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Blogging about the DC trip is pretty basic – I know, but here we go!

While I did not experience the entirety of the PLA trip to Washington DC, I am still left with an experience that is going to resonate with me for years to come. The experience that I am referring to is the group’s visit to the National Museum for African American History and Culture.

Growing up, whenever I would go to a museum with my family or a school trip, I never really had the attention span to appreciate what was around me. I liked learning, but museums were kind of “meh.” I actually have a cousin who got her Master’s Degree in Museum Studies, and this seemed totally pointless to me (because museums are boring, duh.) Honestly, the first museum I really loved was the 9/11 Memorial Museum that we visited last fall on the NYC trip. Being able to stand in the foundation of the World Trade Center and almost touch the concrete columns that supported the building offered a sense of tangibility and enhanced the solemnity of the memorial. I can’t really explain it, but being in the exact spot where the Twin Towers collapsed was really meaningful to me.

This past weekend, I didn’t really know what to expect from the African American History Museum, but after learning that the average visitor spends 5 hours in the museum and that there was a 6-month waiting list, I realized that there had to be something special about this museum. After stepping off the elevator into the bottom level of the museum, you enter the “Slavery and Freedom 1400-1877” exhibit, which depicts the capture and transport of African men and women from their continent to North America and the Caribbean. After turning the first corner in this exhibit, you enter a small, dark room meant to emulate the conditions of a slave ship. As you walk around the dimly lit room, voiceovers play, telling the stories of slaves aboard these ships. You see diagrams of how slaves were packed on top of one another in pitch black cabins that smelled of death and human waste. Finally, right before leaving the slave ship room, you see a display case with shackles – in both adult and child size. Seeing the child size shackles caused my gut to wrench. I recognize that the whole idea of “slavery was cruel and inhuman” is nothing groundbreaking, but seeing this exhibit forced me to confront the history that can be easy to forget as a privileged white man living in the “bubble” of Penn State. I felt a little nauseated for the remainder of our time in the museum out of sheer disbelief at the immense cruelty and utter lack of regard for humanity shown by slave traders and slave owners. While I recognize that this is a pretty obvious conclusion, seeing the actual artifacts of the slave trade was a powerful experience for me, and one I will not forget anytime soon.