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Last week, Samuel Redman, associate professor in the UMass Amherst history department, was quoted in two articles related to the ethics of how human remains are handled by museums, educational institutions, and educators.

On April 20, the New York Times published an article about museums dealing with human remains of enslaved Africans. In it Redman, author of the 2016 book Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, says recent moves by Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Smithsonian Institution to develop new policies to honor and remember enslaved Africans whose remains are in their collections, represents “a historical tipping point.”  He says, “It puts into shocking relief our need to address the problem of the historical exploitation of people of color in the collecting of their objects, their stories and their bodies.”

On April 23, the Guardian published a story about the bones of Black children killed in a 1985 bombing by Philadelphia police, which are being used by a professor in his anthropology classes at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton without the consent of living parents or relatives. Redman says, “There are people alive who are affected by this, not just in an emotional way but in a trauma-inducing way that could be harmful. The notion of ‘do no harm’ should be part and parcel of our research and teaching – we need to wrestle with this problem much more completely.”