Will — or should — the United States’ current climate of potentially explosive racial tension affect the ways in which critics, curators, researchers, teachers, and other specialists in the world of art and culture think about and discuss their respective subject areas? In the visual arts, that’s a question that, in their own ways, art museums in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Atlanta, as well as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are now effectively exploring as they make room in their collections for numerous works by self-taught American artists of African descent from the Deep South.