Abstract
This article examines the persistent and enduring nature of whiteness and racial inequalities within the UK’s cultural sector in general, and in one particular UK-based museum. We shed light on the challenges the institution faces in its journey towards adopting decolonisation and anti-racist practices. Drawing on ethnographic research, we conduct a sociological examination of the structural and institutional factors that hinder diversity efforts within the museum, examining whiteness as physical, symbolic and institutional. Despite notable strides, the institution grapples with confronting its inherent whiteness, at times unintentionally replicating what Sara Ahmed characterises as ‘the politics of diversity as an institutional performance’ notwithstanding genuine efforts towards transformation. While commitments to racial equality and decolonisation are evident in changing some curation and recruitment processes, as well as external activities, their consistent integration into daily museum management remains uncertain. Our critique, substantiated by evidence, is directed towards the cultural and heritage sector, with a focus on the perspectives of ethnically diverse creatives. We conclude that, for decolonial efforts to transcend mere performance, they must acknowledge the endurance of whiteness and pivot towards a central focus on racial equality.
Introduction
Seventeen years ago (in 2007), David Lammy the then Culture Minister threatened to fine museums if they failed to put more black and ethnic minority figures on management boards. He said that museums were ‘pale, male and stale’ with a ‘whiff of institutional racism because ethnic minorities are so under-represented in top-level jobs’ (Greene, 2007). These threats were not put into practice, and it does not appear that the situation is much improved. Statistics provided by Arts Council England (ACE, 2020) on the museum sector show that between 2018 and 2020, only 6–7% of the museum workforce in receipt of funding from ACE was British, Asian or Ethnically Diverse – compared to 17% of the working age population. This suggests a shortfall of around 10% of ethnically diverse representation in the museum workforce. This workforce is also clustered at the lower end of the pay and seniority scale as the proportion of managers falls to 3–4% in the same years. Yet, since 2011 with the launch of the ‘Creative Case for Diversity’ 1 ACE has argued for more diversity in the sector and attempted to address the issue with project-based grants and has required diversity figures (of staff and audiences) to be embedded into a reporting system that could potentially influence future funding. Museums were encouraged to diversify their projects and audiences, to both meet new funding targets and adapt the image of the museum sector as more representative and inclusive of the communities it serves. The museum and heritage sector remains a highly politicised space and the museum sector’s attempts to address colonial pasts have been a focus of criticism within the ‘culture wars’ with, for example, the 2021–2022 UK Culture Minister Oliver Dowden threatening funding cuts to those cultural institutions which removed controversial objects from display in September 2020 (Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport [DCMS], 2020).
It is in this context that we present an in-depth sociological study of one UK-based museum which examines how the museum is a space of race-making despite its desire to be more inclusive. Focusing on institutional practices, we explore the structurally embedded whiteness that hampers individual and collective efforts to diversify and decolonise the museum. These questions have largely been addressed through examinations of collections and exhibitions – with particular attention given to the histories of acquisition as well as display narratives and audience reception though a lens of decolonisation (Giblin et al., 2019; Sandell, 2007; Whitehead et al., 2016). However, rather than focus on collections, we explore the ways in which inequalities are present in the museum through its staffing, practices and structures. This is both important and urgent because, as institutions that shape and commodify knowledge (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992), museums are embedded within the political and socio-economic contexts that perpetuate inequality, reflected in the practices and structure of the museum. It is also pivotal in the current moment where debates about decolonisation urge a structural rather than a surface-level examination of knowledge production and reversal of power (Bhambra & de Sousa Santos, 2017). Our approach is inspired by Saha’s (2018) call for research on race and the cultural industries to proceed through an examination of the terms of production rather than solely through a focus on the analysis of cultural texts and representations.
Although this article tracks debates around racism, decolonisation and diversity in the museum sector, these debates should be understood as a sub-section of a larger conversation about race, racism and the cultural industries more broadly, in terms of both representation and equality within the cultural industries (Brook et al., 2020, p. 7).These questions have been given impetus by the protests around Black Lives Matter over the summer of 2020 in a context of a pandemic which was exposing the life-and-death nature of inequalities both within UK society and globally (Haynes, 2020; Nazroo & Bécares, 2021). At that moment, there was widespread commitment by institutions to recognise and address racial inequalities within the cultural sector (Adams, 2020; Ali et al., 2022; Masso, 2020; Ryder, 2021). Simultaneously, this movement demonstrated how, despite an expressed willingness to change, whiteness – as a phenomenon of maintaining racial hierarchies in which those who are racialised as non-white remain marked by their racialised difference and excluded from processes of power (Byrne, 2006) – endures in place. Following Meghji (2019, p. 56), we understand whiteness as both physical and symbolic – physical where the dominance of white bodies and the exclusion of other racialised bodies fix the parameters of the space and defines who are ‘space invaders’ (Puwar, 2004) and symbolic where the minoritised racialised experiences are excluded from cultural representation and legitimation. But we also understand whiteness as institutional, where policies and practices within an institution reproduce white supremacy, ensuring the continuance of both physical and symbolic forms of whiteness.
