What a travesty!
Another imbecilic result of wokeness. Where are the adults? https://nypost.com/2021/11/30/tenement-museum-is-building-big-fat-lie-evicting-real-life-stories-for-a-flat-out-woke-fantasy/ [Van-buren-fantasy-864](//muut.com/u/brownstoner/s1/:brownstoner:x04Q:vanburenfantasy864.jpg.jpg)
daveinbedstuy
in General Discussion 3 years and 11 months ago
38
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38 replies
dorkofwindsor | 3 years and 11 months ago
I’m SO outraged.
OMG OMG OMG
emoji emoji emoji
snore.
workisfun | 3 years and 11 months ago
Fair enough. But we shouldn’t turn away when they confuse education and facts with personal preference. If one is unhappy that the museum is broadening its scope, that’s their right. But, don’t be lazy with your critique. Blaming change on “wokeness” doesn’t express a yearning to conserve or preserve. It reveals a racial component, as defined by another poster above. Giving the OP the benefit of the doubt, he is just bothered that the museum is changing its mission. That’s ok. Just don’t blame it on a generation that is trying hard to “see” more and understand more about how their current systems were built and how they affect different populations among us. Just sayin.
stevecym | 3 years and 11 months ago
Workisfun, I am from LI and most of the people I know out there do not think like any of us here. Especially not like any of us who made a choice to move into a culturally diverse place like nyc (I was talking to a neighbor yesterday who said “I came here to get away from ‘them'”). Unless we know the people i am speaking of, it is hard to understand the threat these people feel. Your thinking and the questions you pose are totally foreign to them and you will never reconcile anything if you are trying to rationalize anything with them or their mindset.
stevecym | 3 years and 11 months ago
A larger museum. A larger organization with more reach and resources might be able to better pull this together and remain historically accurate at the same time, with multiple locations depicting how other groups lived in nyc.
I am just not sure we are always ready for the truth about how some people were forced to live and my guess is a tenement was warm cozy place when compared to other living situations.
FWIW, I did research years ago that revealed that my 2nd great grandfather lived in a tenement in 1880 on the edge of where the port authority bus terminal now stands. They had quite a few people living in that space though not my great grandmother, they were back in brooklyn by the time she came along.
workisfun | 3 years and 11 months ago
@brooklyncitizen – thank you for the straight definition. So why is that term being used in derogatory ways? We can ponder that for half a second. It’s like PC. what exactly is wrong with taking into consideration all different kinds of people with all different belief systems? I remember Sarah Palin was so mixed up in her word salads that she couldn’t even stand up to her party-mates using words that diminish people like her youngest child. Sad. Terms like “woke” and “PC” refer to our dream that all people, living and dead, are regarded fairly and honoring their self-ascribed identities. It’s basic effing decency. Why trash that position?
stevecym | 3 years and 11 months ago
We needed that perspective workisfun.
Guest User | 3 years and 11 months ago
“Woke” is an African American vernacular term meaning to be “alert to racial discrimination and racial prejudice”. Like many African American terms/ideas/ movements (Me Too) it was appropriated by white mainstream culture and applied to different contexts.
workisfun | 3 years and 11 months ago
Museums have to tell stories. If they can’t keep the stories relevant to their audiences, then who’s going to listen? I don’t see any problem with expanding the story, I’m not really sure what the museum is doing that is not historically accurate or disingenuous or even minimizing the lived experiences of the family that actually did live in that building. Did I miss something?
workisfun | 3 years and 11 months ago
I was an educator at the Queens Museum for 9 years. That building originally housed the UN. Then it became the home of Tiffany Glass treasures. Then, the site of 2 Worlds Fairs. Now it is so many different and wonderful things things. It tries to speak to its community and other visitors. When museums stop doing that, they just become a time capsule or repository. The Tenement Museum is an incredible place with incredible stories. Not sure about the emerging curriculum, but it sounds like CONTEXT is guiding the new changes. I wouldn’t count I just one or two print sources that each cater to millions of people. Won’t find much nuance or complexity to offer a judgment. I would have a stronger reaction if the museum was REPLACING one of its rooms with an archetypal point of reference. What wrong with expanding its scope?
workisfun | 3 years and 11 months ago
Could someone please provide an honest, unbiased definition of “woke/wokeness”?
andriywww1990 | 3 years and 11 months ago
we have to be careful of “sanitizing” history as well lest we forget humanity’s wrongs and lose understanding for those whose ancestral experience might be different than our own.
