The Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles is taking a stand towards President Trump’s DEI insurance policies as $2 million of the establishment’s federal funding hangs within the stability.
Over the past week, Elon Musk’s Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) has made extreme cuts to the funding and staffing of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The JANM was one such establishment impacted by these losses.
Beneath former President Joe Biden, the museum obtained a $175,000 NEH grant for its “Landmarks of American Historical past and Tradition” workshops, which educate the historical past of mass incarceration of Japanese Americans by the US authorities throughout World Battle II within the metropolis’s Little Tokyo neighborhood. Because the workshops’ inception two years in the past, greater than 100 lecturers from 31 states have attended the two-week program to the good thing about roughly 21,000 college students.
“That is impacting many museums in the US, particularly cultural and ethnic museums,” Invoice Fujioka, the Japanese American Nationwide Museum board chairman advised the Los Angeles Times. “We have already got a signed contract with the federal authorities for that cash. And we’ve been advised it’s being clawed again.”
The grant cash was reportedly allotted on a reimbursement foundation. Regardless of being beforehand accepted below the Biden administration, the bills will not be reimbursed, per the NEH grant termination letter despatched on Wednesday.
The JANM additionally obtained funding from the IMLS, which saw its entire staff laid off on Tuesday, via the state of California.
Since Donald Trump took workplace this 12 months, there have been plenty of adjustments together with his dismantling of DEI efforts. Whereas many organizations have up to date their insurance policies and web sites to roll again DEI requirements, the JANM is doubling down by not solely “scrub[bing] nothing,” Fujioka mentioned, but additionally by highlighting the significance of DEI.
“Our neighborhood relies on range, fairness is assured to us within the Structure, and inclusion is what we imagine in,” Fujioka added.
This ethical stand comes because the museum’s $2 million in federal grants from the NEH and IMLS stays unsure. A complete of $1.45 million, which was accepted in the course of the Biden administration, now might not be utilized by the museum, whereas $522,000 in grants had been utilized for however had not but been awarded.
The JANM’s accepted grants included $750,000, as a part of the NEH’s Save America’s Treasures program devoted to historic preservation, which the museum deliberate to make use of for a local weather management and HVAC system improve for its 160,000 artifacts.
