“My fear is that their motivations are far from historically pure and more towards speaking to the political needs of 2021,” he said. State Department, didn’t back down on that claim, maintaining that the inclusion of the Black Joseph Moore somehow tarnished the institution’s mission. Speaking to The Daily Beast, Van Buren, who previously worked for the U.S. So the museum dug into his history and included information about the second Joseph Moore during walking tours. At the time, museum curators discovered that another Joseph Moore lived in the area during the same period and also worked as a waiter. The room was launched in 2008, and visitors could look through an 1869 city directory that showed his address and occupation. One of the rooms at the original location of the museum is dedicated to Joseph Moore, an Irish immigrant who worked as a waiter in the nineteenth century. Along with reconstructed apartments at both locations, the museum also does local walking tours so visitors can see what life was like during the early days in ethnic enclaves in Lower Manhattan. In 2017, the museum opened another location on Orchard Street that focused on the experiences of Latino and Chinese families in the area from the 1950s to the 1980s. It details the rough living and working conditions during waves of immigration from the 1800s to the 1900s, as well as the various social and political biases they endured based on sex, race, ethnicity, and class. The Tenement Museum, which was launched in 1988, has traditionally focused on the Irish, German, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants who attempted to adapt to American life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Just to have your story rewritten to something that's not true,” someone else posted. “Can you imagine being a poor Irish family barely surviving while facing attacks from protestants, hoping for a better future. “But now it's being sacrificed to the gods of wokeness, because the Irish and the Jews it documented are no longer in fashion.” “The Tenement Museum was an unforgettable part of a trip to New York a few years ago,” one Twitter user posted. They believed the addition of a Black family meant that a white family would have to be erased. Many felt the inclusion of a Black man did not do history justice. “To accommodate this change,” he continued, “the museum will do away with its current Irish family tour in lieu of a hybrid to emphasize black suffering and de-emphasize the actual life experiences of discrimination imposed on the Irish by ‘whiter’ New Yorkers.”Īfter Van Buren’s essay went live, conservative backlash was vocal on social media. “The museum is planning for the first time not only to feature the story of a family that never lived there but that weren’t even immigrants. “This wokeness, which drove me to quit, is now headed for a new low in a desperate move to shoehorn a black family into the mix,” Van Buren wrote. Equating the new direction to critical race theory, Van Buren wrote that “narratives were rewritten.” From that point on, Van Buren asserted, curators and directors focused on fighting fascism within the museum. He claimed that the mission of the institution changed after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Van Buren said that he joined the museum for about a year in 2016 as an educator, the museum’s version of a tour guide. In an essay published Sunday for The Spectator World and re-printed in the New York Post, Peter Van Buren charged that the museum, which offers historical accounts of residents who lived in one overcrowded tenement building on Orchard Street, was constructing a “big fat lie” by erasing the stories of some immigrants to appease audiences and visitors who want more diversity. “It has always been part of our mission to tell complicated stories, and it’s always been part of our mission to expand the stories that we told while keeping the stories we already have,” Tenement Museum president Annie Polland told The Daily Beast. Museum directors told The Daily Beast that’s nonsense. The Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side became the latest target of the so-called anti-woke brigade after the ex-employee claimed that introducing the Black man’s story to museum exhibits and tours would be akin to erasing the existing stories of European immigrants. An ugly battle has erupted between a prominent museum in New York City and a former employee who accused it of caving to “wokeness” by adding a Black man’s story to its exhibits, mirroring a conservative-led trend playing out in cultural institutions across the country.
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