Kristin Hass’s new book, Blunt Instruments: Recognizing Racist Cultural Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums, and Patriotic Practices, provides a timely and accessible introduction to some of the ways in which memorials, museums, and everyday patriotic practices produce and reproduce systemic racism in America. Blunt Instruments directly engages with recent national and international debates about racist cultural practices, and especially speaks to and embraces questions raised by social movements that emerged in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
To these current debates, Hass adds what she describes as a “field guide…to help readers identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but that, in fact, work tirelessly to tell vital stories about who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs” (3). To reach this goal, Blunt Instruments introduces and applies a repeatable critical framework...
University of California Press