Today let’s look at a B+ apology and see how it could have been an A apology.
The Portland Art Museum in Oregon recently tweeted this statement:
Our first reaction: Booting an indigenous woman wearing an indigenous child-carrier from your museum’s show of indigenous art is a BAD LOOK…but this is a decent apology.
Let’s run it by our 6.5 elements of a good apology, shall we?
The museum’s statement uses the word “apologize” (#1) rather than “regret.” (That’s good! An apology should focus on the feelings of the person harmed; “regret” instead focuses on the feelings of the person/museum that did the harming.) The statement also names the offense (#2). It shows understanding of why what the museum employee did was wrong (#3). It doesn’t make excuses (#4). It discusses what steps are being taken to ensure that this won’t happen again (#5). Reaching out to the woman who was ejected from the museum was the right thing to do; we presume this involved making an offer of repair (#6).
And we’d like to think that listening (#6.5) is ongoing.
Because it sounds like some things still need to be addressed.
What’s missing? According to other sources (aka the woman who was thrown out), the museum staffer didn’t merely cite the no-backpacks policy. The staffer told the mother that the carrier was unsafe for the baby as well as for the art. (Way to blithely insult traditional Karuk child-wearing garb!) She told the mother to “cool down, take a deep breath” when the mother objected to this treatment and noted white institutions’ history of racism. The staffer then observed, “cool item, though” to the mother (immediately after telling her that her carrier was dangerous for her baby—condescending much?). The museum’s apology should have acknowledged that the staffer’s words and attitude — not just her actions — were wrong.
Further, while a no-backpacks policy is common in the museum world and makes good sense (people with overstuffed backpacks frequently bonk other people and things, displaying zero clue about how far they’re intruding into the space of others — ask Snarly, an NYC subway rider, how she knows this), it seems that at the Portland Art Museum, at least, the backpack policy is selectively enforced. A Portland community group called Revolution Rising tweeted a photo of Oregon’s former governor, Kate Brown, visiting the museum with a backpack on, and noted the sheer number of social media images of museum visitors wearing backpacks. In a truly thorough apology, the museum should have noted that the rules were being selectively enforced.
Finally, people deserve to know whether the staffer was disciplined. The public does not need to know this person’s name, but they do have the right to expect that she experienced consequences for her actions. According to The Oregonian, the museum has declined to say whether she was reprimanded. That’s unfortunate.
All this said: The museum is doing a lot of things right. Reviewing backpack policies and acknowledging the racism involved in kicking this woman out are both excellent steps. It’s important for us to point out when people and institutions do things right, as well as when they do things wrong. Encouraging them when they get a lot of the way there helps them do still better moving forward.
We’ve seen museums worldwide start to wrestle with their shameful histories, confronting how they’ve treated indigenous people, enslaved people, and conquered people. Meaningful education—for museums and for the public—comes from listening to folks who were previously treated as voiceless primitives or sources of treasure with no rights to their own heritage. Plenty of work remains to be done, as this apology shows. It’s not everything we’d wish. But kudos to the Portland Museum for a good apology…along with the hope that they’ll turn it into an excellent one.
