Meditations on Privilege (inspired by Rent-A-Negro.com)

Meditations on Privilege (inspired by
Rent-A-Negro.com)

We don't realize that we are playing for high stakes
even in the smallest of small talk…
Robin Lakoff, quoted in Bakewell, Liza, Image Acts,
American Anthropology, March 1998.

America is a diverse country, racially, economically,
and ethnically. And our institutions of higher
education should reflect our diversity. Yet quota
systems that use race to include or exclude people
from higher education and the opportunities it offers
are divisive, unfair and impossible to square with the
Constitution.
President Bush,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030115-7.html

This isn't some kind of metaphor… goddamn this is
real!
Steve Albini

As a person from a culturally dominant group (visibly
Anglo, male, heterosexual with no apparent
disabilities), it's always an awkward moment for me to
outwardly contemplate privilege and oppression without
resorting to rhetoric that simultaneously projects
apologetic guilt and defensive superiority. Like now -
as if I should I get credit for writing this because
it's awkward for me. It's become easy to seemingly
criticize my unequal privilege gifted through violent
histories while distancing myself from those
histories. The rejection of institutional racism and
sexism can be accomplished intellectually and
emotionally with little change in the material
practice of everyday life. It's easy to do when I'M
not part of the institution. And who really identifies
with The Institution in an Althusserian sense anyway?
Most of the spectrum encompassing the various
ideologies of the dominant culture sees itself in
opposition to The Institution - from the Right's
opposition to state-sponsored affirmative action to
the Liberal critiques of mass culture.
To be sure, I don't want to regress into
non-dialectal positions like atomistic relativity
and/or autonomous responsibility, but the terms of
institutionalization are important to consider. How is
it that both Liberal Senator Ted Kennedy and White
Supremacist Thomas Metzger can oppose the same
systems, but for completely different reasons?
Althusser's definition of ideology as the perceived
relationship between an individual and material
conditions serves as a good starting point.
(http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary\_Criticism/cultural\_studies/althusser\_ideology.htm)
I should be clear that this is not meant to be a
thorough investigation of institutional oppression,
but rather an attempt to establish a jumping-off
point, so to speak, for looking at these issues
through cultural production. Specifically, cultural
objects that can be seen to provide other ways of
interrogating privilege, with the goal of aiding in
the more equitable distribution of power.
One such cultural object that brought these issues to
bear for me is damali ayo's Rent-A-Negro.com. The work
is a visually simple web site designed with simple
bold text and table cells using flat colors, devoid of
any photographic or iconic imagery. This first
web-based work of ayo utilizes textual motifs and
emotional tones that are found in most of her other
activities as a visual and performing artist
(http://www.damaliayo.com). Here the artist
establishes a commercial service in which she provides
diversity to those lacking it in their lives -
something her Otherness as a black woman accommodates.
ayo will provide services like attending a party,
confronting racist relatives, and give a "black
opinion" to those willing to pay a fee. Personal
experiences as an African-American artist in many
predominantly white settings are blurred with the
fictional and theatrical aims of the site. The
services ayo peddles are not just satirical devices,
they come from requests she's actually received from
strangers, like *Can I touch your hair?*
A tactic that is of the utmost importance to the
project is the lack of photographic and iconic
imagery. There are no images of ayo, no iconic logo,
no stock photography of African-Americans, nothing but
text, tables, and the colors blue, red, yellow
(ochre), and black. There is a recognition of how
images work here. The specificity of ayo's personality
is denied, and the memorized images of *blackness* and
*femaleness* are fore grounded. This is the
*blackness* auctioned by keith obadike
(http://Obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html) and the
disembodied *female* of Mouchette
(http://mouchette.org/), nameless prostitutes and
service workers.
There is a refusal, in this work, of the utopian
outlook of earlier new media work, especially
Internet-based work, that saw incompatibilities
between racial and gender recognition and the
technology. The material presence of oppression is
visible, even if not in pictures. We may not see the
person's gendered, racialized body, but this
invisibility, rather than making such distinctions
unimportant, makes mediated stereotypes all the more
powerful. While illusionistic imagery and even
physical appearances can be dismissed as
*unempirical,* newer imaging techniques like genetic
mapping are said to abstractly represent reality in a
kind of mathematical purity. But as the much-debated
book The Bell Curve, and more recent discussions of
standardized testing, illustrate, such abstract data
is no less ideological than pictures.
Despite the lack of imagery, this can be read as a
deliberate *image act.* Anthropologist Liza Bakewell
and others have theorized a practice of images, not as
representation, but as actions that affect material
culture and language. This conception of images
problematizes theories of communicative action
(http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/300024/0) by
disavowing the dichotomy of material and speech in
favor of a view that sees communication as both
dependent on and transformative of material
