The word “pride” carries a lot of currency in the woke context, but its opposite, “humiliation,” gets a lot closer to the heart of that cultural movement. Humiliation is at the center of the growing controversy about woke messages being sent by the Smithsonian Institution.
For example, imagine as a black person being told by the nation’s museum that “whiteness” is exclusively to be equated with such values as “hard work,” “work before play,” the “Protestant work ethic,” “protect[ing] property,” “self-reliance,” “objective, rational, linear thinking,” and “delayed gratification.” This is all from a graphic, since removed, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
It’s easy to see why, whatever the curator responsible for it was thinking, it sends a depressing, insulting, and humiliating message to non-whites.
The 1 Percent Myth
What about the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)? As geologist Casey Luskin has been the leading voice in pointing out, the NMNH in its Human Origins hall pushes what we’ve called the “1 percent myth”: that humans and chimps are separated genetically by a mere 1 percent. Dr. Luskin has brought to bear new research reported in Nature showing the real difference is more like 14.9 percent. He had a great conversation with podcaster Sean McDowell, giving the single clearest discussion I’ve heard so far about why the 1 percent figure is a myth:
But is that humiliating, not to a particular race but to the human race as a whole? Of course that’s the intention. The false 1 percent figure, an evolutionary icon, is clearly trying to knock humans down to the stature, very nearly, of a chimp. Science and media sources have been informing adults and young people for years with the mantra that we are just slightly prettied-up chimpanzees. Human exceptionalism is the target. It only takes a visit to the actual chimps at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo to see that we’re nothing like that. Yet the woke ideology insists on degrading humans, as it insists on degrading non-whites (and whites too), and degrading American history.
The Trump Administration is working to fix that, or some of it. I have not yet heard that the Administration is looking critically at what the NMNH tells visitors about human origins. Reforming the Smithsonian won’t be complete unless they do.
Beyond Our Borders
While the Smithsonian is an American institution, the issue goes beyond our national borders, needless to say. I liked this phrasing from a review in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend:
“We have seen spread through our schools and institutions,” the authors [of the new book The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition] write in their bracing introduction, “a malicious form of humility indistinguishable from self-hatred. This is a humility that humiliates, that seeks to blind Westerners to their magnificent traditions and to rub their noses, like misbehaving dogs, in their worst offenses.”
Humans are not chimps, nor are we dogs to be shamed into submission. “Self-hatred” and the “humility that humiliates” should have no place at all at the Smithsonian.