Posted on by Californiacontrarian

What’s Good For the Goose …

At first you all may think that the following is mindless chitchat. To you I say, “Get woke! … what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” This is especially true when the goose is middle/older aged white women, and the gander is young mostly black tall men.

First off, what has happened (the Goose):

The Art Institute of Chicago fired all of its trained volunteers and guides last month, who were mostly older White women, to diversify its team. 

“We were surprised, we were disappointed,” Gigi Vaffis, president of the docent council, said in an interview with radio station WBEZ of the firings. “There is an army of very highly skilled docents that are willing and ready and able to continue with arts education.” 

The Art Institute used to have more than 100 docents, 82 of whom were active, until an executive director of learning and engagement, Veronica Stein, sent an email on Sept. 3 firing them all, the Wall Street Journal reported. Docents are trained volunteers who lead tours of museums, and at the Art Institute, they averaged 15 years of unpaid service. 

The firings were apparently sparked by the fact that most of the docent staff was composed of older White, financially well-off women, the outlet reported. Stein said that the museum needed to take a new path “in a way that allows community members of all income levels to participate, responds to issues of class and income equity, and does not require financial flexibility.” 

The docents sent a letter on Sept. 13  detailing the staff “engaged in eighteen months of twice-a-week training to qualify as a docent, five years of continual research and writing to meet the criteria of 13 museum content areas, and monthly and bi-weekly trainings to further educate ourselves with the materials, processes and cultural context” of the museum’s pieces.

In the spirit of “wokeness,” I guess the Art Institute can do what it pleases. Granted they will be exchanging these educated devoted women, who obviously have a great interest in art for … for whom? 

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If interest in art and knowledge of the artists are not criteria for these unpaid docent jobs, then I would guess that the Art Institute could just go out onto Michigan Avenue or better yet into the non-white, non-affluent neighborhoods of Chicago and randomly choose just about any non-white female to fill these non-paid docent “jobs.” It sounds to me that the main criteria to be a docent will be skin color and sex … seemingly to be a new docent at the now woke Art Institute, one needs to be other than a nonwhite female. Skill in what docents are supposed to do is no longer necessary. 

So what about the Gander? In the NBA there is a predominance of young black males. In the spirit of what Veronica Stein of the Art Institute said, shouldn’t the NBA  “allow community members of all income levels to participate” … white, short, nearsighted, farsighted, etc. Of course the WNBA would then be held to the same high woke standards. Why should a short white person be eliminated from a place on an NBA or WNBA team? Just like with the Art Institute, why should skill, expertise, and experience matter? After all “what’s good for the goose, is good for the gander!”

11/5/21

www.californiacontrarian.com

45 Replies to “What’s Good For the Goose …”

  1. It’s interesting that in the NBA, while the players are predominantly black , the fans in the stands are mostly white.
    The mantra for woke corporations these days is ” we have to look more like the people we serve”. Given the outrageous costs to attend sporting events these days, especially basketball, it looks like the only people who are attending are well off white folks. I guess they should be the ones out there dribbling the balls.

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