This article draws on research which was conducted in partnership with a museum (discussed below), which recognised many of the critiques facing museums and was actively trying to respond to them. The article will first examine why museums are an important sector of the cultural industries to examine, particularly for their role in narrating nation and history. We will then describe the methodology of the research before examining how, despite recognition of the need for change, whiteness persists in the museum and how this is experienced by the small number of racially minoritised staff employed by the museum. The focus is on whiteness as a sticky phenomenon that for cultural, structural and institutional reasons proves to be hard to shift. At the same time, we recognise that this is a snapshot (albeit a long and relatively detailed one) of a museum in a state of transformation. The focus on whiteness, rather than diversity (Ali & Byrne, 2022), is deliberate and shifts attention to the stubborn power of institutional racism. To approach diversity through a focus merely on those who are racially minoritised ‘can keep the whiteness in place’ (Ahmed, 2012, p. 33). However, at the same time, we argue that the experience of racially minoritised people is a key resource for exposing whiteness which is frequently unmarked and unremarked upon. The voices of a racially minoritised workforce should not be regarded as a merely passive witnesses to inequality, they can also ‘disorient whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2007). However, this also requires structural change whereby racially minoritised staff occupy senior positions capable of enforcing change.
Museums as sites of Heritage
If we consider the role that museums play in what Hall (1999) refers to as ‘The Heritage’ as an exercise of symbolic power and authority, it is perhaps unsurprising that they attract the fierce public debates referred to in the introduction. The Heritage industry largely preserves what already exists and a particular version of the national story. In the UK, these stories are largely white (Edwards & Meads, 2013), often recalling colonialism in a nostalgic rather than critical mode (Aldrich, 2009; Das & Lowe, 2018). Museums are key in this process of preservation, display and recognition (Macdonald, 2006). They are a space of ‘show and tell’ where power is wielded through selecting, ordering and interpreting objects – or leaving them open for multiple interpretations (Lord, 2006). This emphasises the importance of who staffs museums and makes decisions about what will be represented in the museum and how it will be interpreted. Questions around the staffing of the museum are also connected to attempts to democratise curation (Wajid & Minott, 2019) through initiatives of consultation and co-curation bringing in activists and members of different communities to consult on collections and become involved in decisions about exhibitions and displays.
A key point of debate and controversy in the museum sector is around questions of colonialism and race and diversity. There has been some tip-toeing across what Hall (1999, p. 7) referred to as the ‘frontier defined by that great unspoken British value – “whiteness”’. This includes some recognition that museums – as national cultural institutions – should recognise and cater for their ethnically culturally diverse constituencies (Ang, 2005). There has also been a more recent critique of museums as a function of imperialist and capitalist power that enabled the collection and display of the cultures of ‘others’ in ways which frequently supported white supremacist notions of the Enlightenment and the pursuit of scientific knowledge (Giblin et al., 2019). The need to address those parts of European museum collections which were obtained through colonial pillage and looting is gaining momentum in the ‘scramble for decolonisation’ (Hicks, 2020, p. 9). Museums often hold the spoils of militarised colonialism, and even where the contents are not the product of brutal conflict, collections often reflect the acquisitive power and ordering thought of colonial processes, leaving them ‘entangled with colonialism’ (Vawda, 2019, p. 74). Alongside concepts like equality, diversity and racial justice, the concept of decolonisation has gained momentum, not least through important debates within sociology (Bhambra et al., 2018; Moosavi, 2020; Tuck & Yang, 2012) and considerations of the implications for the institution of museum (Giblin et al., 2019).
There remain doubts about the sincerity of some institutions espousing decolonisation, which, if taken seriously, should involve actively identifying, questioning, dismantling and replacing power hierarchies that perpetuate colonial structures (Lonetree, 2009). This process should be an all-encompassing shifting of museum operations, including recruitment, representation, co-production, repatriation, acquisitions, architecture, design, labelling, conservation and storage (Giblin et al., 2019). These debates on decolonisation intersect with an understanding of the museum as a space of whiteness and race-making which we argue needs to include questions of recruitment and decision-making as much as representation and acquisition. In this analysis, and examining Manchester Museum, we delve into power relations in the museum not through addressing collections, but focusing instead on how the institution is actively seeking to transform its practice and how this is still constrained by entrenched whiteness within the museum institution.
