If you walk around the delightful ‘Shambles’ of the historic city of York, through the small cobbled street of timber-framed buildings huddled together, you’ll find more than over-priced cupcakes and novelty-sized Yorkshire Tea teapots. The Shambles was once known as The Great Flesh Shambles, having served as the butcher’s street – and meat hooks still survive where animal carcasses would have once hung. If you peer into the tiny touristy gift shops here you will see other bodies hanging; the small ‘kitsch’ outlines of golliwog dolls hanging lifelessly from display hooks in shopfront windows, like so many lynchings.
This ‘taste’ for kitsch toys – the buying and selling of retro racism in material form – occupies a number of tourist shops in England. However, this trend has not gone unchallenged everywhere. This stereotyped ‘black’ character was previously removed from sale in the Albert Dock, Liverpool following public protest in 2008. The International Slavery Museum, which houses display cabinets containing racist artefacts – and explains quite clearly why these are racist – was used as a key reason for the removal of these items from a shop less than 100 metres away. The argument, as campaigners put it, was that you simply cannot justify selling artefacts which perpetuate racist imagery in the same space as a museum which explicitly outlines why this is a legacy of centuries of slavery and the racist oppression of people of African descent.
The golliwog is a contested symbol in a number of ways. Not least for the many people who owned one as a child (or still do) who don’t see it as racist, or perhaps who feel personally implicated by such interpretations. However, this issue is bigger than individual belongings. In the USA, the long history of the structural oppression of African Americans was justified and sustained through the perpetuation of racist stereotypes and caricatures. Mass-produced popular culture from the nineteenth century onwards was a key mechanism through which such stereotypes and caricatures (i.e. ‘The Brute’, ‘The Tom’, ‘The Jezebel’ etc.) were constructed and reinforced. The ‘inheritance’ of this historic material culture – the dolls and the multitude of everyday household objects, the Mammy cookie jars, fairground games, lawn jockeys, “coon” figurines – in the present, is a distinctly dissonant heritage. This is particularly apparent now as generations who owned such material in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s are passing away and leaving the problem of what to ‘do’ with such stuff to their children. There has been a recent interest in this issue in other countries too, as a recent article on ‘Aboriginalia’, or so-called Aboriginal ‘kitsch’ in Australia made clear. So, what do we do with this racist stuff now?
One answer to that question is to build a museum. I visited one such museum, The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia in Michigan State, America in July 2015 on a research trip as part of the Citizenship, ‘Race’ and Belonging Research Network (CRaB) here at the University of Portsmouth. For this research, I undertook tours, interviewed museum staff and analysed the exhibition. The Jim Crow Museum (http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/) brings together thousands of artefacts which together seek to tell the story of how racial segregation and the oppression of African Americans was justified and enabled by a consumer culture which perpetuated caricatures and normalised the dehumanisation of African American people. The museum claims to be “using objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote social justice”, and there is a distinct teaching ethos in this museum which is housed within Ferris State University, Big Rapids. Despite its ‘out of the way’ location, the museum has attracted quite a lot of attention in the national and international press. The museum’s main narrative arc foregrounds the idea that racism and segregation was ‘normalised’ through everyday objects. Most of the artefacts they display are not rare, and that is the point. This was the imagery which most white Americans had in their homes, gardens and at work.
There are, however, questions which arise in deciding to display such obviously offensive artefacts in this way. One concerns issues of voyeurism – are visitors coming here just to gawp at racism from a ‘safe’ distance? Marvel at the carnivalesque and grotesque caricaturing, the images of lynchings and oppression like a kind of ‘torture porn’? Does this break any meaningful connection visitors could be making to longer term legacies of this living history today? In interviews with museum staff, it was clear that external fears that such a museum would become a ‘shrine to racism’ was seen as something which had delayed the museum’s development. It’s hard to argue that this is the case given the kind of contextual background information developed through panel text, and the overtly ‘social justice’ stance that the museum takes. There are, however, also concerns over the impact of the display of this kind of imagery on visitors and more broadly. This is also an anxiety expressed within the representation of slavery in public history, that representations of enslavement can themselves be degrading (see “Uncomfortable Commemorations”, by Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace History Workshop Journal). Can the re-representation of racist imagery reignite degrading ideas? What kind of affective, emotional impact does this have on visitors? Museum staff suggested that emotions could in fact be a ‘way in’ for people to talk about this difficult issue – that particularly for white visitors, emotional reactions were a way to break down barriers to engagement, dislodge the years of justification and rhetoric which have in part been perpetuated by the ideas carried through the artefacts the museum exhibits.
The Jim Crow Museum started with the personal collection of racist ‘memorabilia’ owned by the museum’s founder, Dr David Pilgrim. Many African-Americans collect such material, some seeing this as a way of ‘bearing witness’ to the overt and grotesque racism which occupied such prominent public cultures. In asking what should be done with historic racist stuff in the present, we are also asking what should be done with racist artefacts within the context of a contemporary economy where there is a thriving market for this kind of thing. Auction halls and markets (including eBay) up and down America continue to sell racist ‘antiques’, with the more overtly racist artefacts being worth more. Furthermore, perhaps a more pertinent question should be, what we should do with historic racist stuff when there is so much present-day racist stuff. Some of this is the re-production of ‘retro’ imagery in new forms, but there are many more artefacts perpetuating evolving present-day racist stereotypes, especially around the presidency of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, and in the context of the campaign to elect Donald Trump.
Museums are not neutral spaces and they never have been. There is something in the museum ‘genre’ which can allow for meaningful critical reflection on dissonant histories. The ongoing ‘legacies’ of such pasts and their raw connections to the present are an area which, in taking up overtly activist and ‘social justice’ stands, such museums should continually reflect upon. One thing we can do with historic racist stuff, therefore, is display it within a setting that allows connections between past and present to be made in meaningful ways, in ways which contextualise the impact, effects and legacies of such material today.
Dr Jessica Moody is a Lecturer in Modern History and Heritage at the University of Portsmouth. Her research concerns dissonant heritage and the public history of difficult pasts. Research relating to this blog post was presented at the Institute for Historical Research, Senate House, London as part of the IHR Public History Seminar series. https://ihrpublichistory.wordpress.com