environments. Bakewell asserts that a study of image
acts would begin with the body, not texts or objects.
While this could easily fall into traditional notions
of essentialized humanness, the body here is not a
universal one, but rather is one where the social
collides with the perceived individual in an
ideological implosion.
Read in this way, ayo's work can be seen as
participating in something other than the
representational strategies of identity politics, yet
still grounded in the coded body. We are not presented
with the artist's identity, or personality via ocular
representation. This work is not educating us about
the artist's humanness, nor that of the larger
demographic she is part of. The target of the gaze is
inverted, in a manner similar to Gomez-Pena's *reverse
anthropology* and Adrian Piper's various public
interventions (like wearing clothing reeking of fish
in the subway at rush hour). The performance, while
initiated by the artist, is actually carried out by
the audience - it is their re/actions that are up for
scrutiny. But here, not only is the identity of the
observer reflected back, the material conditions of
the gaze become the framework for the "transaction" of
looking. Multiculturalism is big business, from
ecotourist adventures with indigenous people to One
World festivals in places like Branson, MO, where the
dominant culture is not perceived as culture, but as a
vacuum that consumes differences as commodified
experience.
What is different here from the strategies of
representational identity politics, coming from a
strong humanist tradition, is that emphasis is placed
on the action of privilege rather than on the set of
symbols that we read privilege through. While not
dismissive of symbolic and semiotic analysis,
Rent-A-Negro.com focuses our attention on the manner
in which privilege is exercised in material terms. In
fact, it practices a form of exchange overdetermined
by historic and ongoing symbolic systems, but an
exchange that is contextualized economically as well
as psychologically. Scientific, popular, aesthetic,
and other systems of understanding, like the color
identification systems explored by the Obadike's in
The Interaction of Coloreds,
(http://blacknetart.com/interaction.html) are becoming
inseparable from market imperatives - biology is now
biotechnology. If it's something worth understanding,
it's something that should be exploited in the *free
market.* If multiculturalism is truly a wanted
concept, it will also be profitable, so goes the
rhetoric from the neo-cons and liberals alike. But as
is fairly obvious, exposing the contradictions of
capital does not so easily alter the order of things;
the battle between moral fundamentalism and
libertarian enterprise is a pillow fight where the
pillows are stuffed with the dead bodies of the
oppressed and the rules change to keep everyone else
out of the bedroom.
In the end, we're left with policies that reflect
sentiments like those spoken by President Bush,
decrying the *unconstitutionality* of affirmative
action policies in Universities, and I assume
anywhere. We are to celebrate diversity, including
*economic diversity.* But what does that mean,
*economic diversity?* In such Orwellian terms, we have
managed to separate poverty and lack of political
power from its material roots, as if economic
differences have no ties to other forms of diversity.
Only then can we applaud that both rich and poor
manage to exist in the US, so that the myth of the
middle as norm can be represented in the abstract
language of averages, statistics, and sitcoms.
How does one resist this? Or can one even create
alternatives from a position of privilege? Maybe as
many, including Deleuze and Guattari, have suggested,
the answer is not to attempt to restrain the further
development of globalization, but rather to push it
forward, accelerating its progress. Resisting the
global economy through global tactics different than
what I'm writing about here, but what if we took ayo
up on her offer? What would the impact of such *image
acts* be? Thinking of this not in terms of subversion,
but as moments of exchange capable of generating
normative behavior as well as disrupt it, the act of
*renting* the artist for a party does provide the
possibility for learning and transformation.
Reparations owed to the descendents of African slaves
certainly involve economic analysis, as much as the
practice of slavery itself did. Multiculturalism does
cost something - consideration of how and whom it
benefits in its current form seems important to
consider. ayo gives us at least some hints on how to
begin this line of thought by presenting racism/sexism
within the US economies of service and information,
where highly visible wage-based service work replaces
production labor rendered invisible by geography and a
lack of representation.
One thing that I keep coming back to, however, is
that escaping privilege is extremely difficult. We
remain involved in a situation dependent on
*expendable income,* the space of art, sex, and
service industries. Someone always looses when there's
*expendable income.* Isn't that one of the infamous
contradictions of capital: that profit is by
definition the difference between the money someone's
work generates via a product and what s/he actually
gets paid for the labor? Of course, the classical
argument is that access to the means of production,
which requires investments of capital, makes all the
difference. Here, ayo's body, or the idea of it, is
both the object of consumption and the site of
production, but not necessarily the means of
production. That still rests with those that have the
privilege of celebrating *economic diversity.*
Speaking of which, maybe I should be saving my
money… there's a party I'm going to that could use
some *difference.*
ryan griffis


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