White Folx on Zoom
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[ 10 min ]
10 am, June 10th, 2024.
White folx on Zoom
Some months ago I found myself in a short dialogue between a couple curators looking for artworks that would "stir controversy". Our dialogue landed on the topic of cultural appropriation. I mentioned that I have made several works in the past that I now consider controversial, but that I would never put them in a show purely to cause controversy. Namely because they were derived through a process of a layman individual attempting to make sense of a world so lost of its senses, in the odd isolation of the Dutch art-scene.
I’ve made things and wrote things under the passion of inspiration, under the craving of a more sensous world, lacking the guidance of elders and traditions and initiation, growing up in a place void of land-based connection and ancient wisdoms.
As a young person with a sensitivity for the voices and sentiments felt in the outdoors, I have always thought of having a kinship with the practices of shamanism and animism. Practices that I did not find through any source indigenous to the Netherlands. Like many, I set out into the world for countless trips to places faraway to search for stuff I felt I needed to exist in this bleak Neo-liberal and sober cultural landscape.
Mind you, we live below sea-level and we imagine ourselves on top of the world, rationally fending off the crumbs of a dying and old Western paradigm crashing as we speak.
But to put work like that in a show cause the curators want to cause a controversy? Yikes.
Tragically enough, more than often the dialogue on cultural appropriation merely focusses on what we can’t or shouldn’t do, or on who owns and doesn’t own something, rather than why the awareness of cultural legacy and continuation matter so much in the first place.
Appropriation
While we have many passionate advocates that speak either on behalf of the rightfulness of ownership and many who are passionate about remaining the owner of things, what is often overlooked in this battle of who is right and wrong is the very reason why we talk about and wish to raise awareness of appropriation in the first place. Why it matters.
We might know of examples of indigenous groups who’ve had their entire cultural regalia stolen and then trademarked by Western fashion companies, or the countless Indigenous people residing in reserves without rights or power while their rituals are selling across the world as a means of personal development.
Yes, we white folkx growing up under Capitalism feel a humongous thirst for spirit, for connection and community with the world and each other - although we often don't know this about ourselves yet. It's true, capitalism is truly the opposite of community and life and this is where we grew our sense of selfhood.
So I understand our craving. Like you, I’ve tracked practices and cultures that supplied me with substances that seemed to be antidotal to the soullessness of the West. And me and you are not new at this. It is also not merely a trait of white Westerners. Everyone is curious for the world in their ways, as they are curious for who they are themselves.
Yet it is striking, how we end up, through various attempts at decolonizing, at reproducing the very merits of the West we try to deconstruct: ownership, bloodlines, DNA tests, cancellations, ridicule, policing, etc. Or worse, turning the entire effort of this difficult cultural work into a topic of pun and controversy for the sake of a controversial artshow?
Why? Because White uneasiness is relevant for the artistic landscape at a time of genocide, global climate catastrophe and overal rising fascisms?
Sigh.
Although it matters to be critical and to question, especially those with tremendous privilege in the world, we can not deconstruct something like appropriation using colonial/western values as the parameters of what is right, wrong - and true, even. The discussion about cultural appropriation is important, but at the same time talking about who “owns" something runs the risk of reproducing deeply colonial sentiment.
I understand why some people want to question the debate, question the work that threatens their privileges, their "freedom". But both the hyper-critical woke workers and the cynical curators who wanna stir controversy seem to just nibble at the tail ends of what this work is about.
Yes, the art scene in the Netherlands is quite particular at the moment, a little isolated and a little anal around the ownership and width of narratives and identities, poster-facing people and pigeon-holing practices to fit critical and guilt-laden curatorial narratives.
It seems as if Western discourse eats itself up like the ouroboros that entwines the world’s oceans with it serpentine body.
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Decolonisation
To me, the point of decolonizing, and the point of this writing, is not to produce a stagnant world of rightful owners on the one hand and guilty folks on the other. Not do I seek to promote or regain a "lost freedom of expression” or to absolve us of being culprits or wrongdoers. In fact my critique is not a critique at all, rather an attempt to find a passage deeper below the surface of the discourse, into what I consider to be actual decolonized space: intimacy with the great community of life.
I’ll get to it in a bit, cause I got interrupted by this:
Someone in the zoom actually said: “We are not allowed anymore to freely create," before they continued to say that it was a sad thing that we are under the “scrutiny of these rules of appropriation”.
Yes, it was a white middle-aged man uttering those words.
I wonder if these “educated” and “liberal” white men are aware of how they carry the faint aroma of populist rhetoric around -unknowingly I hope- but filling the room nonetheless. Like how the great communal and political efforts to make the world more fair and just for marginal people seems to continuously prompt and center the stuff that privileged folks fear they are gonna miss out on.
