White volunteers not wanted
Conn Carroll
Portland public school retired art teacher Paulla Dacklin had been volunteering as a docent at the Portland Art Museum for years. The 71-year-old remained active in her community by leading 30 tours a year for students of the Portland Public Schools.
She was not surprised when the museum stopped asking her to come in when COVID-19 hit. The schools were closed. But as the schools and museum reopened, her phone stayed silent. She began to wonder why. Finally, this August, an email went out to all museum volunteers. The 40-year-old docent program was being eliminated in favor of paid “learning guides” hired from local universities.
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Explaining the museum’s decision to dump its mostly white volunteer staff for paid diverse employees, the museum’s executive director told a local paper that the museum was “evolving to meet the needs of the community.”
If a story about an art museum dumping its docent program because the vast majority of the docents were retired white women seems familiar, it should. The same thing has happened to art museums in Chicago, Birmingham, Denver, and Oakland.
Dacklin said she wasn’t surprised by the museum’s decision, especially after what happened at the Art Institute of Chicago and all the “equity” consultants the Portland Art Museum began hiring recently. Still, she said she was “heartbroken” by the museum’s decision and didn’t know if she would ever go back to volunteer at the museum in another capacity. “They burned their bridge,” another docent told a local paper.
When French historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about our fledgling republic in 1835, it was our volunteer associations that he was most impressed with.
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite,” Tocqueville wrote. “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, very general and very particular, immense and very small.”
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“There is nothing that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America,” Tocqueville concluded. “We easily perceive the political and industrial associations of the Americans, but the others escape us. … One ought however to recognize that they are as necessary as the first to the American people, and perhaps more so.”
The destruction of volunteer programs in the name of “equity” is one of the more vile ways the Democratic Party is undermining our democracy.