Amin Husain on Decolonizing Museums, Nikole Hannah-Jones on School Resegregation

This week on CounterSpin: If someone makes lots of money by, say, knowingly and cynically exacerbating opioid addiction, is it OK as long as they give some of that money to an art museum? Cultural institutions are important sites of public conversation, but the public doesn’t have much say in who gets to lead that conversation, or the stories they tell. Activists are asking us to talk about what that means, and what it would mean to change it. We’ll talk about accountability for cultural institutions with Amin Husain, core organizer with the group Decolonize This Place.

Also on the show: 65 years ago this month, the Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education ordered the desegregation of America’s public schools, declaring segregated schools “inherently unequal.” Five years ago this month, as media marked the 60th anniversary, we spoke with journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose “Segregation Now” series for ProPublica described 21st century Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where, she noted, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown never happened. We’ll revisit that conversation on resegregation on today’s show.


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