Washington Post
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Revealing the Smithsonian’s ‘racial brain collection’
Posted
August 16, 2023
Views
7,127
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196
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August 16, 2023
7,127
196
35
3.24%
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10:03Now PlayingA few years ago, a Filipino American activist and artist, Janna Añonuevo Langholz, learned about their stories and went looking for them, marking their graves and leading tours of the site of the Philippine Exhibition. She also made a startling discovery: The brains of four Filipino people had been removed and sent to the Smithsonian’s U.S. National Museum, the precursor to the National Museum of Natural History.
Claire Healy, a copy aide at The Washington Post and a freelance writer, learned about Langholz’s work and probed further. “I asked the Smithsonian, ‘How many brains do you have and why?’ And they sent me a spreadsheet,” she said.
Healy partnered with investigative reporter Nicole Dungca to keep digging. “There were children in the collection,” Dungca said. “There were men and women and then fetuses. Many of them were Indigenous people, other people of color. And many of them didn’t have their identities actually recorded, partly because they were looked at as specimens.”
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