Antiracist Strategies and Arts-Based Interventions

Human beings are immersed in, sustained through, and sometimes imperiled by systems. Research tells us this, but so does the human body. So does our lived experience in a postpandemic world. For this reason, the term systemic racism is redundant. According to environmental scientist and systems expert Donella Meadows (2008), “a system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time” (p. 2). Racism, all by itself, is systemic. That is its nature. It does not require a grammatical modifier.

But that’s just in the macro. In its systemic origins. In the micro, where its granular abrasions meet the surface of one’s skin, racism is felt. Its injuries are just as personal as they are generational. In my book Growing Up Ugly: Memoirs of a Black Boy Daydreaming (Rolling, 2020a), I told the following story.

I was once with a group of undergraduate classmates on a lithography class excursion to the Museum of Modern Art (called the MoMA for short) to see a special collection of prints on a day when the museum was closed to the public. We entered glass doors to the grand lobby and lined up at the large reception desk. Having started college when I was only 16 years old, I was still rather self-absorbed. So, I was not really paying attention to what our course instructor was doing at the head of the line as she facilitated our entry into the museum. Never talkative or chatty, I was simply observing my surroundings with great curiosity since I rarely visited museums.

I stood in the midst of my classmates and their hushed conversations, dressed in faded jeans and old sneakers just as most of them were. As usual, I wore a black backpack with all my belongings, keeping my hands free. As the line was making its way past the reception desk, a security guard called my attention. I gave it to him casually. He asked if he could help me. I shook my head slowly, trying to decipher what felt at that moment to be a strangely coded message. The guard clarified that the delivery entrance was on the side of the building, implying I was in the wrong place. Suggesting I was a messenger rather than a member of the group in front of him. I felt like I had been slapped upside my head with his powerful, uniform-clad words, sucker punched by a representative of the MoMA, the institution on whose property I stood. I was left stinging. Embarrassed at being singled out, at first I wondered if anyone else had heard his comment. None of my classmates seemed to react at all. Nor were any of my classmates approached in this fashion. I was alone in our little crowd. It was then that I noticed what the guard must have seen, that I was the only African American in the group. Frankly, I had never given real thought before as to how this must have appeared, since it was a visual dynamic I could not gaze upon while occupying my own body. The silence of my counterparts while I fought back a growing fury only served to reinforce our differences. They were clueless—entirely unaware of the gravity of the story happening right in front of them. They were White and weightless.

I responded with great effort to control my breathing, to contain my response, to cap my rising emotion, and not embarrass myself further by causing a scene. I focused on the guard alone, telling him that I was a student, a part of the group in front of him just like everyone else there. I wanted him to tell me why he thought I was different from everyone else. I wanted him to expose his own prejudice. He did not cooperate. Nevertheless, I knew the answer before I asked him. I already knew, deep down I knew. I was a Black, male college student in the early 1980s. Was I that rare? The guard I was addressing was also Black. Yet he looked at me like I was speaking to him in an alien tongue emerging from an alien body in alien circumstances. He didn’t seem to understand that all I wanted was a declaration of his guilt. He didn’t offer one. I was trapped between my desire to bodily pursue him and vocally force a response, and my desire to keep my cool, hidden in the background. I could not do both. The guard never answered me. I choked down the unspent emotion as we entered the elevator. No one spoke to me. My lips were pressed together hard, my eyebrows squeezed into stiff furrows and my eyes did not attempt to meet anyone else’s.

Head down, burdened beneath my own bedeviled thoughts, I did not notice as we approached a second reception desk on the upper floor that housed the special collection. As I was about to step past, I mistakenly met the eyes of a blond-haired young lady with a bright smile and a sharp suit mouthing out loud the same question aimed at me moments before, “May I help you?” My response was loud this time, piercing the museum’s quiet: “No, you may not help me! I am with the group!”

I now had everyone’s attention, whether I wanted it or not. I think my course instructor may have spoken up at this point to say we were all together, but I cannot remember that really, any more than I can remember anything about the special collection I went to see that day. The next thing I remember with vivid clarity was the walk from the museum to the subway. I had peeled away from the group because all I felt was my skin. I felt my skin tingling as though it were not truly a part of my body. I felt all of its surfaces amazingly, shockingly apparent. I had been stripped naked against my will. I was exposed. My skin was radiating messages, heating my blood, glowing brightly with colors, marking my escape, calling me out, hotter underneath its flesh than the sun on the surface of it on that particularly humid day. I had never felt my skin weighing upon my thin frame before. I felt like I was wearing skin, as if it were covering me like heavy, perspiration-soaked drapes flung over my head, making me appear to all passersby as if I were just a messenger. A mere messenger to be given directions and sent quickly on his way in and out of side entrances. I was a first-generation college student on a full-tuition scholarship at The Cooper Union, but no one walking past me could see that. My skin was all in the way. Fully aware of myself as others saw me, I felt ashamed and angry at what I was wearing—not the torn jeans and beat-up sneakers, but the skin.

