Teaching Race

Teaching race in any classroom is hard.  It's a fraught subject, based on how we see ourselves and how others see us, and how we use that knowledge of ourselves and others.  I consistently walk into this section aware that I am a white woman and that most of my students are visibly other ethnicities and races.  Race suddenly looms larger than it should in the dynamic of the classroom because I am not just the teacher but the Caucasian teacher, asking questions and demanding answers of my students, my Black and Latino students.  We begin with the lights on, a rarity in an art history classroom.  But I want them to be able to see me as we discuss the power differences in self-identifying vs. being labeled, in prejudice vs. racism, the idea of stereotypes and their cultural resonances.  

Often, I've been teaching a chronological survey so they see Henry Ossawa Tanner with American Realist/Impressionists like Eakins and Homer; we talk about Jacob Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance.  I started there today (at least briefly as this is a contemporary art topics class).  What strikes me though about Tanner is that his awareness of self is well within the artistic mainstream of Impressionism--gentle bonding genre scene of an old man teaching banjo to a boy in the idiom of light and shadow and loose brushstrokes.  I think it's important to see Tanner as trying very hard to be the man his White colleagues think he can't be, the man who feels compelled to leave the US for the greener-grass of France.  I moved on to Lawrence, who in the 1940s Migration Series, sees somewhat more openly the utopian longing of the move North, the racism both within the established Northern Black communities and the race riots sparked with Whites in cities like St. Louis.  Lawrence has a self awareness that was new and is important.

But part of me wanted to shock them into talking so I started with Carrie Mae Weems and the series, "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried," 1995.  Appropriation is a theme we've been discussing so this was important. Made for Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz in 1850 to "prove" the racial inferiority of Blacks, they are "scientific" daguerreotypes that denied the personhood of these slaves.  Weems frames them within another image--an African woman--at the beginning and end to suggest heritage lost and mourned.  

My students looked at this image from the series:

They acknowledged the visual of the ropy scars from beatings but had no context at all for the words.  They did not know who Duke Ellington was; a few had heard of Billie Holiday.  None of them knew what the "strange fruit" was.  So I played the song and spoke the lyrics.  (Hurrah for YouTube).

We moved from there to David Hammons, an artist I almost never have time to teach but this is a special topics class.  Plus, he's rarely (if ever?) represented in survey books because of the largely political nature of his work.  We started with the seminal work, "Spade with Chains" from 1973.

They eventually got around to working on farms and chains of slavery.  They had seen no African masks so the connections there were ones I needed to make for them.  But they also had never heard the word "spade" in its derogatory meaning.  (So I made the computer users look it up in the Urban Dictionary.)  Age matters--when I was a kid, "spade" was still recognized; anecdotally, I suspect these kids are far more inured to variations on nigger, which was so pejorative when I was a kid that I never heard it, much less from my father in his own prejudices and jokes.

Finally, we ended today's class with Hammons' piece "In the Hood", from the Fresh Hell exhibit in 2010 (a piece which I have since learned dates back to the 1990s).

 For them, they jumped quickly to the Grim Reaper--faceless, deathly.  I asked them if it reminded them of the news and Trayvon Martin, seeing it now.  It seemed so fresh in my mind, and so much an evocation of the complications of race in America, with an African-American victim, an Hispanic-American perpetrator, concealed carry/stand your ground laws (and the economic class issues that drive them).

And about half the class looked at me blankly.  A few knew who I was speaking of and filled the rest in and we went on (actually, we stopped with this image but will come back to race on Friday).

Are they forced to reinvent their racial identities anew because they cannot see where they have grown from?  If my students don't know the history of race besides "the Civil War ended slavery" and "Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for desegregation", are they condemned to repeat the pain and sting of racism?  How can they not know the history happening around them, at this moment?  This is their lived context.  These events will be for them the Rodney King of the 1990s, the Willie Horton of the 1980s and 1970s, Eldridge Cleaver of the 1950s/60s.  When do they move from living in the moment to looking back at the moment to understanding the chain of moments?  When does living the history make it something other than just "OLD" and "A LONG TIME AGO"?

And this is why, every year, despite my own discomfort, despite my own frustration with what they don't know, I teach this material again.  Because we need--as Americans--to see how our countrymen see history, the country, the world.  (By the way, on Friday, we'll also talk about Asian-Americans and Native Americans and contemporary imagery.)