Beverly Daniel Tatum's Defining Racism: Can We Talk?

I have always considered myself to be a problem solver and a critical thinker who likes to challenge patriarchal, sexist, racist, capitalist, and homophobic ideologies. Although, I would like to “burn it all to the ground” I realize that this would not be the best approach to making meaningful change to these problematic institutions. Therefore, I can make small but impactful changes by choosing a career that enables me to change and challenge peoples preconceived notions of the ‘other’. By this I mean, my intended career as a museum curator within anthropological/natural history museums would allow for me to create inclusive and inviting spaces for learning, dialog, and exchange about the representations of cultural groups. Therefore, I should
The student found that these preschoolers believed that Native Americans were feather wearing aggressive war-like people (387). This study reveals that the assumptions we make about others comes from what we have been told or what we have seen on televisions, in books, or in museums. Typically, the audience has not been told the whole story, allowing for the distorting of historical information about people of color leads people of all ages to make assumptions that may go unchallenged for a long time. Along similar lines of thought, Peggy McIntosh notes in her essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” that “when I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization’, I am shown that people of my color made it what it is” (395). It is clear when reading feminist literature, that representations of groups of people have long term affects on how these groups are framed and understood. Luckily, feminism is an epistemology and a methodology- therefore, I believe feminist anthropological methods could remedy problematic exhibits that frame non-White cultures as ‘primitive