Identity Shows: Invisible Whiteness and Colored Display

During a live nationally televised celebrity fundraiser in 2005, rapper Kanye West harshly criticized the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Departing from a script designed to educate the public about the hurricane disaster, West offered personal commentary about the tragedy challenging the public to donate to the struggling people of New Orleans and offering sharp indictment of law enforcement behavior and the U.S. president. West’s claim “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” was widely publicized after the broadcast. But little attention was paid to West’s full statement, a rant that included, “I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, “They’re looting.” You see a white family, it says, “They’re looking for food…” Why didn’t news outlets examine these words? Why no public discussion of West’s attack of media representation? Is it easier to grab the public’s attention with a titillating sound byte about black victimization, rather than address the subjectivity of television news programming?

Solely reducing Kanye West’s critique to “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” not only disregarded West’s insightful media literacy, it also sold a lot of newspapers. The spectacle of race has always generated buzz, and in America when cleverly packaged, it sells product. There is an interesting correlation between the selective highlight of West’s words and the curatorial framing of shows designed to address race and featuring artists of color. Most race-themed exhibitions don’t include white artists and are rarely conceived with white identity in mind. Rather than address race as a social construction, only the mark of blackness (color) is examined. Disregarding the history of race’s function as a hierarchy of meaning and value, whiteness is left unassigned. The byproduct of such omission suggests that race is an issue for non-whites. And so art exhibitions about race, albeit well intentioned, become a spectacle of otherness—communicating that whiteness means status quo (normal) and non-white implies difference. How does this selective staging of race effect how we perceive images and people? Does such a showcase amount to little more than a cultural safari of victimization?

Challenging the ghettoization of cultural programming is not an effort to transcend race. Cultural production is important and so are the voices of all artists. But it is crucial that curators, and artists avoid the trap of one-sided examinations. When artists participate in limited frameworks, they run the risk of self-exploitation. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, cultural critic bell hooks says, “Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” How do you view the selection of artworks in Bi-Lingual? Does it dare to depart, like Kanye West, from the limited script of most race-based public dialogues? Or does it offer bi-lingual palettes for the public to consume?

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de Moraes, Lisa, Kanye West’s Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC, (washingtonpost.com) Sept. 3, 2005; pg. C01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090300165.html

hooks, bell, Black Looks: Race and Representation. (South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992), pg. 21.

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Ayanah Moor is a visual artist and associate professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Moor’s artwork addresses contemporary popular culture through an interrogation of gender identity and vernacular aesthetics and has been featured in publications such as: Critical Inquiry (University of Chicago Press); Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (Parker Publishing); Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip Hop Generation (Cleis Press) and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (Indiana University Press). Moor completed her BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA at Tyler School of Art.