Go Lean…Caribbean

Go Lean Commentary

The human psyche is consistent; when we have been victimized, we want everyone to remember. But, when we have been the perpetrator – the bully – then we want everyone to forget. This applies to individuals and nations alike.

This experience relates to the history of the New World. Upon the discovery of the Americas by the European powers – Christopher Columbus et al – the focus had always been on pursuing economic interests, many times at the expense of innocent victims. (This is why the celebration of Columbus Day is now out of favor). First, there was the pursuit of gold, other precious metals (silver, copper, etc.) and precious stones (emeralds, turquoise, etc.).  Later came the exploitation of profitable agricultural opportunities (cotton, tobacco, sugar cane, etc.), though these business models required extensive labor. So the experience in the New World (the Caribbean and North, South & Central America) saw the exploitation of the native indigenous people, and then as many of them died off, their replacements came from the African Slave Trade.

This summarizes the history of the economic motivation of slavery. The champions of that era may want to be considered as heroes, but with the long train of victims in their wake, are rightly labeled villainous by some. Thusly any population in this drama – consider the United States of America – may not want to be remembered in a negative light. This is why the new museum opening in Washington, DC, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is such a milestone. It chronicles, commemorates and spotlights this dark episode of American history. (Some consider this history to be not so distant, that vestiges still permeate the nation’s social fabric, especially considering the Criminal Justice system today).

See a full story on this new Museum here from CityLab, the Online Magazine profiled in Appendix A; (posted September 15, 2016; retrieved September 18, 2016 from http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/09/how-the-new-smithsonian-african-american-museum-works/500246/):

Title: How the New Smithsonian African American Museum Works
Sub-Title: A floor-by-floor preview of the most anticipated—and last—museum to come to the National Mall.
By: Kriston Capps

One of the most difficult lessons to learn about racism today is one of the first to be gleaned at the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opens to the world on September 24. On the lowest concourse, deep in the museum’s basement levels, exhibits about slavery explain that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was not motivated by racism.

Racism came after. This is not new information, but it is not conventional wisdom in America today. “Enslaved Africans, European indentured servants, and Native Americans worked alongside one another as they cultivated tobacco,” reads an exhibit on life in the Chesapeake region. Planters grew fearful of the interracial friendships, marriages, and alliances—and rebellions—that characterized life in the colonies. “Africans were ultimately defined as ‘enslaved for life,’ and the concept of whiteness began to develop.”

The design of the museum, from the bottom up, which is the direction in which it is intended to be seen by visitors, reflects that history. The lowest-level galleries on the slave trade and the Middle Passage are tight and narrow. They eventually open up to an expansive concourse that sets the stage for the fight for freedom that extends even to today. Exhibits in this majestic hall range from a statue of Thomas Jefferson framed by bricks bearing the names of slaves who built Monticello to a house built in a freedmen’s settlement in Montgomery County, Maryland.

The Smithsonian’s new museum—the last to be built on the National Mall—follows the African-American experience through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era. The museum proceeds chronologically, escalating from African and pre-colonial history (in the third and lowest basement level) to contemporary art (on the fourth floor). It is a massive undertaking, sometimes breathtaking. And the architecture of the museum both builds and hinders its narrative.

Some 60 percent of the building is below grade; the historical galleries all fall along three underground mezzanine levels. To create exhibition space so far below ground, Davis Brody Bond—the same architecture firm responsible for the largely subterranean National September 11 Memorial and Museum—had to build a concrete container in which the museum sits, a bucket with walls rising 75 feet high that frame the entire historical experience.

“The largest challenge was water,” Anderson says. “Everything west and south of the Washington Monument was infill. It was all swampland. When you dig down 12 feet, you hit the water table. We had to build essentially an inside-out bathtub in order to keep the water out of the building.”

Visitors pass from the narrow hall on slavery into this major space, following a ramp that shepherds them by several iconic exhibits: the pointed Monticello statues, a slave cabin, the Jones-Hall-Sims House, a segregation-era railcar, and a prison tower from the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary (nicknamed Angola) among them. This fairly linear course then deposits viewers at a Reconstruction gallery, on the second mezzanine level, with information-heavy exhibits that characterize most of the rest of the museum.

“We thought the added volume made sense,” says Phil Freelon, one of the principal architects responsible for the building’s design, discussing how the area of the history galleries doubled during the museum buildout. “As you move through history, you’re able to see different aspects of the exhibits from varying perspectives. Which adds another layer of understanding to the overall sweep of history.”

One of the great strengths of the National Museum of African American History and Culture is its heavy emphasis on place. There are rich maps scattered throughout the museum that showcase the many migrations that have defined black history: from the domestic slave trade (after the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807) to the Great Migration during the early- and mid-20th century to subsequent returns to the South. These maps explain how the African-American experience shifted within the states, and how states and the nation changed inalterably as a result.

Where the museum may lose viewers, however, is in its sweeping chronology, which is lost over too many side-by-side displays. Many of the exhibits (designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates) serve as portals, with a chunk of text paired with images, or often a video screen, alongside some essential artifacts. Unfortunately, atomic exhibits about the constituent people, places, and moments from Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era do not add up to clear and comprehensive categories.

