on being alive and having to deal with each other

Affirmative action, Studio Museum of Harlem, #BlackExcellence, New Orleans Museum of Art, #DismantleNOMA, Amanda Maples

It starts with seemingly innocuous remarks that seed doubts of your worth. They come from a charitable figure, going out of their way to be there for you when ‘they could do/have better’. You’re dumb and skinny and fat and ugly and embarrassing. You do too much of this and not enough of that. You are lost, a liability. You need them. And they’ve deigned to take on your case pro bono.

So you can’t get upset when they smack you around a little, when they’re overwhelmed by the burden that you are. After all, by choosing to be anywhere near you, they provide cover for the million and one ways in which you are irredeemably inferior, keeping everyone else from taking advantage of what they see (and have made you imagine, too) as your inherent violability. That’s how much they love you. Can’t you see that? You fucking ingrate.

What exactly does affirmative action affirm? Observations from the Black arts.

Universities, we’ve been told, give us opportunities we otherwise would never get, without which we wouldn’t be able to compete in the job market and, by extension, survive. With the reception of that gift, the gift of the degree, the gift of studying alongside (and building relationships with) rich peers ($theymayfundyourprojectwiththattrustfundmoney$), which per the logic of affirmative action just keeps on giving insofar as it (and not our own skills and ability) keep us employed, we accept the responsibility of reinforcing the power of the giver.

Elite universities have, effectively, used affirmative action to buy their would-be critics and groom them to prey on their own.

It’s kind of brilliant when you think about it, in an Abuse 101 kind of way (outlined above), and I’d argue that the institutional capitulation by the Black intelligentsia that we’ve been coerced into following, on the basis of academic theorization, in the two decades since the introduction of the Patriot Act is a performance of trust out of the fear of losing the power that comes from having been “chosen” by academia. It is only a credit to us to have been chosen by Academia if Academia remains unchallenged. Someone with a doctorate said it? Must be true - drop the drones, Barack.

To question the academy that deigned to take us on, in spite of our irredeemability, is to undermine our own power, is to make ourselves violable (which, affirmative action tautologizes, everyone - particularly the white majority - is just waiting to take advantage of). We are in an abusive relationship with white institutions, and if the last week in affirmative action lamentations has shown us nothing else, it’s that many of us like it that way.

Here’s a pattern I’ve observed in Black arts institutions: Black people who graduated from elite universities in the 80s and 90s, palpably insecure about their authority in the world (in that lady-doth-protest-too-much kinda way), ascend through white-run institutions eventually to peak success, which, for most, is the executive leadership of a “Black organization.”

They hire younger Black people who have elected a similar affirmative-action-implied path, which reinforces the perception of the elite institution as purveyor of so-called Black excellence - a perception the employer depends on to minimize competition for their job and to justify what they’re about to put this young person through.

These young hires then have the last few years of their frontal lobe development warped by the experience of abuse at the hands of someone with whom they share an identity, someone whom they’ve long looked up to and aspire to be, before they cycle out to white institutions where their training and networking will continue until their “mentor” retires from her deathbed.

The leader will hand the baton to one of her victims who will post about their gratitude for mentorship, with no mention of the ulcer or the chronic anxiety or the times spent crying in the office bathroom after a particularly stormy staff meeting.

The Black elite of the arts (or humanities, in general) cannot afford to develop a pipeline for Black talent, artists, administrators, or thinkers, that does not fuel that which they credit with their ascendancy: the singular white institution whose brand they rock at any given opportunity and white institutions in general. Without which they believe (true or not) they would have and be nothing.

It is a toxic cycle, a holding pattern, a fix in which Black people’s need for affirmative action has no end. But is it really our need? I think not. Elite institutions need us to believe that they have the unique power to dictate our ability to survive. We could opt out of this belief at any time, kittens.

Studio Museum comes to mind as an example, if you look at the last decade of staff history - who comes in from where and where they go upon leaving.

I met Studio’s executive director Thelma Golden, once, a Smith alum and former Whitney curator, and it was an eye-opening experience. She had been invited to New Orleans in the spring of 2016 by Independent Curators International to speak before a cohort of independent curators about her work. Instead, she spent however long the session was, an hour at least, telling us that there was no such thing as an “independent” curator, that if one didn’t work at a collecting institution they couldn’t rightfully identify as a curator.

