What would happen to Walker’s art in a world where racism didn’t exist? Does her work help us to realize a problem and to solve it, or does it perpetuate the problem?
Walker’s work tries to force on me differences which I don’t perceive to exist. I see a difference of skin color, but that is really no difference at all. However, it seems that some continue to think that whites have a perpetual debt to pay to minorities for crimes committed 150 years ago. I’m sorry that slavery existed, but why should I feel shame?
If one race is constantly reminding the other of crimes long dead and buried, how will the two ever be reconciled???
Hi, thanks for your comment. An important element to remember here, and one that Walker plays with in her work is the idea that certain bits of American history are not over. While much of Walker’s work takes place in the Antebellum south, the pain she presents on the wall is very much out of the present. The debt that white people owe to brown people is for the racism that pervades our world TODAY, not just that of 150 years ago.
I encourage you (and everyone) to check out one of the Kara Walker related programs that happened last week, now available on the Walker Channel, channel.walkerart.org. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts gave a great lecture called “Violating Black Women’s Bodies: Legacies of Slavery in Contemporary U.S. Society.”
Among her many points is the idea that the sins of slavery have not ended. The racist laws created to hold that system in place formed the backbone of the American legal system that rules over our communities today. Welfare and reproductive policy, mandatory minimum sentencing laws and poor public education all stem from cultural and political divides over race that began with slavery and keep African Americans and other people of color disempowered today. I agree that is isn’t much use in feeling shame about the past. What we need is action about the present.
Thanks for writing. Please keep up the conversation.
Sarah Peters
Assistant Director, Public Programs
Comment by Sarah Peters — April 17, 2007 @ 6:01 pm
The mistake in dealing with contemporary racism is this belief in communities that are so vague they don’t even really exist. It’s human cognitive nature to categorize and catalogue for the purpose of understanding. The problem with categorizing and cataloguing is that it’s neither realistic, nor is it relevant, nor is it remotely true. It’s simply easy. “ Black” is not an identity, it’s an adjective.
It’s the same mistake made by the Regionalist painters of the 1920’s, made again by the social realists in Mexico and Russia and again by the surrealists of Paris. Art should never be about “ us and them” but rather about “ me and not me,” as that’s really where social struggle actually exists.
I would not say that I’m 100% Hispanic American. If anything, I would say that Hispanic America is .00000002% me. There’s a difference.
Comment by Jim Torque — April 21, 2007 @ 2:59 pm
That post was mine, I guess I forgot to attach my name.
My point is that no one owes anyone a debt. Because as long as we continue to push this concept of a ‘debt’ held by one race towards another (whether past or present), how can the gap between them ever be crossed? There are people like myself who believe that no difference exists between one race and another. Yet because I am white, I am lumped in with (what I perceive to be) a relatively small percentage of racist whites. I don’t owe a black any more than I owe to another human being, and that is simply respect towards a fellow human.
I don’t deny that racism still exists. But it goes both ways. Kara’s work seems to be reverse-racism. ‘Shame on me for being white, because white males take advantage of black women.’ In that respect, is she helping to solve the issue, or simply fighting fire with fire?
Comment by Jonathan Mayer — April 28, 2007 @ 12:41 am
Hello,
Your point is an important one, and perhaps one shared by many people in your social location. I don’t think that you are alone.
In my opinion, this social and political phenomenon of racism is not necessarily about white people owing a material “ debt” to people of color because of slavery or European colonial systems of economic advancement, although legal scholars and lawyers involved in the U.S. reparations movement would disagree with me (see work by Dr. Derrick Bell), rather it is about understanding the power of race and racism in contemporary U.S. society and in international contexts as well. Racism is not only about our personal everyday relationships to racist violence, behaviors, and stereotyping, but also our participation or coercion into institutionalized systemic forms of oppression that are intersectional across lines of color, educational advantage, race, gender, sexuality, etc. Specifically, communities of color and working class communities have been historically and are presently constructed and characterized in a variety of ways (in the media, in text books, through legal decisions, urban planning decisions, etc.) as expendable, displaceable, and not profitable. Locally, we can look to the history of the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul, MN and the building of I-94– a practice of uprooting and evicting of African Americans. We might also look to the highly racialized and ethnicized history of immigration and the differences in treatment of undocumented and documented immigrants from different parts of the world today for examples of not only institutional exclusionary and racist policies, but also the root causes of race related crimes in communities and police brutality resulting from very powerful divides along race and other lines of social location. Race is a social location, racism is not. Racism is a system of advancement, of hierarchy, and of exclusion based firstly on race (sometimes determined by color, class, language, and ethnicity).