Problems are few in number, but the museum’s biggest ones start with the entry procession. It isn’t immediately clear that viewers ought to take one of two elevators down to the lowest concourse to begin. And it isn’t exactly clear how the escalators connect from one level to the next—though these passages offer some of the best vistas within the building and through its exterior filigree, which looks as delicate as lace when seen from the inside.

From design to execution, the largest changes to the museum happened inside the museum’s central hall. The dipping, timber-lined ceiling initially envisioned for the atrium fell off along the way. (The architects say that the space is now more suitable for performance and static art.) Still, one of the museum’s most important metaphors was maintained in the form of its grand vistas: Floor-to-ceiling windows comprise the four walls of the building’s entrance level, opening the museum to the world outside. Portals throughout the the upper floors emphasize the effect.

“What you’re getting is the journey from the very soil—the very depths, the crypts, the chamber—right through to getting a panoptic lens, a panoptic reading of this important juncture of the National Mall and the Washington Monument,” says David Adjaye, the primary architect of the museum. “When you’re going into the upper galleries, you’re getting these windows that are framing the context and bringing [the Mall] into the content of the story.”

The community and culture galleries make up the third and fourth floors of the museum. (The Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts, on the museum’s second level, was not yet finished at the time of the preview.) The exhibits in the community section range widely. There is a display on the legacy of Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress and the first black woman to run for president (her awesome call reading, “unbought and unbossed”). There is an exhibit on Mae Reeves, a legendary Philadelphia milliner. And there is an exhibit on Ben Carson—that guy. This corner of the museum gives an impressionistic overview of community (a rather broad theme to begin with). While these exhibits are, again, very atomic—only loosely interconnected—they offer by and large the most satisfying insights into the lives and achievements of everyday black Americans.

There is no directionality to these floors, no wrong way to do them. Doing them right will take hours, maybe even days. The culture galleries include snippets of film, television, spoken word, and theater that may add up to hours of programming time. (This, in addition to reams of wall text.) With so much media on display—the number of screens seems to rise as a factor of the floor level—the fine art galleries on the fourth floor offer a welcome reprieve to information overload. (The art galleries are stacked, too, with a smart selection of paintings from across American history. In fact, this corner of the museum arrives as one of the finest art collections in the District.)

The museum’s most impressive visual remains its iconic “corona,” which the architects say they drew from a West African caryatid design of Yoruban origin—a column with a base, a figure, and a capital or crown.

“Our general approach to the design of cultural facilities is to try to imbue the architecture with meaning,” Freelon says. “So that it’s contributing to the stories and the vision and mission of the institution. We did that sort of research to say, ‘What would be an appropriate expression, formally, for the building?’ We looked at a lot of different ideas and settled on the corona notion as a strong and powerful idea.”

There are many smaller moments of design excellence, however, that give the museum its grounding. One thoughtful gallery on the lowest level is a simple sidebar, a triangular cutaway space off the main corridor, that surveys the São José Paquete de Africa. The vessel was a slave ship bound from Mozambique to Brazil that wrecked, killing most of the 500 slaves it held as human cargo. Several ballast bars, which balanced the light weight of their bodies, are on display in this dark and intentionally haunting space. That the shape of this gallery reflects the trapezoidal edges of the museum’s exterior is no accident.

There are enough moments like these throughout the National Museum of African American History and Culture to make it a building that demands criss-crossing, back-and-forth viewing. It is not simple to say what the museum offers in the form of answers about progress or freedom or justice. It may be fair to say that it has none. Or that the museum is “making a way out of no way,” to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. (as this museum does).

According to Adjaye, the windows and cut-outs are key to ensuring that building is not static, but dynamic and responsive to the history around it.

“The idea is to laminate the experience of the outside world with the inside world, so you’re not disconnected from it,” Adjaye says. “It is not a narrative or a fantasy that is hermetically sealed. It’s a real history, that is relating to things that are around you and in you. And that is a very new idea.”

There are many lessons for the Caribbean to glean from this consideration of the ‘National Museum of African American History and Culture’ in Washington, DC: good, bad and ugly lessons. This will hopefully elevate a national discussion to the fore on the full measure of American history with African-Americans. The hope is for more reconciliation.

Here in the Caribbean, we have the same needs. As history relates, the people of our region were also victimized in the Slave Trade; but we were villains too, considering the lessons from the 1804 Massacre in Haiti, as related in a previous blog-commentary:

• It was an illogical solution that killing Whites (of 3000 to 5000 White men, women and children) would prevent future enslavement.
• The Natural Law instinct was to avenge for past atrocities – “an eye for an eye”.
• It was used in a good way to escalate the abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. It was also used in a bad way to justify further oppression of the African Diaspora in the New World.

