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Black students visiting Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts claim that during a recent class field trip to the institution they were racially profiled and told by a staffer that, “no food, no drink and no watermelon” were allowed.
According to The Boston Globe, a group of minority seventh-graders from the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy in the city’s Dorchester area, were allegedly harassed by museum staff and other patrons during a May 16 visit. Dorchester is a section of the city largely populated by African Americans and others from the Black diaspora.
After Principal Arturo J. Forrest was alerted by his staff members that a museum worker had made a racially charged reference to watermelon, the museum — the nation’s fifth largest — launched an investigation.
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The MFA employee in question reportedly claimed they were misheard, and told the students that, “no food, no drink and no water bottles” were allowed in the galleries. But Forrest says, there were also reports of museum security singling out students of color and blatantly following the group around as they perused the exhibits.
Although the museum initially dismissed the concerns, explaining that the normal rotation of museum guards could have made it appear to the students they were being followed, it eventually came to light that two patrons had rather blatantly harassed the students, leaving no room for doubt.
According to Forrest, one adult remarked to a student that she should pay attention so as to avoid a career as a stripper, while another referred to the group as “f—–g black kids.”
“It’s an unfortunate lesson to learn but inevitably it’s something we all go through as people of color,” he told the Globe. “There were many comments that made them feel unsafe throughout their time there.”
In an official statement posted to its website Wednesday, MFA officials finally issued an apology to students and staff for what they describe as, “a range of challenging and unacceptable experiences that made them feel unwelcome.”
“That is not who we are or want to be,” the MFA said. “We deeply regret any interactions that led to this outcome and we are committed to being a place where all people trust that they will feel safe and treated with respect.”
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Marvelyne Lamy, an English teacher at the school where over 90 percent of the students are Black or Latino, and much of the staff are also people of color, took to Facebook to voice her frustrations over the incident.
“It got so bad that I started gathering our students so we could leave,” she wrote in the post. “The worse part about all of this is seeing the hurt look on my children’s faces as this was their first time experiencing racism first hand. It’s sad.”