The chart was credited to a diversity consultant named Judith Katz, who has written about race for many years. In the late 1970s, she wrote White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training. She later wrote Inclusion Breakthrough: Unleashing the Real Power of Diversity. (In the 1990s, the Boston Herald called her a "diversity doyenne.") Today, the company where she is a top executive, Kaleel Jamison Consulting, counts among its clients FedEx, Merck, Toyota, and several others.
Judith H. KatzAfter the chart received public attention on Twitter, some observers said it perpetuated rather than reduced racism in the U.S. "Quite frankly, it's a racist document," Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen said on Fox News on Thursday. "It's racist to say that black people don't possess these characteristics or that it is alien to black people to have these characteristics."
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is one of the most popular in the Smithsonian system. It received $33 million in government funding in 2019. It received tens of millions more from some of the biggest names in business and philanthropy: the Lilly Endowment, the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, American Express, the Bank of America, 3M, Boeing, Michael Jordan, Kaiser Permanente, the Rockefeller Foundation, Target, UnitedHealth, Walmart, and many more.
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Investigative Issues: Smithsonian's Black Museum Cans Chart Listing 'Hard Work' as Mark of 'Whiteness'