Further, Race has so much power because it is a made up social construct, that we participate in and has no biological basis, but there are very real material manifestations of racism and racial oppression and sometimes, but not always, it is based on skin color. When we think about who our local governmental officials are, who has had the opportunity to attend colleges for the past 70 years, who our local and federal judges are, and simply who is at the decision-making tables– very quickly we begin to see that it is about who has power, not always social and economic, but who is being represented and who is not, and most importantly why and how. What race and racism both require in order to understand them is that people realize their personal investment and relationships to whiteness and understand that this identity does not exist in a vacuum, but materially in relationship to blackness and brownness. It is constructed inside of a racial hierarchy where it reproduces itself and societal conditions over and over again and limits the ability to move outside of it. This does not mean that this hierarchy does not shift; it is not stagnant and people do battle against it, and in some cases are able to create changes and chip away at its significance. Although I understand race as a social location/identification, at this point in time we are not done with it nor is it possible to transcend it, because it still exists in the form of racism and hierarchies.
I completely agree with you that at times when we talk about “ communities” they are imaginary communities and do not necessarily draw us closer to people who might look like us or with whom we might share things in common. However, there are relationships, at least in the United States, to where we live and who we interact with and for the most part it is with people who have similar social experiences as us, and overwhelmingly because of how race has saturated every social institution historically and presently in this country from housing lending policies to legalized segregation in schools, correlations between what people look like and where they live are very strongly present.
It is possible for individuals to identify as not being racist, but still participate in very exclusionary, race-based, and racist institutions and institutional practices in this society. In other words it is possible to not be a racist in behaviors, but that still does not make one anti-racist in social and political practice or involvement. I think education is such a powerful process in working to dismantle racial oppressions and systems of hierarchy in daily life. Educating ourselves, educating our families, and getting to know people who we might not feel comfortable with or who may not live in our neighborhoods becomes a way to actually create community and not accept the status quo.
I’m excited to see the ways in which this very stuck and unsophisticated dialogue that we are still having about race in this country evolves. There are many coalitional political projects to get involved with locally that don’t take race and identity as the last resort in ordering our lives. For example, the coalitional work of artists from Juxtaposition Arts in North Minneapolis with youth, the Main Street Project, or Youth Farm & Market Project in Minneapolis and St. Paul. These are great organizations to get involved in or to support.
Finally, I think Kara Walker’s work forces us to look beyond the black and white, amongst many things, and beyond simply ascribing race to her characters and into the process of racial categorization that has ordered society and a lot of the world for hundreds of years. I think she makes us sit in an uncomfortable place, and if we want to we can decide to stay there, or we can have difficult conversations with other people and possibly start to dismantle and displace some of the fictions that have been created about people as a result of racial hierarchies. Her silhouettes do not simply speak to those who identify as black or white in some way, but it allows us an incredibly fertile terrain to ask some of the uncomfortable questions about race and a basis from which to propel the conversation to talk about many different forms of marginalization and power. I don’t believe Walker is perpetuating anything that is not already itself being perpetuated in social or cultural discourse. What I believe she is doing is commenting on the tools that influence discourse (power, knowledge, and representation) and telling us to look closer, to never forget, and perhaps to begin to see the ways in which we are all producers of knowledge. Please continue to think critically and question. I also have a lot of unanswered questions that continue to puzzle me. Thank you for your comments.
Freda Fair
Public Programs Assistant
Education & Community Programs
Resources:
Tim Wise, “ Passing the Buck and Missing the Point: Don Imus, White Denial and Racism in America” (I can email you this article if you would like)
The RACE exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota
Writings by scholar and theorist, bell hooks
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Peggy McIntosh, “ Whiteness: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”
David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness
Writings by labor historian Peter Rachleff
Comment by Freda Fair — May 2, 2007 @ 4:50 pm