Black

Saturday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

The Met’s ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ is equally horrifying and inspiring

One of the first pieces exhibited in Superfine: Tailoring Black Style – The Met’s annual spring Costume Institute exhibition – is a small and faded tan wool livery coat, most likely created by Brooks Brothers, the oldest apparel brand in continuous operation in the States. On its website the New York-based Brooks Brothers proudly claims that since it was founded in 1818 it has dressed no less than “39 presidents, along with industry leaders and cultural innovators.” What it doesn’t say it that it also dressed southern slaves. The mid-19th century tan coat was worn by a black enslaved child, just before the Civil War, at a time when household servants reflected their owner’s status.

Sunday

Peter Van Buren

Wokeness claims a museum

When will our intellectual life return to normal, where facts come together into conclusions? Today, in service to ideologies like Critical Race Theory, conclusions are established and facts are manipulated or just ignored to support them. You can't argue intellectually against something so profoundly nonintellectual but you can take note of it in hopes that someday we will untangle ourselves. That's why today we're paying a visit to the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side. When I joined the Museum as an educator in early 2016, it was a small, elegant, good place. Inside a restored 19th-century tenement apartment house, it told the story of some of the actual all-immigrant families who had lived there, from inside their actual apartments.