Majority Will; Racism in Colorado's Past

Notes from Ari's two recent columns and about the Denver Art Museum.

Stay tuned for notes on important Colorado news. Here I review my recent columns on the nature museum and majority will.

The Nature Museum Closes Its Native American Hall

Complete Colorado published my column, “Denver nature museum struggles with the past.” Here’s part of the introduction:

I was surprised to hear that the museum is closing its North American Indian Cultures Hall. It is doing so, it says, because the Hall “reinforces harmful stereotypes and white, dominant culture.” I’ve been to that Hall several times, and it never occurred to me that it did any such thing. Indeed, I though the Hall went out of its way to fairly and sympathetically present Indigenous history and culture. So was I missing something, or is the museum now overreacting to complaints?

From there, I discuss aspects of the racism of the museum’s past and of Colorado’s past. I review the reasons the museum gave for the closure. And I relate what I saw during my recent trip through the exhibit in question.

Here is part of my conclusion:

Rather than close the Hall completely, wouldn’t it be better to keep it open even as it is renovated, with some relevant materials to explain the purpose of the transition? Letting visitors observe the transformation would be instructive—especially if the aim is to emphasize the ongoing lives and relevance of Indigenous peoples. I don’t see the upside of walling people out of this process.

Read the entire piece.

Image: Avrand6

The Art Museum Critiques Colonialism

In related news . . . If you hurry, you can still see the Denver Art Museum’s exhibit, “Near East to Far West,” on display through May 29. I found this exhibit highly insightful. Here is the summary:

Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism presents more than 80 artworks exploring the many ways that the style and substance of French Orientalism directly influenced American artists and their representations of the American West in art and popular culture during this period.

French Orientalism refers to artworks produced by French artists during the 1800s inspired by North Africa and the greater Islamic world. Their creation paralleled French colonial expansion into Algeria beginning in the 1830s and, as the United States expanded westward, presented a template for how American artists depicted landscapes and people of the American West. As a result, the styles, motifs, and meanings of both French Orientalism and western American art reflect fears, desires, and curiosities about “unknown” lands during the process of colonization.

I also saw the (now closed) exhibit featuring Native American photography, “Speaking with Light.” This also was an interesting (and often upsetting) exhibit. I do have one complaint: Part of the exhibit featured video of a white woman getting slapped bloody by a Native American woman. This is not art, it is just a glorification of violence. Why the museum allowed this white woman poser to upstage Native American photographers in this exhibit is beyond me.

Limits of Majority Will

Complete Colorado also published my column, “The moral limits of majority will.”

I discuss polls about rent control and “assault” gun bans and briefly explain why the majority (if we believe these polls) is wrong on those issues. (I’m confident I could rewrite the questions to come up with different polling results.)

Here is a key section of the piece:

The alternate view [to the view that majority will is inherently good], my view, is that democratic outcomes are neither inherently good nor bad. Rather, they are good or bad depending on whether they conform to underlying moral truths.

Here is an example. Interracial marriage is perfectly fine, and laws against them are immoral. Yet most U.S. states, including Colorado, once banned them. When Gallup polled people on the issue in 1958, only 4% of people supported interracial marriage. Now 94% do.

If we thought that implementing majority will were inherently good, then we’d think that bans on interracial marriage were good until the 1990s, when finally most people approved of such marriages. But that’s obviously ridiculous. Bans on interracial marriage always were horrifically immoral, even when 96% of people disapproved of such marriages.

I then go on to explain why a republican form of democracy, for all its problems, remains the best sort of government.

Read the entire piece.