Demond Wilson played Redd Foxx’s son, Lamont, in Sanford & Son. One line that’s rung in my ears was when Lamont asked, “I read Life Magazine. Do you read Ebony?” It was, of course, a false equivalency, but it made a point, that black people know white culture because it’s the culture of American society.

Whites, however, can happily go through life without ever having to know, or understand, that there is another culture, black culture, that never touches their world. But it surely touches your world if you’re black. Before you start calling me names for saying this, it’s not a political position, but merely descriptive.

It’s one of the first things a criminal defense lawyer comes to realize in order to serve his clients, because cops bust blacks far more than whites, they are our clients, and we need to understand their world to be capable of representing them. Whether we want to or not, we are compelled to see their world in context, as it explains the basics of thought and conduct of our clients. If we don’t know why they do what they do, we can’t help.

Our clients aren’t a race or a culture, but just people. We get to know them as people. Some we like. Some we don’t. Some are smart, funny, the sort of men and women you like to hang out with. Others, not so much. You know, just like real people.* 

The Smithsonian has opened its homage to black Americans, officially called the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Unofficially, it’s called the Blacksonian, because the full name is too long and unwieldy, or even the NMAAHC, because it doesn’t roll off the tongue. Frankly, Blacksonian is more witty anyway.

It’s a hot ticket, according to the New York Times.

The wait to create a national museum of black history and culture was decades long. And the result amounts to a major bureaucratic, academic and emotional achievement. Now everybody wants in. So some of us have to wait.

Any time someone has to wait to get into a museum because of its popularity is a good thing. It’s good that people leave their homes on occasion. It’s better still that they do so to learn something. And where better to learn than a museum?

But imagine walking the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art and instead of seeing Picasso’s “Man with Blue Guitar,” you saw a sign describing it and telling you what an important painting it is. What if this was an active decision, that someone decided it was more important to impress upon visitors to MOMA the value of modern art in their lives than to actually see art?

Wesley Morris spends three paragraphs up top of his article on the Blacksonian describing the architecture, the aluminum siding, of the building, with this resplendent description:

In the course of a day, depending on the weather and the light, that aluminum skin turns every shade of that color. In the sunlight, it’s golden, sepia in the shade, red-bone when it’s overcast. At dusk, it’s mahogany and deep chestnut after a cloud gobbles up the sun. The building can be all of these browns without ever getting to black, as if it knows that no black person is actually, phenotypically black. So the building, a mighty, physical construct, memorializes a figurative one. “Black” is the concept that gets unpacked, rebuilt and celebrated within the museum.

It’s moving, beautifully written and yet trivial. This isn’t an architecture lesson, but a review of a museum, and the prime real estate is obsessed with how the sun reflects off the aluminum siding? Could it get more trivial? Yes. Yes it could.

Inside, there’s more waiting to be done — for the very good restaurant, for the ladies’ room, for entry to the museum’s deep lower levels. Building waiting into the experience feels right for a place that tells the story of a people who’ve had to wait for everything else.

Building waiting into the experience of reading about it too, I guess. Because we’re already deep into the review and not yet a word about what the museum offers. Can it possibly be that…bad?

During that wait for the underground galleries, natural impatience threatens to upstage the human majesty of it all. You don’t know why it’s taking so long to get there. Once you reach the entrance, you see. You’re waiting for an elevator. The Blacksonian has one pivotal conceit, one metaphorical device that you need to embrace despite its hokiness, despite its comical proximity to a set of stairs, and it’s the elevator.

The elevator is an enormous glass box that comfortably fits about 30 people. The operator welcomes you to a time machine that’s going to carry you from the 21st century to the 15th. It was a device I knew I’d bought into when the operator asked whether we were ready, and I honestly couldn’t say that I was. Despite waiting all morning for this — despite waiting all my life, really — I was overcome with stress.

The museum has 37,000 artifacts in its collection. What they may be is unclear. These are the things one might suspect the museum to show, but someone decided instead to tell you instead of show you.

The Blacksonian reveals a wicked, poetic sense of humor about this history. You exit that long, tight, airless gallery into a huge open space with virtually no ceiling, and you realize you weren’t breathing. And then you catch your breath only to look up and see, on a platform, a statue of Thomas Jefferson.

Arrayed behind him are rows and rows of bricks painted with the names of some of his slaves — Hercules and Jupiter and lots of Sallys. Surrounding him are equally proportioned statues of Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Banneker, Phyllis Wheatley and the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture — black people the museum argues are equally important. They loom near Jefferson. They haunt him.

These rows of bricks with painted names make a point, about America, slavery and founding father Thomas Jefferson. But the bricks aren’t artifacts. Somebody bought some bricks and painted a bunch of names on them to make a political point. It’s not that the point isn’t valid or important, but it’s not a painting by Picasso, but a sign telling you how to think about the painting.

We call this place a museum, but to behold its impregnability, to feel centuries of pain and pride, to receive the story of how black people helped forge this nation (first by whip then by will), to find, at the twilight of one historic presidency and the dawn of what promises to be a very different one, that the forging must (must) continue — to see that metal gating reaching up, up, up — is to sense that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture really should have an additional name, one worthy of all that forging and hammering and ironing out. It should also be called the Blacksmith.

Call it whatever you want, but what it’s not is a museum. The message may be worthy, and maybe it has the artifacts one might hope to see in a museum, the ones that show you instead of tell you, history. It probably could be a museum, maybe a great museum, but when the entirety of its historical collection is glossed over in a paragraph,** then it’s not a museum. Which is unfortunate, as this is a forsaken aspect of American history that should be seen.

Even if it’s fashionable to go to Blacksonian, you still won’t know what’s in the pages of Ebony. Or why a black guy looks at the same thing as a white guy, like, oh, a cop, and sees something very different. Or maybe there is a real museum there, but it wasn’t worth writing about. Wouldn’t that be ironic?

*As opposed to the caricatures or stereotypes that others see when they tell you all about black people. Not that other white people don’t still tell us about black people, because Dunning-Kruger.

**What actual historical artifacts can be found inside Blacksonian?

The time machine transports you to other places — to an old slave cabin, a heartbreakingly perfunctory bill of sale for a black girl, the coffin of young, murdered Emmett Till, to photograph after photograph of slaves who radiate a kind of melancholic neutrality. Encountering so many long faces makes you aware of the length of yours. They also dare you to wonder: Who, among these ancestors, was the first to have the audacity to be pictured with a smile?

Beyond that, who knows?