Methodology
This article is based on research which ran for two and a half years – from July 2018 to December 2020 (Ali & Byrne, 2022). We conducted an institutional ethnography of Manchester Museum which focused on the institutional structures of the museum, rather than the audience or displays. We followed Gray (2016) on the need to ‘identify sites, discourses, and practices of producing difference and to study race-making’ (p. 249). Employing institutional ethnography as a method also reflects the sociological interest in museums as institutions for race-making, and the means for examining the structures that enable this ‘making’. We sought to examine the museum not through an interrogation of the collections and displays but by looking at the everyday and institutional practices of the museum and those who work in it: who is hired, how decisions are made, what it is like to work there, how the museum both produces and addresses racial inequalities and processes of racialisation within the institution. This can be understood through what Acker (2006) refers to as ‘inequality regimes’, ‘defined as loosely interrelated practices, processes, actions and meanings’ that produce disparities of power and control within organisations (p. 443). 2 This examination of practice also involves asking who is made to feel at home in institutions, what bodies are constructed as the norm for these spaces (Ahmed, 2012; Puwar, 2004).
During the fieldwork, 3 we observed activities such as staff meetings, attending (and occasionally contributing to) monthly meetings of the senior leadership for more than a year as well as the larger all-museum training days. We tracked strategy planning, and followed ‘front of house’ activities, spending time with the staff on ‘normal’ museum days as well as attending special activities. We examined, and when requested consulted on, documents such as Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies and strategic plans and other forms of reporting to the university and funding bodies. We followed the practices of co-curation with community members for the new ‘South Asia Gallery’. As well as observations, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 members of staff, three community co-curators, and had numerous informal conversations with members of staff and members of the South Asian collective. We were given very free access to the museum and no request for access was denied. The museum embraced the idea of being actively involved in this kind of research, and several members of staff engaged in an ongoing dialogue with us, seeking our perspective on question related to race, diversity and inclusion, which continued after the end of the fieldwork. 4 When the events of 2020 occurred, including the murder of George Floyd in the US, we also participated in some sessions of the social justice group set up by museum staff during lockdown. Once the fieldwork was completed, we produced a confidential report for the museum which was circulated among the staff and led to further discussions with senior leadership and other members of staff. These ongoing activities also illustrate how we experienced, and analyse, a snap-shot – albeit an extended and in-depth one – of the museum. The processes we explore are ongoing and many will have changed – and potentially improved – before the time of publication.
We actively participated in the museum when called upon, aligning with Smith’s (2005) critique of the positivist notion that knowledge producers exist independently of their context (p. 28). Smith emphasises the need for sociologists to apply their skills in a manner that is useful and relevant to both the people and the field of study. The museum also referenced our work in their planning and reporting documents. It is also important to recognise our positionalities as researchers: the project was led by Bridget Byrne, a white senior researcher, and Roaa Ali, a racially minoritised early career researcher. Our diverse positionalities, in terms of seniority and racialisation, facilitated institutional access and fostered a relatability during interviews with racially minoritised staff. We were aware that our presence as researchers in the museum had the potential to challenge certain practices that contributed to inequality. Rather than perceiving this as a negative aspect, we embraced it as a positive outcome of the research process.
In the usual course of this kind of research, the name of the institution would be anonymised, not least to help preserve the anonymity of the participants. However, we felt that this was impossible in the context of this institutional ethnography of a museum which was undergoing very specific changes, including a major rebuilding and the curation of two major new exhibits. Anticipating this, we agreed with the ethics committee of the University of Manchester, the museum leadership and all participants that we would name the museum but do everything we could to preserve the anonymity of individuals. This is particularly difficult in a context where there are a relatively small number of employees and where job descriptors can be highly identifying where there is often only one occupant of a particular post. Finally, in the context of seeking to understand the racialised experience of working at the museum, there are even fewer individuals who come from racially minoritised backgrounds. Thus, we have taken the decision to use as few identifying markers as possible – avoiding, where possible, identifying gender, job role, age and ethnic/racialised backgrounds of individuals. We have also omitted other potentially identifying details such as career history and length of time in the museum. Nonetheless, as important evidence is contained within the racialised experience of those who work in and with the museum, we have retained some broad categories (white/racially minoritised) (Clark, 2006; Corden & Sainsbury, 2006; Saunders et al., 2015).
The next section will briefly describe Manchester Museum. We aim to demonstrate that the museum’s efforts to decolonise through its contemporary practices are constantly in tension with its past and its foundational whiteness.
Manchester Museum – histories of action and change
Manchester Museum is a ‘cultural asset’ of the University of Manchester, giving it a certain freedom in terms of some security of funding and ability to direct change. It was selected as a case study because it is in the process of reimagining its relationship with its locality and diverse communities. The museum had been undergoing structural changes with a £13.5 million ‘Hello Future’ project that aimed to transform the museum to become ‘the most inclusive, imaginative and caring museum you might encounter’. 5 The museum has a recent history of moving towards ‘decolonial’ change as well as, as we discovered, a general enthusiasm and commitment on the part of the staff for the direction of change. Our research aimed to pose important questions about the intentions behind the museum’s commitment to diversity and the prospects for accountability and sustainability in promoting change.
