The Museum We Really Need

By Ian Jobling • 4/17/08

Roger Cohen published a column called “Race and American Memory” today that tells us we need a national black history museum to memorialize America’s history of racial injustice towards blacks. I wrote the following letter to the New York Times arguing a museum that paid tribute to the white victims of black crime would be more appropriate. I also posted the letter as a comment on Cohen’s blog. It hasn’t appeared yet because it’s still under consideration. Hopefully, the blog’s readers will soon learn that the world is inverted.

Roger Cohen’s column “Race and American Memory” is based on an egregious misunderstanding of American culture. Cohen proposes the construction of a national museum memorializing racial injustice towards black Americans on the grounds that whites need to confront the “monstrous” in themselves. America needs this reminder of its racist history because its “heroic narrative of itself is still in flight from race.” However, it is ludicrous to say that America is in flight from its history of racial injustice towards blacks. The real problem with contemporary America isn’t that we don’t think about white racism enough, but that we can’t think about anything else. A survey of American high-schoolers taken earlier this year found that their [top three heroes were Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks](http://whiteamerica.us/index.php/blog/blog/the_triumph_of_the_civil_rights_narrative/). That these three would be chosen before Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford demonstrates that white racism has overshadowed all other aspects of our history. The existence of hundreds of slavery museums in America tells the same tale of obsession. If we really want to expand Americans’ awareness of racial injustice, I recommend the construction of a museum memorializing the white victims of black crime. It would be the first museum of its kind. Statistics compiled by the Justice Department show that [blacks have murdered an average of about 900 whites a year](http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/ovracetab.htm) over the past thirty years, versus about 400 annual white-on-black murders. The number of whites who have died at the hands of blacks dwarfs the [3,437 blacks who were lynched](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching#United_States) between 1880 and 1951. Atrocious as lynching was, black-on-white crime has been a much more serious problem than white-on-black crime over the past century. Yesterday, [Eric Dewayne Boyd](http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/17827469.html) was found guilty of last year’s horrific [black-on-white rape and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Channon_Christian_and_Christopher_Newsom). Boyd’s four suspected accomplices are still on trial. Don’t these victims deserve some memorial? If whites must confront what is monstrous in themselves, why shouldn’t we expect blacks to do so too?

You can write to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. If you, unlike me, keep your letter down to 150 words or less, it stands some chance of being published.