Also, surely you can see the shortfalls in trying to solve today's racism with treating one race over another, right?
Surely?
Do you not think slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights, etc. is a worthwhile topic? Is it not clearly an extremely important area that deserves an entire museum, rather than a couple exhibits here and there?
And finally, imagine a hypothetical country where we enslaved black people for 100 years, and then ceased all slavery and racism completely. One day there were slaves, the next slavery is abolished and nobody is racist. Is the problem solved? Are black people now equal to everyone else? No, because history didn't disappear, they still used to be slaves. They have no money, no land, no friends in power, no education, etc. Their lives still suck, no matter how impartial everyone else is. Again, you can't solve a problem by ignoring it. Pretending black people have no disadvantages and can be treated exactly the same as white people is just naïve, and impractical. It is not racist to acknowledge existing racism, and try to counteract it. There is a line, and it's completely possible for racism to negatively affect white people, but building a black history museum does not come anywhere near that line.
Slavery was very widely popular in China, south east asia, and most notably the middle east during that era.
I've also heard there's still as many slaves today in Africa as there were in the 1800's America:
> Forced labor in Sub-Saharan Africa is estimated at 660,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_contemporary_Africa
Maybe it's a good thing Americans are so interested in the subject, as everywhere else that legacy, and in the case of modern Africa the reality, is not being confronted. But at the same time I feel like there are risks of seeing it as a uniquely American issue rather than a human one that the majority of the earths population's has had some connection to in the past.
The larger narrative about Jim Crow laws and state sanctioned racism in the modern era is still somewhat unique to the US though - at least in the western world.
Otherwise this is largely the consequence of America being the dominant media and news engine for the world. It gets the greatest amount of inward reflection regarding their responsibility for the guilt of past human failures.
It is undeniable that some slave-owners owned slaves in order to keep them as workers, and they weren't necessarily "mistreated" more like they were safer as slaves and couldn't be released anyway.
And what were slave-owners trying to protect slaves from? If slaves had it so good under slavery, why did thousands and thousands attempt to flee at great risk to their own life? Why did they overwhelmingly vote for the Republican Party after reconstruction, again at great cost to their own lives? Why did so many who did flee write about the evils of slavery, and campaign against it, and no free black wrote for it? All slaves were owned to extract economic value of them, they were huge capital investments.
[1]http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/celia/celiaacc...
I think it's good that some slaves were treated well, but I'm not sure how that's relevant here. They were still slaves.
That proves the reason for the existence of a black history museum then, because there are people that are overlooked. Do they not deserve to have their story told? Because that's the point of a museum.
Stating that act of creating a museum for black history is racist towards white people makes as much sense as a museum for wooden boats being an affront to the metallic boats.
It's very easy to see that there would be value in having a black history museum in a country where the majority of people are white.
You can say the same for a "white history" museum in a country where being white is not the majority. However, what you'll find is that a lot of countries have a colonial history that ties into their history significantly. Where white Europeans came along and by force conquered them.
Anyway, did you even read the article? It gives plenty of context for the museum. I don't see you arguing against it however, instead you've just latched onto it being a "Black" History museum.