Managing Perspectives, Keeping History “Good” and Safe

Abstract

This chapter explores the racial politics involved in a highly successful museum-writing project on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 carried out during its 2012 sesquicentennial in southern Minnesota. Specifically, the chapter analyzes negotiations between white instructors and students as they co-authored an exhibit panel displaying “settler perspectives” for a majority-white audience. Interview data reveal the explicit privileging of a “white-guy” identity behind the project and its discursive distribution through use of the inclusive pronoun we, recruiting students to take up the standardizing “white-guy” identity themselves. As the chapter unfolds, it reveals the development of an exhibit panel “balanced” in the direction of white victimhood, foiling one student’s initial hopes of exposing ways white supremacy shaped injustices in 1862. Ultimately, the chapter provides further evidence of a white public pedagogy of fear, directing instructors and students away from critical social justice and toward white justice as fairness.