As an ‘encyclopaedic’ museum, Manchester Museum has a somewhat familiar colonial white supremacist history, starting with the founding collection of John Leigh Philips (1761–1814), a Manchester textile manufacturer and collector who profited from the use of slave-grown cotton. 6 Much of the collection of the museum was gathered by a Victorian voluntary society at the height of empire and until the late twentieth century the museum’s displays constructed a strict biological and cultural racial hierarchy (Lynch & Alberti, 2010). However, gradually in the last 50 years or so, the museum, in common with other museums (Simpson, 1996), and responding to campaigns from both staff and the public, has shifted towards acting as ‘an agent of social inclusion’ (Lynch & Alberti, 2010, p. 19) including rehanging and interrogating the collection in different ways. This recent history of seeking change has been a stop-start, piecemeal process depending on the interests of particular staff, external campaigns and specific funders – often involving temporary exhibitions and initiatives, including partnerships with museums outside the UK, such as the Partition Museum in Amritsar (2019). These attempts have not all been equally successful, impactful or sustained, but they have been prompted in part by an opening up of the question of who should have voice about the activities of the museum, what objects should be included and how they should be displayed.
There has also been a recent concerted attempt to open up the museum to different people – increasing its use as an open space and community resource. This includes multi-lingual displays, special openings for autistic people, work with unhoused people and offering local community organisations office space within the building. Since planning the new South Asia Gallery (see more below) the museum has held celebrations of Divali and Iftar (the breaking of fast during Ramadan). These celebrations, which took place during our ethnographic research, were large events, undoubtably welcoming to religious communities who may not have felt that the museum was a space for them and their religious practice previously. They were well-attended and did go some way towards challenging the (physical) whiteness of the space. In these evenings, it was the white members of the audience and staff who may have felt like ‘bodies out of place’ (Puwar, 2004). However, the way in which these events felt like a powerful transformation of the museum space also arguably exposes the enduring physical, symbolic and institutional whiteness of the museum.
The sticky institutional whiteness of the museum can be seen in its staff. The museum employed 79 people at the time of the research with 14% from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic groups. This falls some way short of being representative of the population in Manchester, where they make up about 21% of the population. In addition, although a third of the museum employees were at the University Grade 6 or above, none of those from a racially minoritised background were in this pay category at the time of the fieldwork, but rather clustered in front of house and lower level service roles, presenting a highly unequal profile within the museum. This issue was the source of some tension within the museum, given extra impetus by the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. There have, however, been some positive changes on this front, in terms of the employment (on a permanent basis) of two racially minoritised curators after we completed the fieldwork.
The museum has also grappled with symbolic whiteness in terms of its approach to objects within the museum that have origins rooted in colonial appropriation and theft with the repatriation of human remains and sacred objects. During the fieldwork in 2019, 43 secret, sacred and ceremonial objects were unconditionally repatriated to Australia in partnership with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). The unconditional element of the return was significant, breaking the colonial assumption of superior knowledge on the preservation and correct use of objects with the explicit acknowledgement that the museum had no right to dictate what use should be made of the returned objects. The museum also commissioned the writer Inua Ellams to write a series of poems responding to a looted carved ivory tusk from Benin. 7 Furthermore, the museum announced that it would return the tusk to Nigeria and move to proactively seek out other contested objects in the collection rather than wait for requests for return. 8
The ‘Hello Future’ project involved the development of a new permanent South Asia Gallery (and performance space) in a newly built extension to the museum curated in partnership with the British Museum, as well as a new Lee Kai Hung China Gallery. While the South Asia Gallery – like the China Gallery – had initially been planned as a relatively conventionally curated space, a decision was made to embrace a co-production approach with ‘a unique collective of educators, community leaders, artists, historians, journalists, scientists, musicians, students and others from the South Asian diaspora’. 9 The process of co-curation will be discussed further below, as will the experiences of the racially minoritised staff working in the sector in general and the museum in particular. However, the next section reflects on ‘inclusivity’ as a vision embraced by the museum and examines how it translates to critical organisational reflexivity and actionable objectives.
‘Who doesn’t want to be more inclusive?’
A key value for the museum, repeated in the promotional literature, and frequently in interviews is that of being ‘inclusive’. There was a high level of buy-in to this term and little visible or reported resistance. Referring to the lack of opposition, one interviewee stated:
I think partly it was because the word inclusive is an inclusive word, so lots of people read it differently. And actually, lots of people have said: ‘who doesn’t want to be more inclusive, I mean it’s pretty grim if you don’t’.
This quote demonstrates the potential pitfall of a term such as ‘inclusion’ in that there may be a lack of clarity about what it specifically means. Whilst this can benefit from an easier ‘buy-in’, it leaves unresolved what the nature of the challenge is. Alternatively, a commitment to ‘anti-racism’ might prompt a harder set of objectives, which, while less cosy or comfortable for some, may also potentially raise more critical questions and suggest more radical transformation of institutional structures and practices.
