Blunt Instruments Recognizing Racist Cultural Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums, and Patriotic Practices

How monuments, museums, and everyday patriotic practices serve to uphold white supremacy in the United States

Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality and while they don’t seem to be explicitly about race, they often are.

Blunt Instruments looks at three categories of cultural infrastructure: memorials and monuments, museums, and everyday patriotic practices. Each of these have been very much in the news for most of the twenty-first century. In fact, more intense, riotous, fraught attention has been paid to them in the last 20 years than in most of the first 200 years of American life. And yet, they are seldom looked at together or understood explicitly as tools used by particular people at certain times and places to shape the culture.

Blunt Instruments helps readers identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work tirelessly to tell us vital stories about who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs. Examining landmark moments such as the erection of the first American museum and Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling pledge of allegiance, historian Kristin Hass explores the complicated histories of sites of cultural infrastructure from the Robert E. Lee statue to the Bridge to Freedom in Selma, from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to Kehinde Wiley’s 2019 sculpture, Rumors of War.

With sharp analysis and a broad lens, Hass makes the undeniable case that understanding what cultural infrastructure is and the deep and broad impact that it has is essential to understanding how structures of inequity are maintained and how they might be dismantled.

Kristin Ann Hass is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Culture and Director of the Humanities Collaboratory at the University of Michigan. She has written two books, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall and U.S. nationalism and Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She was also the co-founder and Associate Director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.

Introduction: White Lies Matters

Section I: Memorials
Monumental Basics

Chapter One: Memorials: The Lost Cause Won 
Memorial Timeline     
Pre-1890: A Mixed Bag     
1890-1920: The First Memorial Boom

Chapter Two: Memorials: The Lost Cause Keeps Winning
Memorial Timeline
1920-1980: Living Memorials and Dying Cities
1980-2010: The Second Memorial Boom in Three Acts
2010-Present: Tumbling Down and Rising Up

Section II: Museums  Museum Basics

Chapter Three: Museums: White Temples Emerged 
Museum Timeline       
Pre-1870: Cabinet of Curiosities       
1870-1940: The First Golden Age of American Museums       

Chapter Four: Museums: White Temples Reshaped?
Museum Timeline               
1965 - 2019: From King Tut to Emmett Till       
The Summer of 2020

Section III: Patriotic Practices
Patriotic Practice Basics

Chapter Five: Patriotic Practices: Allegiance Gets Pledged 
Patriotic Practices Timeline       
1776-1865: A Fraught Beginning
1866-1917: Patriotism from the Ground Up

Chapter Six: Patriotic Practices: Allegiance Gets Paid For
Patriotic Practices Timeline       
1917-1976: Federally Mandated Patriotism
2001-2021: Paid Patriotism and Outrageous Refusal