The fact that the misrepresentations, distortions, and fabrications that perpetuate such injury are converted into the stories we live by and replicated across our social landscapes as enduring structures by systems intended to maintain a race-based hierarchy of wealth and power is on one hand daunting and on the other hand a reason for hope. This is because art + design practices are also systemic (Rolling, 2020b), and stories are interpretations, made to be reinterpreted. That is their nature. Stories build, construct, and adapt “theories,” or units of understanding about human life and our experience in the world. Stories are better understood as comprehensible representations (Rolling, 2013). Sometimes the stories we tell about a person, object, artifact, action, event, or phenomenon are artful representations… filled with a weight of insight and vision that propels us all forward. On the other hand, sometimes the stories we tell are artifice… representations filled with gross mischaracterizations and often a malice intended to injure and construct an enduring prejudice (Gould, 1981/1996). Historically, the economy of racism has constructed stories of artifice about people of color in order to justify and entrench its systemic legacies of wealth creation for a select few, and denied access or brutal exploitation for those it has “othered.” In counternarrative fashion, the purpose I intended in my call for the manuscripts assembled in this special issue is first to marshal scholarship investigating the precedents and potential for the arts and art + design education in their contribution to antiracist social practice. Secondly, these research articles are informed by a systems theory perspective (Meadows, 2008) modeling various adaptable processes by which individuals, institutions, associations, communities, and nations can intervene in those pervasive systems that generate and sustain injurious story structures, decoding and disarming them, while also recoding them to function with new purpose.

The simultaneous process of de/re/coding stories is introduced in this issue by gloria j. wilson, rethinking Black life and consciousness through “an assembly of metaphors and materialities” imagining “a more livable present” in the “shadows of anti-Black violence.” Rina Kundu Little also rethinks race and racialization through materialities, shifting us away from the slippery slopes, floating signifiers, and false binaries of language-based racial discourse to explore new materialist race studies wherein “what is to be known does not precede” the action or process of coming to know it. Race is thus recast “as an emergent ontological encounter—[or] event” that can be remade and reimagined with each encounter.

The next two articles in this special issue recognize that racism is as systemically anti-BIPOC as it is anti-Black. Michelle S. Bae-Dimitriadis draws upon and advances scholarship in decolonization and anti-Asian racism while examining settler colonial violence over Indigenous lands and people. Kevin Hsieh, Yichien Cooper, and Alice Lai also develop interventions against anti-Asian racism in their article.

The next three articles by Alexa Kulinski; by Betsy Maloney Leaf, Macarre Traynham, Nora Schull, James Bequette, and Ted Hansen; and by Albert Stabler each model different interventions regarding the deconstruction of cultures of Whiteness and the supremacist stories at their core.

The final two articles by Indira Bailey and by Dustin Garnet are direct storytelling interventions, the first investigating “the narratives and racial experiences of Black women K–12 art educators navigating the White field of art education,” and the latter mapping out the turbulent flight plan of a state art education association as it attempted to get its new equity, diversity, inclusion, and access commission off the ground and into a stable altitude. The last component in this special issue is a media review by gloria j. wilson and Amber C. Coleman, assessing the strengths of the recently released history text titled Steppingstones: Pivotal Moments in Art Education History (Bolin et al., 2021), an edited book that compiles and explores “overlooked narratives tracing people, institutions, events, tensions, and international perspectives that have shaped the course of art education.” The retrieval of stories that have been systemically overlooked or kept hidden is an essential step in reinterpreting them.

Each antiracist strategy and arts-based intervention in this special issue is purposed to counter and dismantle various systemic prejudicial practices and the deeply embedded power structures that sustain them by reinterpreting, unzipping, and repositioning fixed racial discourses, opening up intentionally uncertain futures. The work of art presented on the front cover of this issue is my own 1997 color pencil and oil pastel drawing, asking the viewer an open-ended question that assumes nothing: “Where do we go from here?” In the end, there are two ways of making something from nothing—either making a hat where there was no hat, or crafting a hat out of the remains of disassembled and deconstructed hats. Both strategies are useful, and both are modeled in the following pages.