The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum is not actually a Museum yet. Set up by Congress in 2020, it is according to its website “at least 10 years” from having a building. In Who Will Win In A Museum Fight: Women Or Latinxes? last year, Steve Sailer noted that a fight is going on about if the available prime location will instead go to the new National Museum of the American Latino.
However, the money is rolling in—$55 million so far from the usual type of donors. And last Monday, March 13th we learned Nancy Yao Named First Director of the New Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum.
First Generation American (possibly immigrant - mother took English lessons). Last 8 years running ethnocentric Chinese in America Museum.
— Patrick Cleburne (@PCleburneVdare) March 13, 2023
Moral: No Historic American Nation members need apply. https://t.co/8xE4LORzEv
This appointment of course is a vicious insult to the probably thousands of better qualified white women, particularly of Founding Stock origin. They might reasonably have expected to head this major institution, which if it has any intellectual integrity at all, has to be primarily about the activities of their ancestors.. Indeed, it raises serious doubts about what is intended.
In her thanks quoted in the announcement above, Nancy Yao said she was
Indebted to Lonnie Bunch, Kevin Gover …and interim director Lisa Sasaki
Lonnie Bruce, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is black.
Kevin Gover, Under Secretary for Museums and Culture, is “a citizen of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.”
Lisa Sasaki, director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, is ethnically Japanese.
Is the Smithsonian under a Minority Occupation Government?
This would certainly explain the appointment of Nancy Yao (who generally seems to go under her married name of Nancy Yao Maasbach: apparently the Smithsonian PR people did not like that).
Yao was born in Flushing, NY in 1971 or ’72, to Chinese immigrants so recent that as a schoolgirl she was helping her mother learn English. Her father had a job with Pan American World Airways, which enabled the family to spend the summers with relatives in Hong Kong and Taiwan [Nancy Yao Maasbach ’99, by Rebecca Beyer, Yale School of Management, January 18, 2021]. (She observes in this interview that her college visit to the School of Management there in 1997 was her first trip to Connecticut,) In her MBA course and in her Undergraduate course at Occidental College Yao stressed Chinese subjects. Her decade-long career in Finance was focused on China, including several years living in Hong Kong.
She has no academic qualifications in American History.
From 2015 to the present she has run the Museum of Chinese in America, a tiny New York operation taking a magnifying glass to the Chinese immigrant experience in this country.
Actually, Nancy Yao comes across in interviews as rather engaging, not the usual conceited grievance-driven harridan. In an interview given to Stony Brook University’s Women in US-Asian Relations Oral History Project she says
I’m Christian. My parents aren’t but I am. I went to church on my own from a very young age.
and says
I wanted to leave Goldman [Sachs] because I… kind of felt like my personality was changing a little bit, and I didn’t like that about myself… for some reason the culture was affecting me in a way that I felt like I wasn’t being the best person I could be… [“Nancy Yao Maasbach,” Women in US-Asian Relations Oral History Project, March 21, 2023]
which is greatly to her credit. And of course she has married a white man with a Dutch surname.
But as an entrepreneur in the ethnic spoils game, she has certainly smelled the coffee. Jumping on the BLM bandwagon, she reopened the Museum of Chinese In America after COVID with a me-too exhibit, Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tides of Racism. The top photo on this account is of an Asian woman holding up a sign reading “Yellow Peril supports Black Power.”
An example of the Coalition of the Fringes: black crime victimizing Asians has been a Thing for over a hundred years, but clueless youth are demonstrating against "whiteness". pic.twitter.com/Qryj3lOap9
— VDARE (@vdare) March 21, 2023
Yao was rewarded by an op-ed slot at the New York Daily News in which she parroted the party line:
The pandemic began in 2020 with an outburst of anti-Chinese racism from the former president, which helped to lay the kindling for where we find ourselves today…
There has always been an undercurrent of prejudice toward Asians and Asian-Americans in some corners of New York City and in America, but the pandemic has created a petri dish where such hatred can grow and fester… I am terrified to use mass transit following those recent crimes against people who look like me.
[To combat anti-Asian hate, teach its roots, by Nancy Yao Maasbach, February 4, 2022] [Archive link]
She concludes by demanding another layer of guilting be laid on White American schoolchildren (in addition to the black and Holocaust brainwashing):
It starts in our classrooms. We must all do our part to create more space for a more diverse and inclusive American narrative. We must make this education accessible if we hope for respect and acceptance to stop hate crimes.
In an even more virtue-signaling tweet, she says
If Nancy Yao indulged in intellectual honesty, or had some scraps of gratitude to the people who created the Institutions from which she is benefiting so much, she might have noted that both the “hate crimes” cited in her Op Ed were committed by blacks (see here and here). And indeed that the de-policing of blacks in NY is the main cause of the present massive deterioration in the city.
But if she had said that, the Smithsonian’s top black, Lonnie Bruce, would have vetoed her appointment to this plum job.
The direction the Smithsonian management wants the Museum to go is clearly demonstrated by the four picture sequence at the top of the website at present.
The first is a group of five unidentified young black women.
The next is of a black female musician.
The third is of Bessie Coleman , an early black aviator killed in a plane crash in 1926 after five years of stunt flying.
The fourth is a generic poster for the Museum store.
Perhaps under Nancy Yao’s leadership some Asian women will appear?
VDARE.com has been reporting that the Smithsonian has been moving in an Anti-American direction for a number of years. See
History at the Smithsonian is being reduced to antiquarianism—an obsession with quaint details at the expense of weight and perspective. Apart from early aviator Bessie Coleman, a truly classic case was discussed by Steve Sailer in ”The Mother of Modern Medicine.” This involved the Smithsonian’s hyping of Henrietta Lack, whose claim to the title they gave her was that she got cancer and died.
So, no white woman to lead the American Women’s History Museum (forget about a man!). And on present indications, whites will appear only as a foil for Coalition of the Fringes Triumphalism.
This is the Great Replacement at work.
Email Patrick Cleburne.