The enthusiasm for the move to being more inclusive came from a recognition by many of those we interviewed about the exclusions which characterise museums in particular and the cultural sector in general:
I think it’s fair to say that heritage, culture, the arts, is predominantly white, middle class, so we need to do much more to increase representation and inclusivity. It’s just vital that we do that, because of course particularly where museums are concerned, museums like Manchester Museum that have collections from all over the world that speak to multi-culturalism and hyper-diversity, it is absurd that our own audiences and staff body are not representative of the diversity of the city, so we need to do much more to increase inclusivity.
Here there was a recognition of the historical role in the museum of promoting ‘The Heritage’ (Hall, 1999) as a narrow version of culture. At the same time, inclusivity is tied to the location of the museum in a diverse city. It is understandable that being part of a multicultural city would be an impetus to consider relationships with different audiences. However, this connection also potentially reveals some of the limits of inclusion, with the suggestion that – in other places – the need to interrogate the ways in which the museum makes race and represents cultural difference would be less important. In the following quote, another interviewee suggests that the ways in which Manchester was approaching diversity would not be so important in an area seen as more ‘white working-class’:
Because, I think, it reflects the community, one is reflecting the community that you live in. And, so I’m talking very much Manchester focus ’cause I do know there are cities that say, for instance Tyne and Wear, Newcastle, it’s very white working class. But, I think, as a cultural organisation, about diversifying, it is about reflecting the communities that you live in.
Reflecting local communities is clearly an important role for local museums – and as other interviewees pointed out, some of the impetus for change came from local inhabitants. However, reliance on discourses on the local misses some of the ways in which museums have historically both constructed the national and reproduced racial hierarchies, which would potentially be of equal relevance wherever the museum was located (Hall, 1999). Narratives about the local are the product of racialised discourse and histories of oppression (Byrne et al., 2023) and the construction of the ‘white working class’ in this quote as somehow unconnected with empire and racial hierarchies elides the intimate relationship between working class lives and the products and relations of empire. In addition, the argument for inclusiveness on these terms can be potentially diluted depending on what is regarded as the ‘local’, as one interviewee pointed out:
I mean, there’s lots of complexities with that because – what’s the local community, is the local community the tiny few wards around, is it the local community Manchester, is it Greater Manchester, is it a 60-minute drive time? There’s different ways of looking at it.
It is perhaps no coincidence that, as you move further from the museum, the demography being considered becomes whiter. In addition, the initial reference to ‘white working class’ in the earlier quote shows the ways in which a class frame is frequently only employed when white people are considered (Gillborn, 2010) and also intimates a discourse about the ‘white working class’ which is often used to counter claims of racial inequality. Yet, as we will see below, for racially minoritised staff in the museum, one element of their feeling of a lack of ‘fit’ was also classed.
Alongside the recognition of the need for change, there was also a sense of satisfaction and pride in working for the museum which many felt was doing well in terms of inclusion, diversity and decolonisation. Respondents felt the museum was the ‘most diverse museum in the North West’ or ‘was doing more than any other museum’. Yet there remained a risk that pride in their place of work could tip over into complacency. Ahmed (2012, p. 145) argues that where diversity or anti-racism provides a discourse of organisational pride, this can produce a non-recognition of racism and, as such, a performance of racism itself. Equally, the language of decolonisation and inclusivity has sometimes been co-opted by neoliberal agendas (Tuck & Yang, 2012), to serve institutional and market imperatives, thus diluting its radical potential for justice and equity.
Indeed, lack of profound structural transformation is indicated by the fact that in the monthly meetings of the senior leadership team we attended throughout the fieldwork, questions of inclusion or diversity did not feature in significant ways in terms of prompting any in-depth discussion. There was clearly an emotional investment at various levels of the institution on being inclusive – but in a way which tended not to involve hard targets or a clear sense of what might need to change in order to achieve inclusion. For example, there was a regular reporting in the leadership meetings with up-to-date data on the breakdown of visitor and widening participation figures on ethnicity (and disability and age) with a view to the different forms of reporting that would be required by the university and funding bodies. However, aside from occasions when reporting to the University or other stakeholders such as Arts Council England (ACE) was discussed in detail, there was relatively limited discourse on the adequacy of these figures or strategies for potential improvements, even though the lack of diversity in the staff was recognised as a weakness in the SWOT analysis that was produced. In the case of staff diversity, the main response was to blame university regulations on hiring and redeployment for the limited progress. In interviews, staff also mentioned the attractiveness of the senior positions, meaning that there was little turnover. Commenting on the tone used to discuss diversity within the workforce in the sector in general, a racially minoritised respondent notes:
I think there’s a lot of lip service. I absolutely watch how people talk about how it’s so difficult to recruit people from ethnic minority backgrounds and people from working class backgrounds as well: ‘This is hard. It’s so hard’. And what really. . . really what I find absolutely fascinating is how at a senior management level, it’s just not happening. Okay, so even if you recruit people at really low-level paid jobs, at senior management level it’s just not happening. It is so frustrating because you think, well what would warrant me being. . . or me or anybody similarly who has similar experiences. What would warrant them being seen as acceptable to hold a position like this?
