New White House Report Alleges ‘Anti-White’ Bias at Smithsonian
A 162-page White House Domestic Policy Council report titled “Saving America’s Story,” published online on July 4, accused the Smithsonian Institution of promoting “anti-white” ideology, focusing primarily on the National Museum of American History. The report also criticized the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s webpage “Furthering the Conversation About Whiteness,” tied to the exhibition “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” which closed last September after presenting 82 works spanning two centuries by artists including Edmonia Lewis, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Isamu Noguchi, Simone Leigh, and Nicholas Galanin. The report objected to language describing whiteness as socially constructed and as a system of power, and it scrutinized Smithsonian staff and internal materials such as a 2019 anti-racist toolkit for the National Museum of the American Indian. Smithsonian spokesperson Julissa Marenco told the New York Times that the institution remains committed to “nonpartisan and independent scholarship.”
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This story was covered in Looted Legacies, Museum Scandals, and AI Showdowns