By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, October 06, 2016
What is the Smithsonian Institution?
It is a depository of national treasures and a national
treasure in and of itself. It is the world’s largest system of museums — 19
museums, nine research centers, 138 million items in the archive, etc. — and it
is a trust established by Congress, the original bequest from the British
scientist James Smithson having been squandered through — one suspects this
history will repeat itself — a bum investment in Arkansas bonds, which the
state defaulted on.
It is also corrupt.
The Smithsonian has opened a new National Museum of
African American History and Culture, a long overdue addition to its offerings.
And in this version of African-American history and culture, black
conservatives do not exist.
Specifically, the life and career of Supreme Court
justice Clarence Thomas have been — forgive the term — whitewashed from the
record. Anita Hill, an obscure functionary who achieved for herself a moment of
fleeting fame when she advanced the interests of the Democratic party by
smearing Clarence Thomas with lurid, flimsily documented allegations of sexual
harassment, is presented as a major figure of the 20th century.
The scholar and jurist who actually sits on the Supreme
Court? Clarence Thomas is an invisible man, so far as the Smithsonian is
concerned.
There are two possible explanations for this. The first
is the Hanlon’s-razor (never attribute to malice what may be adequately
accounted for by stupidity) explanation: The dons of American history simply
goofed and overlooked Justice Thomas, as though the new museum were a picnic
and each of its curators thought the other guy was bringing the potato salad.
Because we tend to have warm feelings toward the Smithsonian, we may extend
maximum charity in our analysis here. But even at the limit of that charity, we
could conclude at best that the Smithsonian is managed by incompetents, that
its management should be decimated or more than decimated, and that Congress
should use its purse-string powers to effect this.
The second and more likely explanation is that the
Smithsonian is corrupt.
This would not be surprising. The Left is committed to
its Long March through the Institutions, with a special emphasis on cultural
and educational institutions, the commanding heights of public discourse. The
Left corrupts everything it touches, and it subordinates everything it touches
to politics. That is true of everything from the public schools to labor unions
to Catholic seminaries. If you are a high-school sophomore in Lubbock, Texas,
that might mean receiving an account of American history which consists almost
exclusively of the Great Depression, Jim Crow, and the Triangle Shirtwaist
Fire, as I did. If you are a family of modest means that has saved its pennies
for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to our nation’s capital with the intent of
exposing your children, however briefly, to the best that has been thought and
written in the American context, that means a museum of African-American
history in which a major figure in African-American history has been airbrushed
away like a Soviet apparatchik fallen into disfavor.
If you were looking for a figure who personified the
humiliations and triumphs of black Americans, you could hardly do better than
Clarence Thomas, the son of a poor, Gullah-speaking family on the Georgia
coast, a man who was not quite fluent in anything that would pass muster as
English until his adulthood — who, nonetheless, found his way into college,
into the Yale law school, and the Reagan administration, whose shortcomings and
errors he admonished fearlessly. When he was elevated to the Supreme Court, the
Democrats — who hate a black conservative more than they hate anything on this
good green Earth — concocted every manner of dishonest attack to try to do to
him what they had successfully done to Robert Bork not long before. But
Clarence Thomas prevailed over what is by now a familiar attempt by the
Democrats, the party of Bull Connor, to keep a black man in what they imagine
to be his place.
His place is in the Supreme Court. In a sane world, it is
also in the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
If the Smithsonian intends to conduct itself like a
political organization — one in which “black” is an ideological descriptor
rather than a racial one — then Congress should treat it like one and redirect
its funding toward some more worthy and more intellectually defensible cause.
Its director, David J. Skorton, might find a useful and profitable role on the
Hillary Clinton presidential campaign — but, if this is the best he can do, he
does not belong on the payroll of an institution nominally dedicating to the
pursuit and preservation of knowledge.
We are owed an explanation. And if the Smithsonian cannot
provide a convincing one, then it no longer deserves public support. It cannot
function as a trust if it is untrustworthy.
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