This respondent felt that what they were hearing was ‘diversity as a form of public relations’ (Ahmed, 2012, p. 143) and a sense of impossibility of their being recognised as a potential custodian of knowledge which was dominated by whiteness – both in terms of who occupied senior positions and which knowledge and experience were valued.
During the fieldwork, there were however experiments with changing recruitment processes to challenge traditionally exclusive practices. This included, for example, involving young people in an interview process to recruit someone to work with young people; re-evaluating essential qualifications for posts and moving away from the single short interview as the basis of interviewing. This did result in some more diverse hiring for the South Asia Gallery and, as mentioned above, there was further diverse permanent recruitment after the research process.
Nonetheless, the lack of discussion in senior leadership meetings around the causes and impact of the lack of staff diversity contrasted with the monitoring of mood and motivation of staff during the significant disruptions caused by the redevelopment effort. This also contrasted with a passionate discussion concerning the building’s condition, including the need for meticulous exhibit maintenance and the content and style of display texts currently in development. In addition, in the discussion of appointing architects and building contractors, there appeared to be no consideration of how values of inclusion and diversity might impact on those decisions.
In contrast to the relative lack of discussion around inequalities in the senior leadership meetings, there was a meeting of all the staff which did address questions of disadvantage and inequality more directly. An invited external speaker addressed classed and raced identities and an internal speaker led a discussion on decolonisation which gave an account of the museum’s history and relationship with colonial governance as well as some of the ways the museum has addressed this history. This event was used to communicate the museum’s approach on inclusion and repatriation to all members of staff. It stood out as a (rare) time when the meaning of ‘inclusion’ was interrogated – prompting questions about whether inclusion also entailed the open discussion of ‘challenging’ ideas, including those that might be perceived as racist. The nature of decolonisation as a global movement was stressed, with one speaker asserting that the museum could ignore the issue, but it would become unsurmountable – or they could choose to engage and lead.
The following section examines some of the experiences of those few racially minoritised staff who have gained entry to the museum which counter some of the complacent narratives discussed above.
Encountering whiteness
Although racially minoritised members of the museum were generally very enthusiastic about their jobs, the museum and the institution’s willingness to improve on questions of ethnic inequality, there was perhaps less confidence expressed about where they had got to in the process.
Whilst all recognised that the museum was attempting to change, they also described feeling, at times, frustrated, angry and embarrassed about the museum. This can be seen in the following account where the participant is, initially at least, talking more broadly about the cultural sector:
It’s like, the cultural sector of the museum, it’s forward-facing. [But] it comes across as way too white. And the issue is, we need to break that barrier, and I don’t think, there’s enough being done to break that barrier, and I don’t think, they realise how bad it, actually, is.
This lack of understanding is illustrated in the quote below where a white interviewee from the museum is considering why they have fewer racially minoritised employees:
I wouldn’t like to think it’s because we’re viewed as like a white space. And I think hopefully the work we’re doing. We’re really kind of like [trying to] break that down. But I think it’s just something that’s not necessarily, part of you know on their on their radar [. . .] Somebody’s radar from kind of, you know, different cultures and I think it could be something as simple as that. And you can even say that for, you know, anybody really because they might not, they might not know it exists.
Here the problem is posed as a lack of understanding on the part of racially minoritised people, rather than any processes of exclusion or devaluation of their experience or perceptions. In a form of ‘colonial aphasia’ (Stoler, 2011), the interviewee is unable to construct a frame of analysis where it would indeed be considered reasonable for people to view it as a ‘white space’. So, the object of action becomes not the culture of the institution itself, but rather a corrective to very vaguely conceived ‘different cultures’ which may not be properly considering the potential for a career in the museum. A racially minoritised interviewee explained how they found it difficult to make their experience visible in the museum (and difficult to talk about in the interview):
Maybe the real issue is I find it very difficult to talk about this because I found my experiences were sometimes definitely so discriminatory or really difficult, the journey getting to the position that I’m in now. Even still, I feel like there’s loads of barriers to break and there’s definitely a lot of unconscious bias. I find this really difficult to talk about
None of the respondents from racialised minorities that we interviewed had had a straightforward route to working in the museum and they felt isolated in the sector. Those with degrees related to the cultural sector had experienced being the only non-white person on their courses and others had had the experience of being the only non-white person in many spaces of the heritage and cultural sector. Thus, they had all endured spaces which were not inclusive. This raises the question of how museums can decolonise their spaces where access routes to those spaces is already established through predominantly exclusive white channels and knowledge base. One respondent described working in a different institution in the cultural sector:
I don’t know, I couldn’t really fit into the culture. Because I think there was a class issue and an issue around ethnicity and things like religion. Because I don’t drink, so a lot of the art [gatherings] are heavily around alcohol so it’s all about drinking wine all the time. Which is fine, but there was just not an alternative at that time and it was. . . When you’re [. . .] trying to carve a space for yourself, all of this can seem very intimidating. You’ve not got much money. Like, you know when you can’t afford things [to wear], you just feel like an imposter. Even though you have every right to be in that situation, you don’t feel like you do.
