Racing My Weekend

Oh lordy, where do I start? Perhaps that's a misleading start to an entry whose length I'm not sure of yet. It's only Saturday (well, Sunday morning) but I've done a lot, thought a lot, and I have to get it down. How long I last, though, is the issue.

My weekend started at 6:05 Friday. I hopped the train uptown a bit to meet Anna at the International Center of Photography. There are a number of exhibits, but the main reason I went was to see White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art. It was good to see a good number of folks there for the same reason, taking in photographs and a couple of installments, video and otherwise, that attempted to shed light on "whiteness" as a concept that has been grossly overlooked in discussions of race. So what is this whiteness thing?

Of course it should be an obvious (center?) point of discussion/contention when we look at race. It's gaining popularity in academia and I've been interested in it for a few years now. My Sociology of Race professor, though, didn't like it as a field of study. I don't really understand that, because its whiteness, the overwhelming acceptance of it, that creates race. In a way. It's the marker by which everything else is compared.

So why does it exist? What mechanisms are in place in society that perpetuate racism? It acts as the constitution, the bible, the bylaw. If you're black, usually, you're also not white. The same with Latino, Asian, Indian, and everything else under this universal sun. This colorful sun that originates from whiteness.It was with excitement I went to this exhbition. Unfortunately, the excitement waned shortly after I began my tour. But that's my fault. I was expecting something different. What that is, I don't know. I enjoyed, appreciated, a few of the pieces. One from the 70s contained a number of photos of a white woman who appropriated a number of characters on a bus. Some white. Some black. The woman was white.

So what did she look like when she was depicting blacks? She looked like a woman in blackface. I couldn't get passed that. She was able to take on various white characters, even playing men at times. When I was looking at each of them, I only saw the clothing.

A white girl posing as a lazy teen and an uptight businessman. I saw no skin color. I simply accepted it as normal. My lens. The photos in which she depicted black folks, young and old, frightened me. She was one shade of black. Her eyes and lips seemed grossly exaggerated because of the darkness of her skin, making the characters she portrayed seem like caricatures of something to fear, rather than to understand. Viewers could undoubtedly understand the whites she played. But the blacks.

I expected a director to yell "cut" and the characters to get up and walk to their dressing rooms to remove the charcoal. I'm not sure what it was about. Another memorable installment was a series of 26 pictures, each containing a picture of a white woman accompanied by a word of her choice corresponding to the alphabet. "Queen," "orgasmic," "barefoot," and "hardcore" are examples of some of the words. The display stuck out for its mere subtlety.

These images are ones I took for granted as not being out of the ordinary. For this very reason, the message was loud in its delivery. As the subject of the exhibit was whiteness to draw attention to its ubiquity, this particular installment forced viewers to see the prevalence of whiteness and should have made them see that it is something to scrutinize. Few of the others stood out. I related in no way to the installment by a mixed-race boy, which included a picture of him as a child sitting between his parents: a white mother and a light-skinned black father.

It included bunnies, which called on the artist's connection to the Uncle Remus/Brer Rabbit books. I could have probably stood to look a little deeper. All of the installments portrayed not only race, but they targeted gender, class, and, barely, sexuality. One in particular included no photos but was rather a collection of tools that depicted a moonshine set-up in the rural south.

The components were painted white. It evoked the concept of "white trash" and the fact that those who fall under this refuse to separate themselves from "whiteness" for fear of being judged as anything but. It forces viewers to consider the very real issue of class and how it is overlooked, but tapped into oh so mildly, where issues of race are concerned. If one is white, he or she is "privileged." This is true in many ways, because there seems to be a checklist people run through when determining how to treat others. Not everybody, but for the most part. Black or white? Man or woman? Gay or straight? Rich or poor?

The description of this installment challenges that notion, though, suggesting there is a separate culture within whiteness whose inhabitants fail to uphold acceptable modes of existence that determine whiteness. I'm no art critic. These are just some thoughts a day after going through the exhibit on a not-that-cold New York evening.

Anna and I then went to Coliseum Books for a little chat. I looked forward to a calm evening at home, one in which I would write, write, write. I wrote one fucking sentence that I will probably end up deleting when I go back to it. So I decided to just watch television. I was flipping away and for some unfortunate reason stopped on the news. A woman was murdered a couple of nights ago during a mugging that went worse. (I wanted to use "awry" but doesn't having reached the mugging point mean something already went awry?)

The tragic death of this beautiful, blond, 28-year-old aspiring actress has received much attention here. Apparently, she got in between the assailants and her fiancee and was shot in the chest. I watched this news report with interest, wishing, perhaps, she had just let them demand what they wanted and then leave. But then the newscast cut to an interview taped earlier with the fiancee. Viewers were treated to about three minutes on the story.

I watched him talk about the details of the incident, feeling sad for him as tears welled up in his eyes as he told the reason why he's doing these interviews. Hopefully, the people involved in the mugging but not the extra violent aspect of it, will come forward. The report came to an end with a conclusion by the late-night newscasters. And then I started yelling. Ok, I didn't yell, but I started talking to the television in an elevated tone, not concerning myself with the fact that my roommate and her girlfriend were just next door being in love with each other (sigh). Don't people get killed every day? Why don't we hear about their stories? A seven-year-old girl was stabbed allegedly by her father.

We got 25 seconds of an interview of her grandfather. Excuse me? Oh, she's black, by the way. We got a still photo of her and a mug shot of her father. Not to mention the poorly edited footage of her grandfather. And that was it. White girl killed. Tragic. Minutes upon minutes of valuable news real estate to lead off the half hour. I should get cable and follow this more closely just so I can get pissed off every night.

It's a shock to hear of the young girl's death, but somehow I imagine the media's spin of it leaves folks saying, "that's sad," and then leaving them thinking, "that's not surprising." But not this beautiful woman in the lower east side. Couldn't it have been anyone else but her? I wonder how much attention it would have received if a group of black men was mugged and one met his death? Would they have been depicted as clubbing thugs out for an evening of dancing, alcohol and women who deserved the attack? Or a group of Latinos? Or both.

Men and women? Black and Latino. Or, do I dare say, gays? How much media attention would those tragedies have yielded? Whiteness. That was Friday. And I have reached the end for this morning. I'm tired. It's 5 a.m. Saturday will have to wait till Sunday.