Recent visitors to the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum were greeted with some unpleasant news: the museum was contaminated. Not by asbestos or toxic chemicals, mind you, but by far more noxious substances: racism, sexism, and anthrocentrism. To protect the unwary, warning labels throughout the halls identified which of the museum’s venerable dioramas were infected by which ideological error. “Female animals are being portrayed in ways that make them appear deviant or substandard to male animals,” warned a label next to an exhibit of American hartebeests. A beloved family of lions at a watering hole was also branded for sexism, because the standing male and reclining female suggested to the museum’s gender police a pre-feminist division of labor. A leaping Bengalese tiger was dismissed as too predatory, a violation of the communitarian animal ethic.
The Natural History Museum is not the only Smithsonian institution to have rethought its mission in recent years. Next door at the National Museum of American History, visitors encounter an America characterized by rigid class barriers, ever-growing economic inequality, predatory capitalists, and oppressed minorities. Several blocks away, curators at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum are busy exposing art as just another “social text” masking illegitimate power relations. And across the Mall, Air and Space Museum curators, still fuming over the cancellation of the shameful Enola Gay exhibit, whine like grounded teenagers about the old military fogies now directing the museum who are inhibiting the curators’ revisionist lust.
Anyone who still doubts that the madness
