The liberal whining about inclusion always happens to be exclusive, and that is even true for the “protected” classes liberals try to pretend they are supporting.
Museums across the country are erasing Native American exhibits after President Joe Biden’s Interior Department “issued new rules to strengthen” existing law that requires museums to get consent from tribes to display certain items. The American Museum of Natural History in New York closed two halls dedicated to Native Americans, and the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Field Museum in Chicago have both covered up several displays while they figure out if they are complying with the regulations.
The new rules are both inconsistent and tedious. They do not apply to the Smithsonian, which is also lagging behind in its compliance with the law. It helped employ even more bureaucrats at Harvard University, which has doubled the size of its staff dedicated to complying with the law. But most notably of all, these rules that are supposed to benefit Native Americans are actually completely erasing them from museums, where people go to learn about history and would presumably be able to understand those cultures and what happened to those tribes better.
This is similar to the logic that has been imposed on sports leagues. While renaming sports teams is admittedly lower stakes than museum exhibits when it comes to history, the high-profile renamings of the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians also erase Native Americans from our society. In this case, it is our sports culture that is being whitewashed to erase Native Americans but keep the naming honors for other ethnic groups, such as Vikings or Celtics.
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And while you can quibble about how the Interior Department rules are simply forcing museums to ask for permission and return unapproved artifacts, we know that the liberal impulse to erase Native Americans from society does not care for permission. The Washington Redskins name was universally despised not by Native American tribes but by non-Native liberal sportswriters, who launched a corporate media pressure campaign against the team and others.
This obsession with racism, racial categorization, and racial grievances is counterproductive in many ways, dividing people by race and pitting them against one another based on what people did hundreds of years ago. In this case, this obsession is isolating Native Americans and erasing them from our shared society and history while claiming that this is how to respect or honor them. You couldn’t come up with a more backward “logic” than this.