This interviewee experienced a profound sense of being a ‘space invader’ (Puwar, 2004) looking ‘wrong’ and unable to engage in social and formal settings. At the same time, having a job in a museum was something that they felt they had to be grateful for.
I just think it’s weird. I think it’s really weird how you have to. . . like, how I feel, always so appreciative that I’ve got a job. But why should I be so. . .? Then I also think, but why am I so appreciative because they still don’t accept the fact that I’m British? But why am I not British? Because I was born here and I lived here. Why do I not have equal rights to being able to have the same opportunities as somebody else, just because my class or my. . . Like, I feel like if someone says to me, oh it’s not a barrier, I’d say to them, you haven’t got a bloody clue ’cause it is.
In addition, there was a sense of discomfort for some that they, as racially minoritised people, had to somehow be representative of their ethnic group, or only do work related to their ethnicity or race:
Because I don’t see why people who are from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds should be working in museums in roles that have something to do with their ethnic background. More often than not, you’ll find that people who work in museums and galleries are recruited based on their ethnicity because they’re there to support a project, and behind that project has a link to their ethnic background.
The interviewee picks up on the racist practice in the museum and cultural sectors where the expertise and knowledge of racialised people is only recognised when it directly concerns their presumed experience or using them as cultural informants. Compounding the injustice of this practice is the fact that decolonial work, much like diversity work, is often confined to individual projects, rather than being integrated into the broader scope of institutional operation and responsibility. It is also more likely to involve short-term funding-specific projects which some respondents felt was a bar to both promotion and retention:
I think definitely in the cultural sector I think they bring people of colour in for a specific reason to fulfil a specific project and when that project is finished, that person will go. And I think with other people they’ll find them alternative pathways within the organisation.
Thus, despite narratives of inclusion, for racially minoritised staff, their experience of working in the cultural sector was racialised. They operated in contexts where they were often in a very small minority and made to feel conscious of their racialised (and classed) difference and often only gained entry through routes which potentially commoditised their racialised positioning. Whilst they recognised that the museum was attempting to address some of these issues, there was also an uncertainty of the degree to which their colleagues understood the extent of their feelings of exclusion and difference. The following section examines a process of co-curation where members of the local community were invited into the museum to curate the new South Asia Gallery – a moment where racialised minorities were invited in to give their expertise. Whilst this changed the racialised profile of who was determining the content of exhibitions, it also raised important questions of power and inequality.
Co-curating: Trial and error
As co-curation had not been planned from the outset of the gallery, the museum faced a steep learning curve in managing the process, and retrofitting collaborative curation had implications for its functioning. For example, while there was an inclusive approach to selecting curation participants, the gallery’s title and scope, ‘South Asia Gallery’, were predetermined. The museum initially invited numerous local individuals to an Indian restaurant to explain their plans. These invitations were circulated through established informal contacts and community representatives, followed by a series of workshops at the museums explaining more about the process. This process of co-curation exposed – and challenged – the whiteness of the senior leadership and curatorial staff of the museum (something many present at the community meetings were acutely aware of). There were, at the outset, no South Asian staff leading the process – or indeed presenting at the initial meeting. One interviewee recalled a friend’s reaction to the first workshop of the collective:
At [the] first event, he turned around to me and he goes: ‘bloody hell, this looks so white, at this moment in time, it’s two white people, speaking down to the ethnic minority community. You know, it’s just coming across as too white [. . .], you need some other people there to, kind of, give faith back to the organisation, or faith back to the community, that there are ethnic minorities on board with this project.’
In this moment, the physical, symbolic and institutional whiteness of the museum is being noted as well as how this impacted on trust between the museum and racially minoritised communities. However, over time, the work surrounding the South Asia Gallery was used to increase the representation of staff with South Asian heritage – including a new apprenticeship scheme and extending the work with young people – as well as bringing in a wider range of speakers to events. A member of the South Asia Gallery collective became initially a ‘community producer’ before eventually being made a permanent curator of the South Asia Gallery (Ali, 2023).
The initial co-curation workshops were a space for dialogical engagement raising contested questions of what community means, what South Asia means and the innate problem of essentialising the region and its diverse communities. There was openness from the curators leading the process on the evolving nature of the co-curation process and that it was at times what one interviewee described as ‘organised chaos’, which in itself may be a positive acknowledgement of the need to disrupt hierarchies of power. However, the somewhat chaotic nature of the events may have inhibited the engagement of some who may have found it irritating, disrespectful or disorientating, or even exclusionary, depending on their positionality.
