One Race, Many Faces

There’s one exhibit at the Liberty Science Center that will make grown up visitors take notice.

The first thing you see when you walk into the “Race: Are We So Different?” exhibit there is a video montage that seems say, Yes, we are.

In the display, by artist-producer Teja Arboleda, faces of different races and ethnicities morph into one another. Of course, you can tell when you are looking at a black man from sub-Saharan Africa, or at a woman from East Asia, or a blond from northern Europe. People do look different, yes.

But we knew that. What Arboleda — who describes his ancestry as “African-American/Native-American, Filipino-Chinese and German-Danish” — succeeds in showing visitors is that races  blend almost imperceptibly. One second you are sure you are looking at somebody who might be Chinese, and a half a minute later the person certainly looks black, but in between there are subtle gradations, countless ways of being both.

And that is what the exhibit wants to do: challenge the conventional thinking about race.

In the center of the room, children play with multi-racial dolls; everywhere, videos and voices surround you. In one display, we learn Brazilians have 134 terms for people of different skin colors.

This is a complicated issue, and so it is divided into three: The Everyday Experience of Race, The Science of Human Variation and History of the Idea of Race.  This last exhibit explores some of the crackpot racial theories of decades past. It quotes one book: “The population of the United States will, on account of the great influx of [immigrants], will rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, and more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder and sexual immorality.”

 We learn this was written by one Charles Benedict Davenport, in 1911, to warn against the wave of people coming to America from southern and eastern Europe, whose children and grandchildren form some of the largest ethnic groups in New Jersey today: Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Jews.

Liberty Science Center, known for interesting insects, rock walls, skyscrapers, and entertaining giant bubble displays, takes a serious look at how science can be used for all the wrong reasons.

And this is worth your attention.

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Tags: Liberty Science Center | Arboleda, Teja

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