In 2020, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture published the two graphics above as part of its “Talking About Race” portal.

A necessary disclaimer: the museum removed the chart after criticism and acknowledged, “We erred in including it.” It is not current Smithsonian policy. That correction deserves recognition.

The point of revisiting it is not to pretend otherwise, but to examine the ideas circulating within an institution when someone created this material, others approved it, and the museum decided it was fit for public education.

Look at what the chart assigns to “whiteness”: objective and rational thinking, the scientific method, cause-and-effect reasoning, hard work, delayed gratification, planning for the future, self-reliance, decision-making, written communication, politeness and the protection of property.

If a white supremacist had claimed these were distinctively white characteristics, everyone would recognize the racism immediately. Placed inside an anti-racist framework, however, the same racial essentialism was briefly presented as enlightenment.

What does the chart imply about people who are not white? That rationality, foresight, scientific thinking and self-discipline are foreign norms imposed upon them? The creators may not have intended that conclusion, but they constructed the racial division that produces it.

There are a few legitimate observations buried inside the mess. American holidays have been shaped by Christianity, its legal system descends substantially from English common law, and its history was often taught through European settlement and male political leaders. “Win at all costs,” female subordination and treating wealth as personal worth are also reasonable targets for criticism.

The chart destroys those distinctions by dumping historical inheritance, social conventions, genuine vices and universal human capacities into one container marked whiteness. English common law, Barbie, scientific reasoning, bland food and delayed gratification are all made expressions of the same racialized system.

Objectivity is not white. It is a method for correcting the biases found in every human population. Written traditions developed across civilizations. Parents of every race sacrifice for their children, workers labour toward future goals, and societies everywhere use observation and causal reasoning to survive.

To produce something this ridiculous requires more than an editorial mistake. It requires an institutional culture that has spent so long treating Western inheritance as presumptively oppressive that civilizational self-criticism has curdled into self-repudiation. Once “whiteness” became the organizing category, apparently nobody stopped to ask what assigning rationality and hard work to white people implied about everyone else.

The museum eventually did stop, listen and withdraw the chart. Good.

But the artifact remains instructive. When anti-racism teaches that reason, discipline and foresight are white characteristics, it has not defeated racism. It has reproduced racism, reversed the approved moral direction and called the result education.

Background on the chart and its withdrawal