THE HISTORY OF RACE
The exhibit demonstrates how economic interests, power struggles, scientific research and
even popular culture have informed the American understanding of race, and have provided
a sturdy framework for discrimination. Learn about race as a human invention, and see how
scientists who once legitimized ideas about race are now dismantling them.
History of the idea of race
No story of race and human variation in this country is complete without an understanding
of how race evolved in the United States. To emphasize the centrality of history in
understanding race, four
History Stations
form the spatial centerpiece of the exhibition.
Each station includes collages of images, video and text positioned to reflect and comment
on other exhibit areas.
Facing the entrance and serving as primer for the history area is
Creating Race
. Here, a
large monitor, photos, objects and text reflect on the origins of our ideas about race in the
United States. The second station,
Human (Mis)measure
, focuses on the pursuit of “race
science” in the 19th and 20th centuries to legitimize racial and ethnic inequalities.
Separate
and Unequal
traces the history of inequality and privilege. It centers on the second half of
the 19th century, when segregation and ideas of distinct racial categories were set firmly in
place. During this time and beyond, white Americans instituted laws and social practices
that unapologetically disenfranchised American Indians, many immigrants and people of
African descent.
The last station,
The Invention of Whiteness
, considers “white” as a racial category
normalized and sustained over many years. Finally, historical sidebars throughout the
exhibit connect the contemporary expression of race and racism with historical antecedents.
History Station: Creating Race
Creating Race
tells the story of how the idea of race in the United States was forged in
response to economic, social and political forces. An increasing dependence on forced
labor in the 17th and 18th centuries resulted in the transition from indentured servitude to
a legalized system of permanent slavery of Africans, imported in increasing numbers to the
United States. This system of oppression did not go unchallenged; many pointed out the
hypocrisy of slavery in light of an American Revolution espousing equality and democratic
ideals. To rationalize this contradiction, white political elites raised questions about whether
blacks were somehow biologically different and inferior. Scientists, embedded in the culture
of their time, presumed existing human variation supported this notion.
“Let him [the white man] be just
and kindly with my people, for the
dead are not altogether powerless.”
THE HISTORY OF OUR COMMUNITY
Seattle’s original residents
Seattle’s Industrial District, where the Mariners play their home
games, has been continuously inhabited since at least the 6th
century CE. When the first white settlers arrived in the 1850s,
Native Americans occupied 93 permanent longhouses in
17 villages — 13 inside present-day Seattle city limits. In 1855,
native leaders signed the Point Elliott Treaty and surrendered
most of their ancestral lands to the government of Washington
Territory. Today only about 1% of King County’s population
identifies itself as Native American.
Ordinance No. 42 Relative to Indian Women
Approved Aug. 14, 1873
The City of Seattle does ordain as follows:
Section 1
:
That all dissolute Indian women or other disreputable
persons found loitering or strolling about on any street, wharf, alley
or common or any public or private place within the city, except
actually leaving the city by steamer or other conveyance, or arriving
by such conveyance, shall, if found after 9 P. M. during the months
of May, June, July, August and September, and after 8 P. M. of
October, November, December, January, February, March and
April of each year, be deemed vagrants and punished as such in
accordance with Ordinance No. 32 of the Ordinances of the City
of Seattle.
Section 2:
This Ordinance to be in effect from and after its passage.
Taken from historical record
RACE: Are We So Different?
| 4
—Attributed to Chief Seattle, in a speech
addressed to Territorial Governor
Isaac I. Stevens, 1854