Now, I see the value in conserving, interpreting, and presenting work over time and in conversation with other works either in a collection or on loan for other exhibitions that the museum presents with the unique infrastructure that museums have access to (particularly insurance money, climate control, administrators, and conservators). But museums are increasingly limited in the range of discourse they can present, by their board of corporate-types protecting their investments, the funding priorities of the philanthropies that supplement their endowments, and a public increasingly in favor of censorship.

We sat at that Contemporary art Center conference table with Golden, with deep respect and admiration for her, gathered around a shared interest in interpreting and presenting artifacts in ways unbound by institutional policies, practices, and - for those with projects that couldn’t be presented in a building - the material limitations of a collecting institution, and she saw our work as an offense (as evidenced by the defense she mounted for institutional primacy). Golden seemed to have interpreted ‘independence’ as a affront to the path she’d chosen, an unwillingness to be abused in the pursuit of security. How dare we claim membership without having been hazed?

As I’ve reflected on this experience in the seven years since it happened, I’ve come to believe that Golden’s speech was not a warning for us to get back on the straight and narrow of institutional belonging, as much as it was her way of soothing the emotional dysregulation she experienced at the idea that there was another way to participate in public discourse about contemporary art that didn’t leave us beholden to our abusers.

Amanda Maples, white-woman African Art curator

I could draw Amanda Maples, a complete stranger, from memory if I wanted to - the photo of her face has climbed my facebook and instagram timelines so many times in the days since her appointment as New Orleans Museum of Art’s new African Art curator was announced. She’s the museum’s second hire with a lip ring (maybe there are more, but they’ve taken down their staff page from the website), a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion if there ever was one (you go, Susan!). But everyone seems to be most captivated by the juxtaposition of her skin's pallor with the black font of her job title.

The more I saw her face, smiling and unaware of the ire it would one day inspire, the more disturbed I was that it was being shared with the intention to associate her image and her name with this ugly feeling of being slighted on the basis of race. It’s evil eye, plain and simple.

I am not here to defend Amanda, who - as far as I know - has done nothing to offend, besides being hired for a job she appears to be qualified for. But I think there are some intellectual presuppositions on which the idea that her hiring is offensive that we need to walk through to their logical conclusion before we end up buried in the grave we believe ourselves to be digging for an “other.”

For the record: It has never been an NDA-bound trade secret that the New Orleans Museum of Art is a racist institution. All one has to do is finger through their exhibition and programs history online. And certainly any of the, at most, dozen Black people working as administrators in contemporary art in New Orleans know. Unequivocally. NOMA hires Black people who are perceived to be willing victims (and any Black person who has ever applied to work there, does so knowing that they will need to present as such in order to be considered for a position - me thinks they call it code switching). That’s that on that.

But back to the white woman African art curator. NOMA had a Nigerian curator of African Art, Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba, until last year when he left for the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. What did all the Black contemporary art people concerned about Amanda Maples’ hiring do to keep him there? Oh - that’s right, he didn’t fuck with our nigger asses.

Ezeluomba made no effort to build relationships with Black people in contemporary art in New Orleans. In fact, after #DismantleNOMA, he wrote for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune highlighting a different African artifact in NOMA’s collection with each column - an obvious PR counter-measure to undermine the rumors of racism.

But let’s pretend, for the sake of the argument, that being Black is evidence of good character and professional integrity. Africa is a continent of 54 countries, each of those countries is comprised of many distinct peoples. Many Africans take issue with the primacy Nigerians have been granted in international discourse about the continent (arguably a result of Anglophilia) - does that disqualify Ezeluomba from interpreting artifacts with origins beyond Nigeria? He is also, I presume based on the name, Igbo. Does that disqualify him from interpreting artifacts of Yoruba origin, given the history of violence between the two peoples?

Moving on…

If NOMA is so racist (it is), why would we wish that on any Black person? For another notch on the #BlackExcellence headboard? So that they can get fucked while we applaud just how close they got? It’s honestly a bit sadistic.

