Handout made in collaboration with Teana Boston-Mammah and Jan van Heemst for the project on Cultural Diversity Q7/8 as part of the Social Practice of the Willem de Kooning Academy
“Now part of what”…“I see as the problem is the idea of anybody’s having to fight the fragmentation and multicultural diversity of the world, not to mention outright oppression, by constructing something so rigid as an identity, an identity in which there has to be a fixed and immobile core, a core that is structured to hold inviolate such a complete biological fantasy as race— whether white or black” —Samuel R. Delany, interviewed by Mark Dery, 1994
…“race is the child of racism, not the father. And the naming of “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the world and me, 2015
a concept of Edward Said which “foregrounds the centrality of imperialisme to Western culture. The cultural archive has influenced historical cultural configurations and current dominant and cherished self-representations and culture.”
—Gloria Wekker
“For a white woman […] to imagine herself into a real-life black identity without any lived black experience, to turn herself into a black history professor without a history degree, to place herself at the forefront of local black society that she had adopted less than a decade earlier, all while seeming to claim to do it better and more authentically than any black person who would dare challenge her—well, it’s the ultimate “you can be anything” success story of white America […] Another branch of manifest destiny. No wonder America couldn’t get enough of the Dolezal story.”
— Ijeoma Oluo
Photo courtesy of Jenny Risher. Revolution Tribute, 2017. Hip-hop artists Mahogany Jones, Che, ReddBone, Alexis Allon, Ellie Sandiego, Piper Carter and Lakia Nicole
“in een ander type samenleving, zou je dus met nieuwe helden moeten komen die andere functies hebben in de samenleving. Niet alleen ‘het veroveren’, maar ook ‘hoe leef je samen’.”
—Valika Smeulders
“De positie die Valkenberg inneemt gaat verder dan een ‘blinde vlek’ hebben voor ongelijkheid, ontkennen van institutioneel racisme en het bewustzijn dat we in een klassenmaatschappij leven. Deze positie is, door de teloorgang van het Nederlandse onderwijs aan de opkomst van diversiteit te verbinden, racistisch in zijn kern.”
— Mark Mulder
…“The inference is that “Becky” has desirable, sleek hair, while Beyoncé has a naturally curly texture under the wigs and without hot tools. It sheds light on an overall picture when it comes to how black coarse hair is perceived, since the former is “good” and the latter is assumed to be the opposite.”
“Even if she’s referring to another woman of color, “to critique her as a Becky is more than just like, ‘You’re a cheater.’” The insult cuts far deeper, she says: “It re-encodes her as a white Becky.”
— Rebecca Kinney