I wonder if these “educated” and “liberal” white men are aware of how they carry the faint aroma of populist rhetoric around -unknowingly I hope- but filling the room nonetheless.
Venus Jasper
It makes me think of the famed Luther King quote when he said:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the (…) great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season.” (1)
Okay yes shady to quote Luther as a retort to someone’s Zoom utterances, but bear with me, it’s a rainy day and I have chronic IBS. And besides, its an intensely poignant point.
It’s just that my ears peak when a White person resists a process that is meant to bring about a more equanimous and just world for those other than himself.
I get it, people fear they will lose terrain and freedom, and to a degree perhaps they actually will. But it is in the broadest sense a fantastical unwillingness to actually live in reality, this idea that justice means you loose terrain, I mean come on. Why does it remain easier to hold onto privilege, philosophically even, then it is to be fair and collaborative in the processes of the justice in the larger world? Why is it so hard to see that in the long breath of this work we are all meant to be uplifted and thrive?
That when the world burns and floods we in the end all loose our livelihood?
Whiteness makes me think of species loneliness, “[...] this state of isolation and disconnection stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors." (2) Robin Wall Kimmerer uses this notion to speak about the isolation of humanity amongst the more-than-human, but take a look at White culture getting more and more insular in a vibrant world it tries so desperately to suppress.
Are White people the most lonely?
"This whole idea that we are isolated independant selves is a part of what I call White stability, which is a part of White modernity. Whiteness is the arrangement of bodies in a power structure, it captures the bodies of white people just as much as it did everyone else. What it does not allow us to see is how are bodies are coterminous with microbes [...] and ancestrality. White modernity flattens the world [...] and tells us that we are all alone"
Bayo Akomolafe.
To me Whiteness means a cultural goggle, and upbringing or ontology if you will, that approximates near, centers and favors white people (i.e. fair-skinned folx).
HOWEVER, this does not mean that a person of color is by default exempt from partaking in the industriousness of Whiteness, nor does it make every single white person the central and individual carrier of its operation. Whiteness, in truth, is a bloody mess. It is the sole issue at the heart of racism. It is frankly larger than the sum of its parts.
For the sake of structure i use capital "W" when describing those bound by the ontology of Whiteness, and normal case "w" when it's about someone's skin. However, Whiteness is unfortunatelly not bound by skin.
I believe Whiteness (or White Supremacy) can best be seen as something that one carries or propagates, consciously or unconsciously, like a virus of the mind, an infection of Wetiko(3), an erroneous mistake at best and an abhorrent misdoing at worst. It is a virus of culture if you will, but it is not something that one “is”.
Although truth be told, some people are so very very White.
Its been puzzling and interesting to unravel what Whiteness is to me, and where I trace it in myself and in society.
I like to put it this way; White people have "discovered" many things already known to many more people, they have "explored" the far reaches of the world, but the last thing they might discover is his own Whiteness.
Read that again.
I like to put it this way; White people have "discovered" many things already known to many more people, they have "explored" the far reaches of the world, but the last thing they might discover is his own Whiteness.
Venus Jasper
You're not alone
Every white person reading this, I implore you to understand that when you are addressed or critiqued as White, it is often this faint-or-not-so-faint, consciously-or-unconsciously-carried aroma of White Supremacy that is addressed, and not you as a person “because of your skin”. Honestly, lets not make this about our skin.
Truth is, this great White fear of losing out on liberties or access in the process of justice actually mutes our ears to the vastness that lies beneath our very own feet and dare-i-say within ourselves, and ultimately within community.
Camille Barton, the writer, artist, and embodied social justice facilitator writes about the violence of the Void in her marvelous book Tending Grief; "the Void - the sense of internal emptiness that many white people feel; a sense that they have no culture, no richness, no ancestral wisdom to connect with or lean upon" (4)
"it is this sense of emptiness that I believe is the driving force for cultural appropriation and other intersecting harms rooted in extraction and domination," she concludes.
I concur.
XOXO
Venus
Curious what is crawling and alive in the undercroft of this decolonial discourse for me? How I found a way of somatic cultural experience of my own? How much of us is in kinship with the-more-than-human?
Continue reading at the next drop: Queer Swamp Roots
- Cover image: mangrove roots at Flamingo Point, Everglades National Park (USA).
Footnotes:
(1) Martin Luther King, Jr. , Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)
(2) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013).
(3) Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption. In Cree, Anishinabek and other Algonquian societies, the wetiko (alternately spelled windigo or wendigo) were most commonly understood as cannibals.
(4) Tending Grief, Embodies Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community, by Camille Sapara Barton (2024), Pp. 37.