Blunt Instruments
Recognizing Racist Cultural Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums, and Patriotic Practices
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States—and how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future
Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality, and while it doesn’t seem to be explicitly about race, it often is. Blunt Instruments helps readers identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work tirelessly to tell us vital stories about who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs.
Examining landmark moments such as the erection of the first American museum and Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling pledge of allegiance, historian Kristin Hass explores the complicated histories of sites of cultural infrastructure, such as:
· the American Museum of Natural History
· the Bridge to Freedom in Selma
· the Washington Monument
· Mount Auburn Cemetery
· Kehinde Wiley’s 2019 sculpture Rumors of War
· the Victory Highway
· the Alamo Cenotaph
With sharp analysis and a broad lens, Hass makes the undeniable case that understanding what cultural infrastructure is, and the deep and broad impact that it has, is essential to understanding how structures of inequity are maintained and how they might be dismantled.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hass (Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall), a professor of American culture at the University of Michigan, delivers a succinct and illuminating "field guide... to racist cultural infrastructure in the United States." Unearthing "the power of the ordinary... to naturalize simple untruths," Hass examines Civil War memorials, museums, public parks, and such patriotic rituals as the Pledge of Allegiance. Throughout, she calls into question the apparent timelessness and naturalness of these places, objects, and practices and uncovers the messages of white supremacy embedded within them. For example, Hass shows that most Confederate statues were erected decades after the Civil War and were intended as much to intimidate Black Southerners as to pay tribute to Confederate soldiers and officers. She also reveals the messages of racial and ethnic hierarchy encoded in displays at the American Museum of Natural History and other institutions, and notes that rituals venerating the American flag have emerged when the nation feels itself threatened, whether by mass immigration in the 1890s–1900s, Soviet communism in the 1950s, or terrorism in the early 21st century. Though Hass covers well-trod ground, this is a lucid and immersive primer for those seeking background on recent debates over how America honors its past. Illus.
