News News from America Chica­go Art Muse­um Fires Unpaid Vol­un­teers For Being White

Chica­go Art Muse­um Fires Unpaid Vol­un­teers For Being White

A pres­ti­gious art muse­um in Chica­go fired hun­dreds of unpaid vol­un­teers and replaced them with paid work­ers because they were too white.

Scott Olson via Get­ty Image 

A pres­ti­gious art muse­um in Chica­go fired hun­dreds of unpaid vol­un­teers and replaced them with paid work­ers because they were too white.

Yes, real­ly.

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go had been able to depend on the help of 122 high­ly skilled vol­un­teers, most­ly old­er white women, to act as guides to the Museum’s col­lec­tion of 300,000 works, which they explain in great detail to visitors.

The vol­un­teers also act­ed as “school group greeters” to help chil­dren under­stand the impor­tance of what they were seeing.

Train­ing require­ments for the posi­tion were intense, and the vol­un­teers were appar­ent­ly doing a great job.

But now they’ve now all been dis­missed for not being “diverse” enough.

“Many of the vol­un­teers — though not all — are old­er white women, who have the time and resources to devote so much free labor to the Muse­um,” reports the Why Evo­lu­tion is True blog.

“But the demo­graph­ics of that group weren’t appeal­ing to the AIC, and so, in late Sep­tem­ber, the AIC fired all of them, say­ing they’d be replaced by small­er num­ber of hired vol­un­teers work­ers who will be paid $25 an hour. That group will sure­ly meet the envi­sioned diver­si­ty goals.”

“Pay­ing the replace­ments will not result in more knowl­edge­able docents. But they won’t be Cau­casian; that’s the impor­tant thing,” writes Dave Blount.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for the vol­un­teers, a lack of “diver­si­ty” is only appar­ent­ly a prob­lem at one end of the spectrum.

This is the Pres­i­dent of The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go, James Ron­deau. Fun­ny how peo­ple like him nev­er think that the need for diver­si­ty should start at the top. pic​.twit​ter​.com/​I​J​h​z​W​U​4​UYJ

— Boost­ah­fa­zoo (@boostahfazoo) Octo­ber 10, 2021

A sim­i­lar thing hap­pened last month when the Eng­lish Tour­ing Opera (ETO) kicked out half of its orches­tral play­ers in an effort to pri­or­i­tize “increased diver­si­ty in the orchestra.”

The act of musi­cal eth­nic cleans­ing was car­ried out in the inter­ests of fol­low­ing “firm guid­ance of the Arts Coun­cil,” which is a gov­ern­ment-fund­ed body.

Once again, this all under­scores the fact that the only form of insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism that remains not only accept­able, but some­thing to be encour­aged, is against white people.

Source: sum​mit​.news