Potentially one of the most significant consequences of the retrofitting of co-curation was that payments for the co-curators were only agreed relatively late in the process, despite being raised as a concern from the beginning. This meant that participants were self-selecting based on their willingness and ability to volunteer their time. It is impossible to know who else might have been involved if they knew that their time would be compensated for as was later agreed and funded separately. Additionally, during the financial crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, these payments and activities were temporarily paused, risking individuals’ continued involvement. It was not always clear to potential community participants what would be involved in taking part or how they might participate, and who would have final agency and authorship of the anthologies. It took many meetings before any ground rules about respect for others participating were laid out. The collective was ethnically, nationally, religiously and sexually diverse and these ground rules were clearly important to participants when they were discussed, as one participant said: ‘I don’t want to feel like I’m in a minority in the room and I’m not going to be respected by the majority views.’
The co-curation of the South Asia Gallery also raises questions about the different approach taken for the China Gallery, which did not involve a similarly open process. This reflects a broader question of the long-term meaning of co-curation for the museum. The museum has engaged in previous co-curation work, as in the 2007–2009 Myths about Race project (Lynch & Alberti, 2010), and the South Asia Gallery relied on an intensive three-year co-curation process, so the question is why is co-curation as a process not more embedded in the museum’s overall practice and structure? Will co-curation be repeated in the future? Finally, the enthusiasm of community participants for the idea of a gallery in the museum which speaks to their heritage and identities inevitably raises the questions of other communities in Manchester and beyond. For example, what is there/will there be for long-standing African and Caribbean communities in the museum?
Conclusions
Twenty-five years ago, Hall (1999) called not only for funding to bring about cultural change in the heritage sector, but also for a transformation of the ‘deep institutional investment which key organisations have in doing things in the ways in which they have always been done’ (p. 8). Such transformation goes beyond the scope of a single institution and requires a radical transformation of all institutions within the cultural, along with an explicit recognition and disruption of the embedded forms of whiteness – physical, symbolic and institutional – that sustain inequalities. In this article, we have undertaken an in-depth sociological examination of how one institution attempts to address internal inequalities while responding to wider calls for museums to decolonise their collections and practices. Our analysis speaks directly to broader discourses on racialised inequalities and the urgency of meaningful decolonisation, demonstrating that this requires engagement beyond merely symbolic whiteness (representation) to directly address institutional whiteness (structures, recruitment practices and day-to-day operations) and physical whiteness (embodied in who inhabits museum spaces and the experiences of racially minoritised individuals within these environments). The organisation had a stated commitment to inclusion, and we have analysed this alongside the experiences and perspectives of its racially minoritised staff and a process of co-curation. It is evident that the museum is grappling with colonial histories and recognising the need for change in how it welcomes and engages diverse local communities into the museum. It also acknowledges racial inequalities in its staffing structure. However, it is less explicit about addressing the inherent whiteness within the institution, of revising its own self-conceptions in the way that Hall (1999) calls for in rewriting ‘the margins into the centre, the outside into the inside’ (p. 10). The power of institutional whiteness is further reinforced by the reluctance to engage in difficult conversations about race and racism, maintaining instead a superficial and symbolic ‘happy image of diversity’ to preserve ‘institutional happiness’ (Ahmed, 2012, p. 152).
While there were significant shifts in how the museum operated in terms of positive changes in some recruitment processes and adopting a co-curatorial approach to the South Asia Gallery, issues of consistency, legacy and permanence persist. For example, the opening up of recruitment processes was not standardised across all recruitment. Similarly, the community co-curation that steered the South Asia Gallery was not replicated in the China Gallery. The vision for inclusion and equality did not always translate into how the museum runs in its day-to-day estate management, reporting and staffing. That might be very well the case of a museum in transit, in development, and working towards a version of an anti-racist decolonised museum.
Nonetheless, the general fatigue among ethnically diverse creatives and communities with decolonisation as institutional PR is real, revealing that processes of decolonisation which are devoid of attention to racial equality merely serve as performative action. This is compounded by the isolated nature of decolonising projects, which often focus on specific communities or experiences of marginalisation. Ultimately, the persistence of institutional whiteness in defining who can participate, how recruitment processes operate and what qualifications are valued reveals an ongoing mechanism of power preservation. Thus, despite stated commitments to racial equality and decolonisation catalysed by the Black Lives Matter movement following George Floyd’s murder, the genuine willingness of cultural institutions to relinquish the privileges embedded in their physical, symbolic and institutional whiteness remains in question. Moving anti-racist knowledge and action forward requires institutions to explicitly confront and systematically dismantle all three forms of whiteness if they are to achieve meaningful, lasting transformation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the participants of the research, and the editors and reviewers of The Sociological Review for their very helpful comments.
Funding
The article was the outcome of a research project funded by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council, reference ES/R009341/1).