Executive order on Smithsonian targets funding programs with 'improper ideology' | Hacker News Reader

Executive order on Smithsonian targets funding programs with 'improper ideology'

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Word of the day is : wrongthink.

Wrongthink is doubleplusungood.

Don’t wrongthink.

They're not even trying not to sound Russian. And by Russian I mean Soviet Russian.

This is not new, only applied to programs instead of staff (which probably means it won't be as effective):

Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...

Life science jobs at Berkeley give precedence to candidates’ diversity and inclusion statements - https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2019/12/31/life-science-jobs-...

FIRE calls on UC Santa Cruz to drop diversity statement mandate for faculty applicants - https://www.thefire.org/news/fire-calls-uc-santa-cruz-drop-d...

Minority professor denied grants because he hires on merit - https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/minority-professor-deni...

Is there a list of all of the museums that are controlled by the US federal government?

As with many non profits and charities, if you did a detailed look at the revenue of many museums and performing arts centers (Kennedy Center in WA DC for instance), their funding sources are diverse and various.

But there's a few noteworthy ones like the Smithsonian where I would take a wild guess that the federal government might be 65% or more of their operating budget on an annual basis, giving the government a very large lever of influence.

For those which are a 501(c)3 you can go find their annual IRS tax filings and make an attempt at breaking down their different incoming revenue streams.

And so we're getting to the burning books part.

From the executive order:

> The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”

So I guess "race is a biological reality" is an official stance of this administration. How long until actual segregation makes a return?

...oh, wait: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/03/18/nx...

How would race not be a biological reality? Recently there was an article posted on HN, "Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea to Africa" [1]. How could they distinguish stone age Europeans from Africans by DNA, if it's all socially constructed? Or how can humans, most of the time, tell someone's race by appearance alone, without knowing anything about their lived experience or upbringing?

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00764-2

The spectrum is a matter of nature. Drawing lines in it and saying "Group A begins here and B begins there", and more importantly "A gets access to the good schools and country clubs to the exclusion of B" are human constructs.

Yes, exactly. So saying "race cannot be meaningfully unambiguously described by a handful of totally discrete categories" is true. Saying it has no biological basis is clearly false, in the same sense that saying "color has no physical basis" is false, just because there is no clear way to exactly determine which pigments or wavelengths should fall into red, green, or blue (or how many and which primary colors there should be).

This feels a lot like the immigration debate in the US. One one hand it is actually sort of insane that undocumented people have all these rights and things as no other place on earth operates that way, but on the other hand the way the right side of the spectrum approaches enforcement and treatment of these people is so insane that it forces empathetic people to oppose them.

Race certainly has a biological element, but we empathetic people are forced into cognitive dissonance because the reason the right makes this argument is not because of science but because of racism. So, like immigration we are forced to defend a sort of insane position, claiming that race is something we've just invented, when there are very clear racial traits to be found in the human population.

Then our cognitive dissonance is weaponized against us to argue that our aims are irrational.

> One one hand it is actually sort of insane that undocumented people have all these rights...

Well, the 14th Amendment says "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" so... there's that.

> Or how can humans, most of the time, tell someone's race..

How can you tell someone's race without a formal taxonomy or classification? Different people hold differing options on what classifies people into races based on nothing more than their own cultural stereotyping biases. For example, some American's calling anyone with dark skin African-American even if that person has no ties too, nor has ever in their life been to America.

This is just stupidity in the american population though.

Americans are not the only ones that "stupidly" stereotype other's into boxes they don't necessarily belong to based on their own person and cultural experience.

Since Native Americans were populated by East/SE/Asians and Pacific Islanders why are they not "Asian"? Why do Indians in some parts of the world get grouped Asian but in others are Indian only? Which "race" does that "make" them? Why is Hispanic as race? How does one being a native Spanish speaker make a race? And why are Russian's "white" and not Asian? even when quite a few that have white pigmented skin, clearly have features that other people with slightly different tinted skin get grouped into with Asian?

What exactly defines race? or what white is? Because in the US, and I use the US because it is one of the few places with a long history of a mixing cultures and nationalities from around the world, there was the One Drop Rule[0]; people who produce less melanin but have a family ancestry consisting of one or more darker skinned people, were not white by the One Drop standard. Even though if anyone looked at them that is what they would be grouped as today by most cultural stereotyping biases. So what is their race?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

> Or how can humans, most of the time, tell someone's race by appearance alone, without knowing anything about their lived experience or upbringing?

