,” said the spokesman. “These kinds of rules are unlawful and have no place in a society that values individuals for their character.”

    Kevin Cokley, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, said he was “absolutely devastated” to learn of the A.P.A.’s decision on a psychology listserv this week.

    “Frankly, I think the decision is really unconscionable, given what we know of the importance of having diverse mental health providers,” Dr. Cokley said. “I don’t know how the A.P.A. can make this sort of decision and think that we are still maintaining the highest standards of training.”

    He said he thought the A.P.A. had acted prematurely, and could have waited until it faced a direct challenge from the administration.

    “I think that there is always a choice,” he said. “I think this is a classic example of the A.P.A. engaging in anticipatory compliance. They made the move out of fear of what might happen to them.”

    According the data from the A.P.A., the psychology work force is disproportionately white. In 2023, more than 78 percent of active psychologists were white, 5.5 percent were Black, 4.4 percent were Asian and 7.8 percent were Latino. (The general population is around 58 percent white, 13.7 percent Black, 6.4 percent Asian and 19.5 percent Latino.)

    The demographic breakdown of graduate students in Ph.D. programs, in contrast, is more in line with the country. According to 2022 data from the A.P.A., 54 percent of doctoral students were white, 10 percent were Black, 10 percent were Asian and 11 percent Latino.

    John Dovidio, a professor emeritus of psychology at Yale and the author of “Unequal Health: Anti-Black Racism and the Threat to America’s Health,” said the A.P.A.’s focus on diversity in recruiting had played a major part in that change.

    “It really is something that departments take very, very seriously,” he said. “I have seen the impact personally.”

    A memorandum announcing the decision describes it as an “interim action while awaiting further court guidance” on Mr. Trump’s executive order, which was upheld by a federal court of appeals on March 13. The order, it says, “is currently law while litigation is pending.”

    Cynthia Jackson Hammond, the president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which coordinates more than 70 accreditation groups, said it is “unprecedented” for such bodies to receive direct orders from the government.

    “The government and higher education have always worked independently, and in good faith with each other,” she said. “Throughout the decades, what we have had is a healthy separation, until now.”

    The federal government began taking a role in accreditation after World War II, as veterans flooded into universities under the G.I. Bill. Accrediting bodies are regularly reviewed by the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the Secretary of Education on whether to continue to recognize them.

    But government officials have never used this leverage to impose ideological direction on higher education, Ms. Jackson Hammond said. She said diversity in recruitment remains a serious challenge for higher education, which is why the standard is still so commonly used.

    “If we think about what our institutions looked like before,” she said, “that might be a barometer of what it’s going to look like if there’s not attention paid.”



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  • ‘Modern Love’ Podcast: How I Decentered Men and Learned to Center Myself

    ‘Modern Love’ Podcast: How I Decentered Men and Learned to Center Myself


    Natasha Rothwell plays characters who are constantly trying to improve and to better understand their desires. This season on “The White Lotus,” Rothwell, an Emmy-nominated actress, is back playing Belinda, a striving spa manager with dreams of becoming her own boss. Ambitions like these are relatable to Rothwell, who created and starred in her own show, “How to Die Alone.” But as she and her characters have learned, going after what you want often means changing your priorities and steering away from certain types of people.

    Today on the show, Rothwell reads Jasmine Browley’s Modern Love essay, “I Decentered Men. Decentering Desire for Men Is Harder,” about the challenges and joys of putting your own needs first. And Rothwell tells Anna Martin how vision boarding has helped her center herself.

    Here’s how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times.

    Here’s how to submit a Tiny Love Story.

    Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

    Links to transcripts of episodes generally appear on these pages within a week.

    “Modern Love” is hosted by Anna Martin and produced by Reva Goldberg, Emily Lang, Davis Land, Amy Pearl and Sara Curtis. The show is edited by Gianna Palmer and Jen Poyant, our executive producer. Production management is by Christina Djossa. The show is mixed by Daniel Ramirez and Sonia Herrero. This show is recorded by Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. It features original music by Pat McCusker, Elisheba Ittoop, Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Carole Sabouraud, Aman Sahota and Rowan Niemisto. Our theme music is by Dan Powell.

    Special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Dahlia Haddad, Lisa Tobin, Brooke Minters, Felice León, Dave Mayers, Eddie Costas, Sawyer Roque, Daniel Jones, Miya Lee, Mahima Chablani, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda, Isabella Anderson, Christine Nguyen, Reyna Desai, Jordan Cohen, Victoria Kim, Nina Lassam and Julia Simon.

    Thoughts? Email us at modernlovepodcast@nytimes.com.

    Want more from Modern Love? Read past stories. Watch the TV series and sign up for the newsletter. We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”



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  • With 100 Pounds of Blue Pigment, an Artist Conjures Spirits of the Past

    With 100 Pounds of Blue Pigment, an Artist Conjures Spirits of the Past


    Standing in her studio on the South Side of Chicago earlier this winter, the abstract painter and architect Amanda Williams was surprised by a dark blue form that filled the earth-toned canvas, which she had poured with paint the day before. Williams’s process is precise yet fluid; she knows just where the paint should hit the canvas but surrenders to its diffusion. To her, the spectral figure — a body, hunched and bent — that manifested eerily overnight sprang not just from the paint, but from the very soil the paint was made from — Alabama iron-rich soil Williams had her cousin ship in buckets via Fed-Ex. And to Williams, the image was unshakable.

