“Open to all people”: upholding radical tolerance in commemorative spaces

ABSTRACT

On Friday, May 18, 2018, the grounds of Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas were splashed with white acrylic paint and littered with flyers containing a brief, targeted manifesto: “It’s okay to be white.” Through interviews with Rothko Chapel staff members, I explore the various tensions that arise from a commemorative space that upholds a policy of radical tolerance—that is, an elevated human virtue that attempts to transcend the limitations of mere tolerance by requiring a deeper reflexivity toward acts of hate and violence—becoming the subject of an intolerant, violent act that challenged the central values of its mission.

KEYWORDS:

• Hate incident
• tolerance
• radical tolerance
• commemorative space
• vandalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Vision and Mission,” Rothko Chapel, http://rothkochapel.org/learn/vision-mission/ (accessed November 28, 2021).

2 “Mark Rothko: Art as an Experience. The Significance of Interaction between Painting and Viewer in the Rothko Chapel,” RIHA Journal, no. 0183 (2017). It is important to clarify that Rothko Chapel is not an art museum; its function is quite different. According to Ruth Christensen, “the contemplation of the individual viewer is the focus and, furthermore, the Chapel space is primarily for meditative silence and prayer.”

3 “Fighting Hate & Bias,” The Leadership Conference Education Fund, https://civilrights.org (accessed March 15, 2019).

4 Manny Fernandez, Richard Fausset, and Jess Bidgood, “In Texas School Shooting, 10 Dead, 10 Hurt and Many Unsurprised” (The New York Times, May 18, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/school-shooting-santa-fe-texas.html; “Houston Police Investigating Vandalism at Mosque as a Hate Crime,” ABC13 Houston (KTRK-TV, May 20, 2018), https://abc13.com/hpd-investigating-vandalism-at-mosque-as-a-hate-crime/3497386/.

5 Elizabeth D. Wilhoit, “Organizational Space and Place Beyond Container or Construction: Exploring Workspace in the Communicative Constitution of Organizations,” Annals of the International Communication Association 40, no. 1 (2016): 247.

6 Cutcher, Dale, Hancock, and Tyler, “Spaces and Places of Remembering and Commemoration,” 3.

7 Allen and Brown, “Memorial Meshwork: The Making of the Commemorative Space of the Hyde Park 7/7 Memorial,” 10; Petani and Mengis, “In Search of Lost Space: The Process of Space Planning through Remembering and History,” 71.

8 Rothko Chapel, Be in the moment., Organizational Pamphlet.

9 Leanne Cutcher, Karen Dale, Philip Hancock, and Melissa Tyler, “Spaces and Places of Remembering and Commemoration,” Organization 23, no. 1 (2015): 3.

10 Matthew Allen and Steven D. Brown, “Memorial Meshwork: The Making of the Commemorative Space of the Hyde Park 7/7 Memorial,” Organization 23, no. 1 (2016): 10.

11 Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman, “Memorial Landscapes: Analytic Questions and Metaphors,” GeoJournal 73, no. 165. (2008): 165; Pablo Alonso González, “The Organization of Commemorative Space in Postcolonial Cuba: From Civic Square to Square of the Revolution,” Organization 23, no. 1 (2016): 47; Nuala C. Johnson, “Mapping Monuments: The Shaping of Public Space and Cultural Identities,” Visual Communication 1, no. 3 (2002): 293; Sara McDowell and Márie Braniff, Commemoration as Conflict: Space, Memory and Identity in Peace Processes (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Junjia Ye, “Re-Orienting Geographies of Urban Diversity and Coexistence: Analyzing Inclusion and Difference in Public Space,” Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 3 (2018): 478.

12 Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2006): 27.

13 Shirley Knight, “Montrose: Then and Now,” OutSmart Magazine: Houston's LGBTQ Magazine, April 3, 2017, http://www.outsmartmagazine.com/2017/04/montrose-then-and-now/.

14 Veronica Della Dora, “Infrasecular Geographies: Making, Unmaking and Remaking Sacred Space,” Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 1 (2018): 44.

