“In particular, indigenous peoples and people of color become the occasion by which the white subject can self-reflect on her/his privilege.” – Andrea Smith,“The Problem With Privilege.”
The post I wrote over the summer about Detroit was nicely picked up by Culturebot, and was praised by a lot of my friends. Soon after I put it online, I had a conversation with a colleague in that city – also white, like me - and a longtime activist and artist. We discussed a few gaps I might have left open, a few questions I couldn’t answer, or oversimplifications I might have made. At the same time, I noticed that most of the people visibly approving or championing the post were white.
I wonder how my point of view was impacted by the access I
have to certain forms of societal opportunities as an educated white person of
some means. By ‘some means’, I’m specifically talking about the education I
had, and the access to social and job networks granted to me by my education,
and other opportunities. No, I’m not rich, but money isn’t everything.
In the last post, I wrote about artists I’d met through the Kresge
Fellowships, for whom I teach a yearly workshop. My Detroit friend and
colleague pointed out that, while the fellowship is of tremendous value there,
the language of those fellowships – their guidelines and mission – are the
language of a particular kind of cultural norm – a mostly white, mostly
educated norm. Kresge is, of course, not alone here, but just my closest
experience at hand.
These opportunities are great. The people who get the award,
all of them, are remarkable artists, all deserving, regardless of their level
of access. But as an example and embodiment of the seemingly subtle (but not
subtle if you’re black or brown) ways that exclusion takes place unintentionally,
without even anyone needing to discuss it, Kresge, like many grantmakers, might
have some more work to do. And my practical experience in that one city brings
up questions for me about the way many funders and their guidelines interact with
diverse communities. I hope anyone reading this from that community can take this inquiry in the spirit of generous progress.
Another way to put it is, in a city that’s 80%
African-American, the grant recipients are largely not African-American. Again,
it’s not that the intentions or practices of the foundation are excluding black
people by design. It’s that they don’t even have to. Nor am I suggesting that
the population of grantees should necessarily be an exact reflection of the
overall population, just that the disparity seems glaring. A starting point to
unpack the problem is this: that the way the grant is positioned and described is
race neutral, yet the results of the process are not. Because nothing is.
For those of us in the middle of it, whose intentions are
100% positive, the critique here can be mystifying. What I would say is that,
if we should look at the language funders use, and the language surrounding
concepts and trends like “social practice”, “community engagement” and
“artistic excellence” as being in part specific to a particular set of people, then
issues of unintentional exclusion might start to make more sense. Or, put
another way, as an African-American colleague said to me at a conference
recently, “Social practice. We’ve been doing social practice for a long, long time. We just didn’t call it that.
Now we can’t get in the door.”
I don’t know answers for Detroit. I’ve seen and read work by
people like Grace Lee Boggs and Invincible, Allied Media and the US Social
Forum, as well as smaller collectives and even individual activists like Bill
Kellerman. I’ve met and loved the work of artists and gardeners galore, and I’ve
been visiting with my in-laws for a bunch of years. But in the larger
discourse, I keep seeing a kind of blind adherence or a resignation to market
principles (profits over people, business start-ups over needs and services, though
perhaps this time couched in a comfortable scruffy hipster coffee shop instead
of a casino), and to the rhetoric of ‘opportunity’ and ‘entitlement’ over
justice, equality or democracy.
“…our project becomes less of one based on self-improvement or even collective self-improvement, and more about the creation of new worlds and futurities for which we currently have no language.” – Andrea Smith, “The Problem With Privilege."
There is a dynamic and almost dialectical tension in the
city that is palpable and painful – between the rhetoric of improvement and the
continued desperation; between the fact that people are making things happen
everyday that do not conform to what we think of as renewal, but those same
people are largely shut out of the official process of renewal and salvation
the city proposes. Because those people are engaged in daily acts of renewal,
and daily acts of resistance, does not mean they are doing okay. The system
doesn’t work in Detroit. Other systems are forming. Both of these facts
highlight the ongoing racial scars in our history, our present, and perhaps our
future.
The Questions
The Questions
I ask readers,
especially white readers, the following questions. People of color have been
asking them and answering them for a long time. Whether or not you’re in the
arts, these are questions I actually don’t know the answers to, and I think
they’re worth thinking about. There will not be a test, or there already is.
What do you feel responsible for, politically?
What don’t you feel responsible for?
Why?
How do you benefit or suffer because of restrictive
offerings?
What is the cost of making politics solely about economic
impact?
What is the cost of making politics about ‘the best we can
do,’ ‘the sensible solution,’ ‘the most we can hope for?’ What have we lost by
our pragmatism?
What are many well intended people forgetting when it comes
to race and class, when it comes to trying to remake, renew, or simply
re-engage a place like Detroit?
What are the unspoken assumptions about what’s possible in
the realm of what we now call “politics’, when it comes to Detroit’s future,
and the future of cities in general?
How is the language behind certain opportunities offered by
well-intentioned bodies – foundations and government agencies offering grants and fellowships,
educational institutions offering new models, bodies politic changing
governance to surmount a real problem – restrictive or exclusive to the
underclass, however unintentional or covert those restrictions might be?
How are you creating opportunities for people unlike
yourself to have the systemic, embodied power that you have?
Do you feel you ought to be doing “more?”
Do you feel you ought to be doing better?
What do you assume to be true about the necessity of the
entrepreneurial spirit, the profit motive, competition?
What are the corollary benefits to being white, over and
above the color of your skin?
Have you accidentally internalized the dominant rhetoric
about poverty?
Does some part of you believe it’s a choice to remain poor?
Do you believe that there is a level playing field?
Really?
Further Reading