    Encountering that form, Williams said, felt like conjuring spirits of the past. “It was like, Oh my God, there they are. They’re coming back. We brought them back.”

    That first (amicably) haunted work is one of 20 new paintings and 10 collages that Williams presents in her current show, “Run Together and Look Ugly After the First Rain,” at Casey Kaplan Gallery in Chelsea, through April 26. The painting, “She May Well Have Invented Herself,” like all the work in the show, centers on a deep, midnight blue. It’s a pigment that took Williams, together with two material science labs, three years to develop. Or, rather, to recreate.

    The blue originated in the workshop of George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee food scientist known mainly for his research on peanuts. Carver was an amateur painter who developed and patented his own pigments, including a Prussian blue, from the Alabama soil Black farmers worked at the turn of the 20th century.

    Williams first came across a reference to Carver’s Prussian blue while researching Black inventors’ patents for her 2021 multimedia installation on Black ingenuity in “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. “He was on one of these lists of Black inventors,” Williams recalled. “At first I didn’t pay attention because I thought it would be something with peanuts, but when I looked again, I saw it said blue.” In fact, Carver’s 1927 patent described refining red clay soil into paint and dye.

    After working on several other projects, Williams returned to the patent in 2022. “It all started with a simple, innocent question: what would it take to recreate Carver’s blue?” she said. Williams quickly realized that bringing the idea to life on her own would be exceedingly difficult. “The patent is extremely vague. It’s just clear enough so you know Carver knows what he’s doing, but not clear enough to follow a cooking recipe.” Also, Williams added, “I’m not a chemist.”

    When the University of Chicago’s president, Paul Alivisatos, a distinguished chemist, overheard Williams enthusiastically discussing Carver’s recipe at a university event, he offered her access to his laboratory to help recreate the pigment. After a summer of experimentation, a group of student researchers successfully produced a small batch. To paint, however, Williams needed to scale production. She turned to the German company Kremer Pigments Inc., where its founder, Dr. Georg Kremer, modified the recipe. Kremer ultimately produced 100 pounds of powder pigment, only small amounts of which are needed to make a gallon of paint.

    But Williams was fascinated by more than just Carver’s chemistry. His boldness also spoke to her. “Of 44 bulletins that Carver wrote, only one talked about color and beauty,” Williams said, referring to a bulletin from 1911. “I can’t imagine the audacity to be thinking about beauty at a time when so many just had to survive.”

    Williams, a Cornell-trained architect, has a deep understanding of color. Her work, which she’s shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, at the Venice Biennale and in three exhibitions at MoMA, explores the propagandistic power of color. Williams uses color to alchemize fraught histories into expressions of joy and resilience, bringing the past into a new, vibrant and politically aware view.

    Since childhood, Williams has understood how space and infrastructure dictate the possibilities afforded to different communities. “We have the best architecture in the world in Chicago,” she said. “But that’s not what inspired me.” Instead, she was drawn to the questions of inequity. “I was asking, how come our streets don’t get plowed? Where did that building go?”

    For her 2015 project “Color(ed) Theory,” Williams coated eight homes scheduled for demolition on Chicago’s South Side in bold colors — “Currency Exchange yellow,” “Flamin’ Hot orange,” “Crown Royal purple” — referring to consumer products associated with Black life in America. “I come from the South Side, you know, very Black. And Black people like to show out,” Williams said, laughing. “Liquor store lights blaring, the tire shop neon green. Every color is brighter than the one next to it. That was my first palette.”

    In 2022, Williams explored a still fraught chapter of South Side history in “Redefining Redlining,” a public installation of 100,000 red tulips planted across vacant Chicago lots, tracing the former boundaries of discriminatory home lending policies known as redlining.

    “The most important and beautiful message of Amanda’s works is that the past is not past,” said Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA Chicago), where Williams staged her first solo museum show in 2017. “It’s still very much with us — particularly the American history of racism, the American history of disinvestment in communities, and the hope for the restoration of community.” She added, “Amanda knows how to both acknowledge and offer an olive branch to a difficult history.”

    That same year, Williams also exhibited “CandyLadyBlack” at Gagosian in New York, a series that paid homage to Black women who sell candy and small goods from their homes and on the streets. The nine saturated paintings reimagined everyday dime candy — Jolly Ranchers, Frooties, Stix, and bubble gum — into incandescent works so vibrant they nearly glowed with phosphorescence.

    “Amanda understands color tactically, strategically, and historically,” said Michelle Kuo, the chief curator at large and publisher at MoMA. “She’s not just using it for its visual impact, but to map out ideas of place, memory and Black culture. That really is her superpower.”

