Tenement Museum

Monday

Peter Van Buren

More woke gymnastics at the Tenement Museum

One of the great things about not being obsessed with racism is that you don’t have to put yourself through the mental twisty turns required to see racism in everything. For example, I don’t have to pretend that moving from New Jersey to Manhattan to find a new job was, for a free black man in the nineteenth century, the same thing as an Irish immigrant boarding a “coffin ship” hoping to survive the Atlantic journey, knowing his only alternative was to die of starvation during the Potato Famine.

tenement museum

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.