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Introduction
The aims of this paper lie in the broad topic of racialized institutions, safe white spaces[1] – or what we have labeled as white sanctuaries – and the maintenance of white supremacy. Thus, this paper is interested in interrogating the connection between racialized organizational, institutional, and structural social space(s) and white supremacy. More specifically, this paper is interested in better understanding the specifics of how institutions in a racialized social system (RSS) facilitate white supremacy. That is, what are the specific racial mechanisms within these institutions that reproduce colorblind and other racial ideologies? How do these institutions serve as both physical and mental white sanctuaries? How are these spaces complicated by class, or other positionalities in society? In this paper, we hope to provide some insights on how nationally recognized art museums serve to preserve and present our collective identities regarding who we are as a city, or state, or nation, but additionally serve to both passively and aggressively tell us who belongs and who is otherized, which groups are inferior and which groups are superior. Much like all racialized institutions (Ray, 2017), museums reinforce existing social and racial order of the society in which they reside. Extending Moore’s (2008) concept of institutional white space beyond law schools, we understand museums as both white spaces and racialized institutions.
This paper situates museums, specifically the Art Institute of Chicago (hereafter AIC), in the larger context of RSS, within a society that allocates differential reward to groups along socially constructed racial lines. Bonilla-Silva (1997) notes that these rewards can be economic, political, social or even psychological in nature. Museums also constitute a racialized organization. Victor Ray (2017) argues that organizations are fundamentally racialized and serve as meso-level arbiters of racial construction and stratification. Accordingly, for this paper, museums, and in particular nationally recognized museums, help maintain the status quo dominance of white supremacy in RSS. Further, we contend that such notable museums serve to facilitate both whiteness and elitism, and a call to nostalgia of a specific type of normativity[2]. This paper adds to the existing literature on race, place and space by highlighting three specific racial mechanisms in museum institutions that help to maintain white supremacy, white normality(ies), and serve to facilitate a reassurance to...