15 Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci Jr., “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 3 (1991): 263.

16 Pamela G. Smart. “Atmospheric Pressure,” in Rothko Chapel: An Oasis for Reflection, eds. Pamela Smart and Stephen Fox (Rizzoli Electa, 2020), 26.

17 Smart, “Atmospheric Pressure,” 26.

18 Ibid., 26.

19 Fabio James Petani and Jeanne Mengis, “In Search of Lost Space: The Process of Space Planning through Remembering and History,” Organization 23, no. 1 (2015): 71.

20 “Understand the History,” Rothko Chapel, http://www.rothkochapel.org/learn/timeline/ (accessed November 27, 2020).

21 “A Houston Timeline, 1972-1985,” Houston Art History, http://www.houstonarthistory.com/a-houston-timeline-19721985/ (accessed November 16, 2020).

22 Rothko Chapel, Be in the moment., Organizational Pamphlet.

23 Laura A. Reese and Matthew Zalewski, “Substantive and Procedural Tolerance: Are Diverse Communities Really More Tolerant?,” Urban Affairs Review 51, no. 6 (2014): 781.

24 Reese and Zalewski, “Substantive and Procedural Tolerance: Are Diverse Communities Really More Tolerant?,” 781; Lasse Thomassen, “The Inclusion of the Other? Habermas and the Paradox of Tolerance,” Political Theory 34, no. 4 (2006): 439.

25 Helen F. Wilson, “The Possibilities of Tolerance: Intercultural Dialogue in a Multicultural Europe,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2014): 852.

26 Chris Earle, “Good Muslims, Bad Muslims, and the Nation: The ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ and the Problems with Tolerance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (2015): 121.

27 Henry Hardy, “Pluralism and Radical Tolerance,” Insights 118, no. 1 (2002): 21.

28 Earle, “Good Muslims, Bad Muslims, and the Nation: The ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ and the Problems with Tolerance,” 121.

29 “Rothko Chapel 2019 Annual Report,” Rothko Chapel, http://rothkochapel.org/assets/pdfs/2019_Annual_Report_Compressed.pdf (accessed November 28, 2021).

30 Laura L. Ellingson and Patty Sotirin, Making Data in Qualitative Research: Engagement, Ethics, and Entanglements (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), 55.

31 Linda L. Putnam, Gail T. Fairhurst, and Scott Banghart, “Contradictions, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizations: A Constitutive Approach,” The Academy of Management Annals 10, no. 1 (2016): 65.

32 Sarah J. Blithe and Anna Wolfe. “Expanding Organizational Research Methods: Analyzing Ruptures in Qualitative Research,” in Transformative Practice and Research in Organizational Communication, ed. Philip J. Salem and Erik Timmerman (Hershey: IGI Global, 2018), 168.

33 Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995).

34 The Rothko Chapel June 2018 “Letter from the Director” was sent in an e-mail on June 4, 2018 to those who subscribe to Rothko Chapel’s mailing list.

35 “A Houston Timeline, 1972-1985”

36 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. (Basic Books, 2015).

37 Michael Calvin McGee. “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” in Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 1 (1980): 1. According to McGee, an ideograph is an “ordinary language term found in political discourse. It is a high order abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular by equivocal and ill-defined normative goal. It warrants the use of power, excuses behavior and belief which might otherwise be perceived as eccentric or antisocial, and guides behavior and belief into channels easily recognized by a community as acceptable and laudable” (p. 15).

38 “White U.S. nationalists chant ‘you will not replace us,’” BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-40911744 (accessed November 28, 2021).

39 Dan Barry, Mike McIntire, and Matthew Rosenberg, “‘Our President Wans Us Here’: The Mob That Stormed the Capitol,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/capitol-rioters.html (accessed November 28, 2021).

40 Reese and Zalewski, “Substantive and Procedural Tolerance: Are Diverse Communities Really More Tolerant?,” 781; Thomassen, “The Inclusion of the Other? Habermas and the Paradox of Tolerance,” 439.

41 Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 581.

Additional information

Funding

This research received a departmental research enhancement grant from the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University, USA.