- courtesy Illinois Holocaust Museum
There are plenty of things to look at in “RACE: Are We So Different?”, a traveling exhibit that originated at the Science Museum of Minnesota and has now settled in for three months at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie. There are charts and pictures and videos and buttons to push and explainer text to read. If you stop a few times to say, “Huh, I did not know that,” the staff of the museum, and also of the YWCA Evanston/North Shore, which is cosponsoring the exhibit, will be pleased. But what would really make them happy is if you left feeling better equipped to have a serious and honest conversation about race in America, preferably with someone whose skin tone is not the same shade as yours.
More recently, there’s been the argument that racial inequality is less a problem than economic inequality. The exhibit challenges this notion by showing the connections between race and class: housing covenants and limits on eligibility for the GI bill in the 1940s and 50s prevented African-Americans from buying homes, or locked them into bad mortgages, which meant they couldn’t build up home equity the way their white counterparts could. (A point the exhibit makes graphically by showing stacks of fake money representing the average wealth of whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.)
The exhibit has been touring for the past seven years, but this is the first time it’s come to the Chicago area. (“Maybe Chicago didn’t want to deal with race?” jokes Arielle Weininger, the museum’s chief curator.) Several YWCA officers saw it in other cities before it came here and have heard stories about the effect it’s had on different communities.