Can they really, though? Most people would identify me as "white," but as a 100% Slavic person from Russia, how much do I actually have in common with "white" people from Italy, or "white" people from Ireland, or "white" people from South Africa, or most "white" Americans? You might have to go back many centuries to find some common ancestry.

Is an olive-skinned person from Greece or southern Italy "white"? Today they are, but they wouldn't have been in the past. It took a while for them to acquire that label: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/colum...

Should a light-skinned person with 1/32 black ancestry be considered black? They certainly would have been in the Jim Crow era, but Susie Guillory Phipps sued over this to change her recorded race to white.

Is "hispanic" a race? In fact, many latinos actually consider themselves white: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/06/16/321819185...

Et cetera. There are certainly genetic differences between populations, but "race" as it's understood in popular culture (based on superficial phenotypical differences) is a muddy, unscientific classification. I'm not a social scientist, so feel free to look up "race is a social construct" to find more authoritative sources. There is a very high degree of academic consensus on the subject.

> look up "race is a social construct" to find more authoritative sources

I'm well aware of that argument. As user hakfoo noted, the underlying spectrum (if we want to call it that) is biologically real, it is only the human categorization into (more or fewer) groups that is lossy. But this is the case with nearly everything, including color, yet we wouldn't say colors are a social construct and there's no physical difference between red and blue. Especially since those "muddy, unscientific" classifications correspond so well to observed genetic clusters.

Sure, my mitochondrial DNA is 100% Native American but I'm as much a pasty white European as they come. In fact, if I were to travel to northern Europe the only way someone could tell I "didn't belong" is because of the way I speak.

It gets very, very hard to classify people into neat little groups when you have a multi-generational mixing pot such as the US.

> my mitochondrial DNA is 100% Native American

This statement implicitly accepts race as biologically real. That it can't be fully described with "neat little groups" doesn't make it less so.

Uh huh, then what race am I?

Is race passed down the mother's line? The father's? Or does it arbitrarily transform between generations due to some biological facts I'm unaware of?

Scientifically speaking, what are the rules?

I don't understand why you think your question should have a simple answer. 'Race' is, very obviously, a coarse division of human genetic diversity into a few clusters. That doesn't imply everyone fits neatly into one of the clusters. Saying someone belongs to race X is just a way of saying they are more similar to that genetic cluster/area than any other. Or to some point between two clusters, e.g. they are race (X + Y)/2 (Amerindian-Caucasian, for example).

Try applying the same logic to any other concept - it is nearly always the case that concepts in language do not perfectly describe the underlying reality. Yet we're not stupid enough to then claim that means the underlying reality is meaningless.

So it's a social construct...

It seems you've confused clade with race.

The ability to measure an edit distance between words doesn't neccesitate a racial theory of spelling any more than the abilty to estimate familial or evolutionary seperation between DNA sample pools implies "race" must exist.

> How would race not be a biological reality

Imagine a world where people's sociaal standing was decided by the colour of their hair and we called this their "hace." Fashions, types of jobs, ways of talking, political views, would all be deeply impacted by your hace. It would be hard for us to imagine living without paying attention to someone's hace because it had been such a huge thing in society for so long. We would even point to biology and say that hace wasn't a cultural thing, there really were biological reasons why one person's hair colour was different from another, how could hace not be biological reality?

We live in a world where we do all of this with people's skin colour and we call it race. The colouring has a biological basis but the concept of "race" as a dividing line between peoples is a cultural one.

"Improper ideology" is the politically correct term for woke. Irony in its most ferrous form.

Huh, I thought they were talking about those who fought against the Confederacy during the War of Northern Aggression.

The Smithsonian is not in the Executive branch. Trump has no authority there. But that won't stop them from complying and destroying their own museums.

Which of the three branches does the Smithsonian fall under?

None it seems.[0]

> The Smithsonian Institution is a trust instrumentality of the United States ... Congress delegated the authority and responsibilities of the United States to the Smithsonian Board of Regents. ... The Smithsonian Institution is considered unique in the Federal establishment. The Smithsonian is not an executive branch agency and does not exercise regulatory powers, except over its own buildings and grounds. ... Thus, courts have held that the Smithsonian is not an agency or authority of the Government...

[0] https://www.si.edu/ogc/legalhistory

I hope there are archivists at the Smithsonian who will preserve any removed content in a box in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.

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