Guest User | 3 years and 11 months ago
What I find disturbing is that a “newspaper” which supported the liar in chief is objecting to a cultural institution’s choice to tell a particular story. If that is a problem for you , don’t visit. It doesn’t change everything they are offering that validates the immigrant experience.
Perhaps in honor of 45 they can re-create a detention facility with babies and toddlers locked behind bars. Kind of like the European exhibitions that imported colonial subjects and displayed them in hackneyed dioramas. Is that enough truth telling for ya?
colonialrevival | 3 years and 11 months ago
This seems like a thoughtful reconciliation of the museum’s role as a steward of the city’s multicultural history, combined with a recognition of the opportunity to tell stories of more than just historical whiteness. It’s interesting that such a harmless reexamination of the museum’s purpose would warrant anything other than admiration and praise. Perhaps those calling for its “closure” because of such a decision have some reconciling to do of their own, uh, beliefs.
stevecym | 3 years and 11 months ago
Dibs, us adults have to deal with the truth, no matter how much it hurts. And there is plenty of hurt to go around. A little perspective and understanding can smooth out some of the real rough spots, at least for those too young to process what is going on. To close it down would go too far. But look at Neil’s comment, “has built facilities”, maybe other near by facilities could depict life for other groups. Perhaps the museum is not doing what we think is best, but it is better than doing nothing.
I am only thinking of children here because I suspect making a child feel excluded from anything during a school day or event might have further reaching and longer lasting consequences. Children dont have the outlets us adults have when we are not pleased about a perceived injustice.
Steve cym and doors by are the same and I only shifted my opinion after comment from my 16 yr old.
neilw | 3 years and 11 months ago
Representation matters. What possible harm could come from expanding – as the museum is doing – who is represented in the story of our city? The author knows, but chooses to ignore, that the Irish, Italians and Jews weren’t considered white at the time – it was as much about race as class.
The museum found another person of the same name and same occupation as the Irish immigrant they featured, who was black (how amazing is that?), and has started to include that person’s story in their tours. They have also built facilities to include Chinese and Hispanic stories.
The author is the one with the political agenda, and his skewing of facts didn’t really stand up to scrutiny (or a an actual interview with the museum): https://www.thedailybeast.com/wokeness-battle-engulfs-tenement-museum-in-new-york-city-after-ex-employees-rant. But, as Fox News knows, “outrage” gets clicks and views, not subtle or complicated stories.
daveinbedstuy | 3 years and 11 months ago
It should probably be closed or, as they say these days, “Cancelled.” It’ll never please everyone and there will always be those offended by some aspect of it!!!
andriywww1990 | 3 years and 11 months ago
and now this, a youth’s perspective.
i brought this up at the dinner table and my son spoke up offering what i thought was a justifiable perspective: he said “I have been to the tenement museum. it’s not so nice when school classes go to these museums and everything depicted is about white people and the black kid feels left out among his peers by no doing of his own”. my son is 16 and i imagined he was thinking of what is would be like for real small children, 7 year olds.
neilw | 3 years and 11 months ago
The travesty is presenting an opinion piece (from the Post, no less) as actual news. Peel away the author’s agenda, thin skin, and incredibly short tenure at the museum, and its clear this is just an extension of whatever the latest outrage is being drummed up by the Central Committee. Van Buren is just parroting whatever “CRT” or “woke” nonsense he hears. He’s smart enough to know history is constructed and evolves, but got his feelings hurt because nobody wanted to listen to him.
daveinbedstuy | 3 years and 11 months ago
Yes Bob, and hasn’t been right about anything since then, whicjh was my point. And then there’s his most famous of all quotes: “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”