Following Lawsuit Settlement, Latino Student Internship at Smithsonian Now Open to All Students

The Latino Museum Studies Program undergraduate internship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino has been opened to students of all races after the settlement of a lawsuit that said the program amounted to discrimination, CNN reports.

The lawsuit was filed in February by the Texas-based American Alliance for Equal Rights against the museum’s director, Jorge Zamanillo, and the director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Crosby Kemper. The suit claimed that the program hadn’t hired any non-Latino interns since it began operations in 2022.

“When the Alliance sued,” the American Alliance for Equal Rights said in a statement Wednesday, “the Museum said the internship was ‘for Latina, Latino, and Latinx-identifying undergraduate students’ and focused on ‘increasing the representation of Latina and Latino museum professionals.’” 

However, after it became aware of the suit, Zamanillo and Kemper submitted a brief affirming that “the National Museum of the American Latino does not consider an applicant’s race or ethnicity as a factor for awarding an internship” and “does not collect data on race or ethnicity from the Internship Program applicants.” 

The website for the program now reflects that brief in bold, and the program’s scoring rubric will be updated to reflect that “reviewers should not give preference or restrict selection based on race or ethnicity.”

The charge against the museum’s internship program was led by Edward Blum, the 71-year-old legal strategist and activist who, through a group he founded a group called Students for Fair Admissions, won a Supreme Court battle against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that effectively ended affirmative action admission policies at American colleges.

“Every student who is interested in this area of museum studies should have the opportunity to compete for an internship without their race being a factor,” Blum said in the statement. “Corporations, law firms, academia, and cultural institutions must end these kinds of unlawful, racially exclusive programs and policies.”

A spokesperson for the museum told CNN that the newly added language simply “spells out what had been our practice already,” adding, “The National Museum of the American Latino reaffirmed its longstanding commitment to equal opportunity for all internship applicants, regardless of race or ethnicity.”