    When Williams found Carver’s creative writings, she was struck by his own desire to bring Modernist color to the Southern landscape, to take the raw materials of Alabama farmland and encourage Black farmers to turn them into something beautiful. “Carver was just trying to show people how to make things from what they already had,” she said. “It was very D.I.Y., very straightforward, but the aspiration was beauty.”

    And the fact that Carver developed a Modernist palette around the same time Le Corbusier was refining his own, underscored a larger truth: whose innovations are celebrated and whose forgotten? For Williams, it was yet another example of how Black creativity, invention, and resourcefulness are often overlooked. In that sense, Williams found an unexpected creative and intellectual kinship with the scientist.

    In her studio, Williams experimented with her Prussian blue, layering, diluting and pouring the paint, letting it crack, pool and bleed across the canvas. The apparition on the first canvas was the only full human form to materialize. “We tried like ten times to make it happen again,” Williams recalled. “It didn’t. I just accepted what it was.” The rest of the resulting paintings — such as the evocatively titled “Historical Elisions, Gap for Blue” and “Blue Smells Like We Been Outside” — produced their own ghosts, neither fully figurative nor entirely abstract. Some suggest torsos, while others allude to landscapes, rivers, or veins. “There is something anthropomorphic about this work,” Williams said. “I didn’t force it. That’s what made it powerful.”

    But while the ghosts may live in the paint, Williams’s goal is not just to resurface the past, but to expand it. “I want to make sure that the work just stands on its own,” Williams said. “It doesn’t have to just carry the baggage of history.” This color, Williams added, is something closer to “Amanda Carver blue.”



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  • Why Did It Take a Fire for the World to Learn of Altadena’s Black Arts Legacy?

    Why Did It Take a Fire for the World to Learn of Altadena’s Black Arts Legacy?


    Saar, whom White would eventually recruit to teach at Otis, grew up on the edge of Altadena in the 1930s and ’40s. Her neighborhood’s paperboy, she told me, was Jackie Robinson, who lived down the street. Her local landmarks included the five-and-dime store, where she bought trinkets and art supplies. Though she would eventually settle in Laurel Canyon after studying art at Pasadena Junior College and U.C.LA., she has maintained tight family and professional relationships to both Altadena and northwest Pasadena throughout her life.

    In the 1950s Saar (whose maiden name was Brown) started a jewelry business, cleverly named Brown and Tann, with Curtis Tann. Saar’s sister, the teacher and civic leader Jeffalyn Johnson, settled in a home on Lincoln Avenue, where she and her husband, Alvin, hosted art shows in their backyard. Visitors would dress in their Sunday best. Other venues for art display, Saar said, were churches, afternoon tea parties and artist-run studios. Often there would be musical performances or book readings.

    “It was very Altadena — laid-back, informal and filled with makers supporting each other,” said Moore, adding that artists here often stayed under the radar, without recognition by distant galleries, museums and critics. When Saar and others broke through , they were often identified as part of the larger Los Angeles scene.

    And then came the fires. Hundreds of artists have lost their homes and studios, and it’s unclear how many will be able, or willing, to return.

    “I just don’t want to go through this again,” said La Monte Westmoreland, 83, a longtime Altadena collage artist who lost one home in the 1993 Kinneloa fire. He rebuilt, only to lose his patio, koi pond and metal and ceramic sculptures in this one. “I don’t want to think about the next fire.”



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  • Why ‘Show Boat’ Is America’s Most Enduring, Unstable Musical

    Why ‘Show Boat’ Is America’s Most Enduring, Unstable Musical


    The musical brought out some of the finest work from both: wit, bite and heartbreak in the libretto, and infectious melodies, cinematic underscoring and operatic sophistication in the score. Each decade of the story is indicated through musical signposts like spirituals and parlor songs in the 19th century, and an interpolation of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in the 1920s.

    Because music is so central to the plot, Kern and Hammerstein also wrote crucial diegetic songs. In the first act Julie, the show boat’s prima donna, sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” which Queenie, the Black cook, interrupts by saying, “How come y’all know that song?” She has only heard “colored people” sing it before, she says, a revelation that presages Julie being unmasked as mixed race.

    In Act II, years later, Magnolia, who is white and like a little sister to Julie, auditions with “Can’t Help” at a theater in Chicago. It turns out Julie is the star there, and she abruptly quits to make room for Magnolia. Magnolia then becomes a star, as if to embody the idea of Black culture being taken up (or taken over) by white entertainers, which is what happened with popular music in the early 20th century and continues to this day.

    Kern signified the seriousness of this subject matter with a grand, dramatic A-minor chord in the Overture. Even more of a jolt, in the original Broadway run, was Hammerstein’s lyric for the opening chorus, in which audiences heard Black singers identify themselves with the most severe racial epithet. (In revivals, that word was changed to “darkies,” “colored folk” and, benignly, “we all.”)

    Although there are offensive tropes in “Show Boat,” Hammerstein’s attitude was more nuanced, and progressive. The musical also contains advocacy on behalf of Queenie, for example, who is given a scene in which she is made to suffer, with seasoned cool, the indignity of a white man questioning where she got a brooch that Julie gave to her. And the musical’s biggest hit, “Ol’ Man River,” is reserved for Joe, the other principal Black character.



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