This discussion of museums and reconciliations align with the objections of the book Go Lean…Caribbean, in that it serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The purpose of this roadmap is to elevate the economy in our Caribbean region, while harnessing the individual genius abilities – as in the arts. This Go Lean/CU roadmap employs strategies, tactics and implementations to impact its prime directives; identified with the following 3 statements:

• Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
• Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
• Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

While the Go Lean book is primarily an economic elevation roadmap for the Caribbean, it also details the eco-systems surrounding the business of the arts; there is consideration for jobs and entrepreneurship. The book declares (Page 230) that “art can be a business enabler, [while also serving as an] expression for civic pride and national identity”.

There is even a plan to foster museums that commemorate Caribbean history and culture in a new Caribbean Capital District. (The roadmap calls for a neutral location, among the 30 member-states, to host leaders of the Federation’s Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government). See the quotation here from the book (Page 230):

CU Administered Museums
Modeled after the Smithsonian, the CU “mother” (first-tier) museums will be placed in the Capital District. There will also be “child” museums scattered through out the regions with touring exhibitions.

The Go Lean book identified this vision of reconciliations-museums-art early in the book (Page 10 – 14), as implied in the following pronouncements in the opening Declaration of Interdependence:

Preamble: As the history of our region and the oppression, suppression and repression of its indigenous people is duly documented, there is no one alive who can be held accountable for the prior actions, and so we must put aside the shackles of systems of repression to instead formulate efficient and effective systems to steer our own destiny.
As the colonial history of our region was initiated to create economic expansion opportunities for our previous imperial masters, the structures of government instituted in their wake have not fostered the best systems for prosperity of the indigenous people.

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law.

xiii.  Whereas the legacy of dissensions in many member-states (for example: Haiti and Cuba) will require a concerted effort to integrate the exile community’s repatriation, the Federation must arrange for Reconciliation Commissions to satiate a demand for justice.

xxi. Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including sciences, languages, arts, music and sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.

xxxiii. Whereas the cultural arts and music of the region are germane to the quality of Caribbean life, and the international appreciation of Caribbean life, the Federation must implement the support systems to teach, encourage, incentivize, monetize and promote the related industries for arts and music in domestic and foreign markets. These endeavors will make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play.

The commentaries in the Go Lean blogs have previously addressed the wisdom of museums and monuments showcasing the historic sacrifices of the African sons and daughters that have contributed to the great societies of the Western world (Western Europe and the Americas). The people of the Caribbean are all part of this African heritage. We have been affected by events that took place in Africa, the Atlantic Slave Trade and subsequent national histories in the New World. So much of that history is soaked in the blood, sweat and tears of African people, the ancestors and the children. Any symbolism or artistic expression of any country commemorating this history should be acknowledged, promoted and celebrated.

This subject also aligns with the book Go Lean…Caribbean and its plans to better promote World Heritage Sites (Page 248) in the Caribbean region. This goal is for the very same purpose of acknowledging, promoting and celebrating the special history of Caribbean people to the world’s cultural landscape. The Go Lean book asserts many benefits from these types of initiatives, including economic, cultural and ambassadorial.

• Imagine the flow of tourism that can result from our own museums and monuments.
• Imagine the commissions to regional artists.
• Imagine the positive image the world over of our region reconciling our pasts and forging a bright future despite the historic experiences.

The foregoing news story on the Smithsonian effort to curate the history of the African-American experience and culture presents this project as transformative. Many people in America did NOT want a federal-government backed effort to create a monument of this “dark topic” in America. (The Smithsonian eco-system is funded under the National Parks Service of the US Department of the Interior).

Despite the Emancipation of Slavery in 1863 and the Civil Right Act in 1964, only now in 2016 is America coming to grips with the need to commemorate the history of its African-American people in a formal museum. There have been many museums in the past, but all through private efforts or that of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s). The first African-American museum was the College Museum in Hampton, Virginia, established in 1868.^[2] Prior to 1950, there were about 30 museums devoted primarily to African-American culture and history in the US. These were located primarily at historically black colleges and universities or at libraries that had significant African-American culture and history collections.^[5]

See the full list of museums in Appendix C below.

As of 2010 the largest African-American museum in the United States was the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. It will be exceeded in size by this Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture ^[9] when it opens on Saturday September 24, 2016. This will be the first time there is a formal American Federal Government effort.

The subject of fostering the economic opportunities of artistic endeavors in the Caribbean region have been discussed in other Go Lean blog/commentaries; consider this sample as follows:

This subject of the Slave Trade, Slavery and Civil Rights – how it related to economic, security and governing functioning in a society – have also been addressed by previous Go Lean blog-commentaries. See a sample list here:

This subject of Slavery and the Slave Trade is a “dark topic” to curate in a museum. But this is necessary. Around the word, the Holocaust memorials – remembering the Nazi’s Jewish annihilation in World War II – help to keep the lessons fresh in the minds of the world’s populations that the horrors were real and should never be allowed again. A similar museum on the African-American experience in the Americas should have a related effect: tell the world the truth, and then try to reconcile between the villains and the victims. Many positive lessons can be gleaned from these dark topics.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean provided thorough lessons from this history, in its compilation of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies. See a sample list here:

There are lessons to learn from the past; see VIDEO in the Appendix B below. There are benefits – for the future – to many stakeholders for any attempt to reconcile the past with the present.