Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Fires a Longtime Employee for Requesting a Definition of ‘Systemic Racism’

The once-distinguished museum lands in federal court in a lawsuit over workplace speech and illegal retaliation.  

T here are many reasons to skip museums in giving end-of-fiscal-year gifts. Places like the Getty and the Met, with multibillion-dollar endowments, are worthy but not needy, though the Met is worthy only part of the time.

Also on the no-dough list ought to be college and university museums that stayed shut as long as they possibly could during the Covid calamity. These include museums at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, but the list’s a long, shameful one.

Heroic were museum leaders at the Meadows at SMU, Reynolda House at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University, and the Addison at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., though I’m sure others, like them, opened the minute that state and local public-health zilches decreed they could. Senior staff at most private and public schools viewed Covid as an unexpected but still delightful way to terrorize students, ditch the public, and “work from home,” which could mean ghost-hunting, beekeeping, or collecting celebrity hair, in between Zoom meetings, of course.

I wouldn’t give a farthing, sou, or even a Bulgarian stotinka — worth 1/100th of a penny on a good day — to a museum with a diversity, equity, and inclusion program. I might have considered it a few years ago if the program targeted unfair pay for women, inconsistent evaluation standards, and clubby hiring, but now DEI is a boatload of false values and a racket. It’s the framework for firing competent, hardworking staff who challenge DEI’s toxic pieties. This is unfolding right now at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.

The Atheneum is America’s oldest museum open to the public. It’s got a distinguished history and superb collection. Right now, its extreme DEI regime has landed it in federal court. A long-time, respected staffer questioned the regime and was — within days — fired. She’s arguing that the museum trashed her free-speech rights. I think she has a very good case.

The Atheneum is the poster child for atrocious museum governance. I’ve written about this a few times. Among their many deficiencies, the trustees are apostles in the cult of diversity, which means race-based hiring; equity, which means race explains everything; and inclusion, which, perversely, makes dissent from PC fads a crime. Petty bourgeoisie from the burbs, the trustees tout their virtue like Schwarzenegger once flexed his muscles.

Riotte v. Wadsworth Atheneum is the case. I read the complaint filed by Kate Riotte and the answer provided by Atheneum. They’re public documents. In 2021, Riotte, a white, college-educated woman who was the curatorial department’s administrator, volunteered to serve on the Atheneum’s new diversity, equity, and inclusion task force. After attending meetings for a month, Riotte learned that the museum’s high-salary DEI consultant had, working with the museum’s top brass, developed an equity-and-diversity plan that, she felt, seemed to require race-based hiring.

Riotte, who’d worked for the Atheneum for six unblemished years and steadily advanced in responsibilities, emailed the co-chairs of the DEI task force. She asked, “Why is equity essential for the growth of the Wadsworth Atheneum?” “Equity” meant that all staffers had to land in the same place in terms of work quality, and if they didn’t, racism would be the culprit. “I would think that striving for equity would be detrimental to the museum,” she said.

She asked why advancing equity is attainable, or even desirable, in a museum. Also, she asked how the museum defines “systemic racism,” a term it plans to sprinkle throughout its website. And she requested “more information to help me understand this.” She didn’t send her email to anyone else.

Riotte was naturally in a questioning frame of mind. She knew that hiring by race is illegal. I learned in researching this piece that she’s from Durham, a small Connecticut town just one town away from Ye Olde North Haven, the small town where I grew up and where I lived until I went to graduate school for my art-history Ph.D. in my early 30s. People in small towns in Connecticut aren’t dogmatic, but they do revere hard work and earned achievement. Grousing about grievance is much disliked, as are sleeves soaked with phony virtue.

One co-chairwoman — Anne Rice, the museum’s education director — sent Riotte a list of things to read, which Riotte reviewed. A few days later, Linda Roth, who was Riotte’s supervisor, and Deputy Director of Operations Michael Dudich, who was also the acting HR director, summoned Riotte to a Zoom meeting. The pair acknowledged that some of the terms and themes were complex, commended Riotte for making an honest effort to understand them, and told her that some of her questions showed “a political agenda.” No one asked Riotte whether she’d read the equity resources suggested to her.

They told her that one of the co-chairmen, a “person of color,” was offended. She’d already gotten a bullying email from this man suggesting she favored “the continuation of oppression.” They added that Riotte wouldn’t have much of a museum career unless she embraced “allyship,” which means acknowledging the primacy of racism in America and embracing the DEI agenda.

The aggrieved co-chairman, Joe Bun Keo, is an artist and an art handler at the museum. He’s Cambodian American. I looked at his website. I can’t say he’s a no-talent since I haven’t seen his work firsthand, but, based on my shot-in-the-dark opinion, it looks uninspired and rote. One of his works is a neon sculpture that reads “stupid ass white.” Bernini he ain’t, nor Proust.

In his artist statement, he foregrounds gender, power, the oppressive nature of Buddhism, intergenerational trauma, and Cambodian culture, among a hodgepodge of other things. Though he arm-twisted Riotte, he had the nerve to say he’s empathetic and anti-patriarchy!