And if a Black person had been hired, are we to presume (or demand) that their interpretations of African artifacts would be “favorable” to us (whatever that even means given that we’re not PhDs in African art to peer review their work)? How could an intellectual possibly thrive in a context where they’ve been chosen based on a bunch of unspoken presumptions about what, how, where, and whom they think - the biggest presumption of all being that, insofar as the identity on which all of their thoughts are predicated is fundamentally unyielding, so too is the aforementioned what, how, and where. The horror.

I read many comments that suggested a “POC” or “BIPOC” should have been hired. So you mean to tell me anyone from five of the six habitable continents on earth can interpret African artifacts except for Europeans or people of European descent (even though Europe is closer to parts of Africa than other parts of Africa are to parts of Africa - not to mention the distance of most of Asia and all of Australia and the Americas)? The European-controlled slave trade pales in comparison to that of the Arabs (which persists today). Many of them are considered “POCs,” though. Do they get to interpret African artifacts?

Not only is it ridiculous to suggest that anybody but a European can interpret African artifacts, the use of BIPOC undermines the whole argument: if Black people are too mentally warped to just say “Black people” while arguing that African artifacts would be best interpreted by those with an ancestral relationship to the cultures from which they come, then what’s so wrong with Susan Taylor, a white woman, being too mentally warped to hire the Black people that Black people don’t even want to mention (out of fear of offending the “IPOC”)?

If Amanda Maples can’t do a job that she got a PhD to do because she’s white, whose next - Robert Farris Thompson, a white man who was also one of the most significant scholars on Afro-Atlantic visual culture and music ever? Are we supposed to not read Flash of the Spirit now? What about all the Black-authored texts that cite Thompson’s work? Throw those away, too, huh?

I’m not saying Amanda Maples is the next RFT - he seems like a once in a lifetime experience. But if we say that only certain types of people can interpret the work of certain types of people, two dangerous possibilities emerge: (1) We inch a little bit closer to book burnings, and (2) we rob ourselves of new analysis as those people will either be too preoccupied with the defense of their right to have something to say to generate new thought or, if we’re successful in our attempts to silence them, will stop trying altogether.

“Those people,” let me be clear, are not an other. No matter how many critiques of 4th of July we launch each year, to the vast majority of the world, we are Americans. What white people are to us in terms of so-called privilege, we are to many, many more. Are we, too, disallowed from interpreting the art and culture of people who, in some sense or another, “have less” than us (including other people of African descent in the “developing world”)?

Lastly, what are we doing to support Black people in the pursuit of Art History PhDs? Not many people get Art History PhDs, even fewer get Art History PhDs in African Art, even fewer have seemingly well-tilled relationships with institutions and living artists on the continent, even fewer want to work as museum curators (that’s not the only path for an art history phd).

Systemic racism is an easy boogeyman to pit the blame onto, but there are Black institutions with their own systems that have a very narrow pipeline of people they accept (often based on who has already been vetted by a white institution) and/or they lack a strategy (or even an intention or interest) in collecting, caring for in the long term, interpreting, and presenting African artifacts.

For instance, I worked at the highest funded Black arts institution in New Orleans (very briefly before resigning) and suggested to its leader, a Black woman, to get the African artifacts that had been collected by the institutions founders and sat haphazardly clumped together appraised. She felt that the six-month timeline of the Black woman African Art History PhD, a university professor at the time who now is a curator of African Art at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, was too long. She insisted that there was a Black person who would do it quicker and for less money. There wasn’t. It never got done. Could such an institution offer the experience that would cultivate intellectual rigor in a curator of African antiquities?

The human experience is vast, and there are things that we cannot see about ourselves. Will Amanda Maples probably get things wrong? Sure, but who the fuck doesn’t (and again, besides the inter-personal, most of us wouldn’t even know because the experience of being Black does not qualify one to conduct peer review)?

The point of public discourse isn’t to be right, it’s to be open and honest and committed to working with the best information we have access to in order to make sense of this weird ass situation we all find ourselves in called “being alive and having to deal with each other in spite of our pain.” Public discourse cannot exist without a mutual willingness to have our minds changed.

---

Well, this newsletter took some unexpected turns - I was going to write about Nicole Ari Parker in And Just Like That. Whelp. Tune back in on Monday.