Success Quote by Katherine Dunham

Dunham’s sentence moves with the logic of choreography: recognition is not a trophy, it’s a reordering of space. Coming from a dancer who built a career out of insisting Black movement traditions were modern art, not “folk color,” she’s talking about visibility as infrastructure. “Recognition for themselves and their backgrounds” signals the fight against the default setting of American culture, where Blackness is treated as either a problem to be managed or an ornament to be consumed. She wants naming, lineage, and credit - not just representation, but authorship.

The key phrase is “relationships with other people in the world.” Dunham spent years in the Caribbean studying Haitian and Afro-diasporic dance on its own terms, then translating it for stages that often preferred sanitization. She’s pushing back on the idea that Black culture is local, marginal, or only legible through white approval. Relationship here means belonging to global networks of history, migration, ritual, and intellect. It’s also a quiet correction to the isolating story America tells about Black life: that it begins and ends as domestic racial conflict.

“Thus lose some of their alienation” is deliberately modest. She doesn’t promise liberation through a museum; she claims a measurable reduction in estrangement. The museum she praises functions as civic counter-memory - a public site where Black life isn’t an exhibit of suffering but a record of complexity. In “this town,” she’s pointing at the politics of place: recognition isn’t abstract, it’s fought for block by block, institution by institution.