Like the curious journalist I am, I read Keo’s entire email. He said he “was quite confused” by her questions, which seem straightforward, but he’s a dope. “From first glance, it can be interpreted as you being a proponent for allowing the continuation of oppression and denial of developmental opportunities for those who have historically been left out of the equation.”

Lots of blah, blah, blah follows about the dominant white-male Eurocentric narrative, police brutality, and how about those sugar bowls? “Why have an exhibition about beautiful porcelain sugar vessels and not discuss the slavery that was rampant during the sugar trade at the time?” he wrote. Well, I can think of a few reasons. Porcelain sugar bowls, say, by Meissen or Sèvres, are art, not artifacts. We study them for their beauty, design flair, palette, provenance, and technical bravura. Together, “slavery and sugar,” while not irrelevant, is so well trodden that it’s become shorthand for all the games in the Oppression Olympics.

What’s the point? That sugar-toothed people of old were bad? That we viewers ought to feel guilty when we enjoy them? Must we endure pious finger-wagging over slavery at every turn?

My mother kept her collection of rhinestone I Like Ike pins in a porcelain sugar bowl tucked in a kitchen cabinet. I’m sure the Caribbean slave trade never occurred to her, nor should it have.

Roth, Riotte’s supervisor, was the curator of European decorative arts for years. She’s very good, and I’m surprised she’s even peripherally involved in this dumb-ass episode. I thought she’d retired, but she’s a director of special projects. I doubt these include her being a party-line enforcer or race-pimp facilitator.

Dudich, the HR and operations guy, is now the director of the Biggs Museum, a tiny place in Delaware. Before he worked in museums, he spent 25 years at GE, which yes-manned itself into oblivion. Dudich sounds like a mediocrity.

Three days after the Zoom meeting, on a Friday, Riotte’s supervisor sent her home early to “self-reflect.” A few hours later, Riotte couldn’t access her museum email. On Monday, Dudich fired her because of “her views on equity and equality.” Later that day, he emailed Riotte, telling her that “while questioning and understanding are acceptable and encouraged workplace behavior, the opinions you expressed in your email . . . were highly confrontational to the museum’s core espoused institutional values.”

Were Riotte’s questions “highly confrontational”? Of course not. The Atheneum’s top brass saw a chance to intimidate the staff through savage retaliation for speech that is, in fact, protected.

Yes, the American Constitution’s First Amendment, protecting freedom of speech, among other freedoms, generally applies only to government abuse. Connecticut, I’m happy to say, applies these federal First Amendment protections, as federal courts have interpreted them, to speech in the private-sector workplace. Retaliation against workplace speech is illegal unless the speech attacks the employer, whether a business or a nonprofit, or it makes working with supervisors or co-workers untenable.

Is the importance of the speech outweighed by the disruption it causes in the workplace? That’s one way an employer and a court can look at it. Speech in an email between two employees is rarely considered disruptive. Riotte asked her co-chairs questions. If Keo was offended by simple questions from a long-time employee, isn’t there something wrong with him?

Riotte is represented by the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit public-interest law firm. It’s dedicated to the defense of individual freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution but too often trampled these days by censors in government and in a politicized private sector. On its board is Robert “Robbie” George, a Princeton professor who fights censorship on campus. Riotte’s not rich. Getting fired from her job ended her museum career. The Atheneum, with millions in the bank, can afford lawyers, however flimsy its defense might be.

Without Riotte’s courage and the CIR’s advocacy, the museum can and will push its extreme race agenda. Alas, since it’s a distinguished museum, the Atheneum needs to be made an example of — for its twisted, abusive governance — for the entire profession to ponder.

I don’t think anyone disagrees on the facts, at least judging from the Atheneum’s answer to the complaint. The Atheneum wants a cap on punitive damages in part because Riotte taped her termination meeting, in violation of Connecticut’s law against eavesdropping. In a world ruled by me, this law wouldn’t apply to skunks.

Riotte wants a jury trial. It’ll happen in a New Haven courtroom, with few latte liberals to be found in a pool heavy on middle-class locals who don’t believe that smarts and striving should be detrimental to success. Not even the Yale professors I know like DEI. They don’t like teaching students who didn’t get there by merit.

I’ll continue to follow this story. I hope Riotte’s legal team puts the chairman of the Atheneum’s board of trustees and its CEO on the stand. They’ve created what seems to me is a terrible, toxic environment.

DEI might sound nice, but it’s poison. It enshrines double standards based on race. It means stealth quotas. It empowers HR bureaucrats whose paychecks depend on grievance and discord. It pressures high-achieving art historians to countenance mediocrity. It facilitates passive-aggressive people who try to win by pretending to lose. It leads to crappy shows and the acquisition of bad art.

Art becomes an illustration of fad political agendas. The country has had an increasingly aggressive affirmative-action regime for 50 years. DEI only turbocharges it for, what, 50 more years?

My advice to Riotte: “Sock it to ’em.” I hope her lawsuit empties the Atheneum’s coffers. In the meantime, look at a museum’s website before you write a check.

If you read sticky-sweet DEI blather, know that it’s doublespeak. And give the money to NR. Or to the Center for Individual Rights, dedicated to Kate Riotte’s fight.

Better still, give to both!