To round out our trip to Washington, the CDDRL Honors cohort was taken on a private tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (aka the Blacksonian) before it opened. Given that it’s very difficult to acquire tickets to the museum, it was a true privilege to be able to get a tour, led by a volunteer. Part of the reason this visit was so special was our tour guide, an African-American woman, who had spent her first years under segregation. Hearing her firsthand stories about the racial divide that was so fiercely pursued in Southern states added a personal layer to the historical atrocities that all of us had heard about. To that end, my favorite exhibit in the museum was on Reconstruction and Jim Crow, during which African-Americans were systematically excluded from American democracy and one-party rule proliferated across the South. The somber depiction of the fear tactics used against African-Americans trying to exercise their constitutional rights reinforced to me how fragile democracy in America has been in the past, despite the traditional narrative of the “city on the hill.” Given that many of us are writing about democracy in our theses, I think it was important to visit a place that adds nuance to that narrative.

Though the whole trip had been filled with awesome connections with think tanks, researchers, and practitioners who had been in the government space for years, one thing all of us looked forward to was speaking with people who were closer in their careers to us and who worked directly in the brunt of all these issues. For this reason, Friday’s Capitol Hill discussion panel with Stanford alums was eagerly awaited. 

Before our stop at Capitol Hill, our cohort was lucky to have an exceptional treat of privately touring the African American Museum before the building opened. Though I had been before, it had been under remarkably different circumstances. About three and a half years earlier I visited the museum with my high school on our senior trip. I went to a high school that did not largely reflect the diversity of my state or country. Additionally, what I learned in high school unfortunately did not include much of African American history — from both the tribulations of enslaved people to the cultural contributions of African Americans to American society. The last time I visited I was essentially exposed to many of these concepts for the first time. Now, almost four years later, I’ve learned about American history from a significantly more critical position, while also simultaneously being exposed to peers who are directly affected by the systematic discrimination of African Americans. Visiting this museum again, in the wake of a week of learning about the weakening of American democratic institutions, put American history into a new context. I couldn’t help but think as I was in the museum, of course it makes sense that our democratic institutions are backsliding — they were never truly democratic in the first place!