ANTHROPOLOGISTS SAY WILLIAMSBURG PORTRAYAL OF BLACKS IS `LESS REAL'

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 9, 1993                   TAG: 9301090153
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 6   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WILLIAMSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium
ANTHROPOLOGISTS SAY WILLIAMSBURG PORTRAYAL OF BLACKS IS `LESS REAL'
Colonial Williamsburg presents black history as a guess supported by sketchy documents and artifacts, while white history is made to seem much more certain, three anthropologists say.
However, exhibits and dramatic portrayals of the life of white residents in the colonial capital are also guesses based on documents and artifacts, they said in an article in "American Ethnologist."
Eric Gable of Sweet Briar College and Richard Handler and Anna Lawson of the University of Virginia wrote the study after 22 months of field work. They also plan to write three or four books about modern Williamsburg and its approach to the past.
"From our perspective, every building, room and exhibit at Colonial Williamsburg is, and must necessarily be, an interpretation of the past rather than a . . . replication of it," they wrote.
But in practice, Colonial Williamsburg exhibits and guides emphasize the uncertainty when dealing with black people and events, but not white ones, the anthropologists said. The effect is to reinforce the false reality of white history, they said.
The article discussed the presentation of the George Wythe house, which is shown as it is assumed to have looked in 1770. The occupants of the house that year included Lydia Broadnax, Wythe's slave cook, according to the journal.
When the anthropologists toured the house, they found a bedroom said to belong to a boarding student. It was decorated with a cricket bat and crumpled sheets of paper. A guide told visitors the boarder "was a less than assiduous student, always a bit behind."
But there is no record that any white students lived there that year, the anthropologists said.
The presence of slaves in the house is only "suggested" by a bedroll in a corner and some rumpled clothes and a wash bucket in the master's bedroom.
"Slaves become ghosts, conjectural personages," the anthropologists wrote.
The anthropologists say the discrimination they criticize is a byproduct of Colonial Williamsburg's well-meant efforts in recent years to increase and improve its portrayal of black history.
Colonial Williamsburg has been working with black history since the mid-1970s and established an all-black Department of African-American Interpretation and Presentation in the 1980s.
Cary Carson, Colonial Williamsburg's vice president for research, said he feels the article provided the foundation with "a fresh perspective on something we were much too close to see for ourselves."

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB