She’s spent much of her adult life wrestling with
terms such as “privilege,” “responsibility,” “fear,” and “opportunity,” as they
relate to people and race in this nation. Now, at age 26, she’s surrendered to
exploring themes of what whiteness means in her life by making
performance-based art and by teaching art in inner-city schools in Baltimore.
This is hard work. Pondering such heavy thoughts can
be paralyzing, which is why she suspects so few other white people pause to
think about being white and what effect it has on their lives. “I try to
understand what it means to be white in 2013,” Howell told me yesterday. “I’m
trying to understand the privileges you have as a white person and what your
job is once you acknowledge that privilege.”
With blobs of paint splotching her fingers and
sheetrock dust in her dark hair, Howell paused from whitewashing the walls at
the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, D.C., where she was setting up her
upcoming show.
Titled “Spotless,” the part art exhibition, part
performance show is a monochromatic study of the imagery and fixations with
cleanliness. Installation pieces include oversized white representations of
household products such as toothpaste tubes, bathroom cleaner, soap bubbles,
and the like. The centerpiece of the show will be Howell’s opening-day
performance piece, titled “Rub-A-Dub-Dub,” featuring three nude women of
varying races bathing in claw-footed tubs filled with marshmallows.
As Howell explains it, the oversized pieces and
obsessive effort at cleanliness are artistic and physical “metaphors for the
equivocation of whiteness to purity, cleansing, and superiority.”
This theme is kicked up a notch by the decision to
showcase the art and performances at a gallery in the U Street corridor, one of
Washington’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Over the past decade, the
community surrounding the Hamiltonian Gallery has transitioned from a space of
hot-dog shacks, nightclubs, and shoe-shine parlors that catered to mostly poor
and working-class black customers, to upscale watering holes and
European-themed eateries that attract white hipsters and young suburbanites
looking to get their inner-city groove on.
In a notable Washington Post essay, Stephen A.
Crockett Jr. coined the phrase “swagger jacking” to describe what’s happening
in the U Street neighborhood:
Look. I
get it. The Chocolate City has changed. It isn’t what it used to be, and I
don’t know what’s worse: the fact that D.C. was once so marred by murder that
it was nicknamed Dodge City or that there is now a hipster bar on U St. that
holds the same name. Point is, there is a certain cultural vulturalism, an
African American historical “swagger-jacking,” going on on U Street. It’s an
inappropriate tradition of sorts that has rent increasing, black folks moving
further out—sometimes by choice, sometimes not—while a faux black ethos
remains.
The raw feelings of some black Washingtonians toward
swagger jacking inspired Howell to make one of the photographs in the
exhibitions, an image of a black woman using an enormous bottle of Wite-Out
correcting fluid to swab away a historic marker on U Street.
Though she always wanted to be an artist, Howell
didn’t start her career with race-themed work. It slowly came upon her, she
said, as she became increasingly aware that being white was critical to her
experiences in every place she lived. In some cases, being white was obvious by
its stifling vastness, such as when her art studies took her from a
multicultural high school in her hometown of Cincinnati to the nearly all-white
Wheaton College outside of Chicago. But in other places, whiteness was
noticeable by its absence. Teaching at an all-black public school or choosing
to live in a row house in a predominately black West Baltimore neighborhood
rendered her the lonely white face adrift in a sea of black bodies.
This experience of choosing to see whiteness in
American society is rare for white Americans but fuels Howell’s creative
spirit. For example, one of her most powerful works, “Racial Make Up: More Than
Skin Deep,” grew from the realization that being a white person prevented her
from having the connection she desperately wanted with her black students. The
minute-and-a-half video makes the inescapable point that whiteness is a sticky
mess with in-your-face clarity.
“I knew that my race was a barrier with my
students,” Howell said of the piece, her favorite. “I wanted it so badly for my
race not to matter with them. I just didn’t want to be white, if it kept us
apart.”
Howell is frustrated by some reactions to her work, notably
from white viewers who feel as if she’s putting them down in some sly way. Or,
in some cases, from her young, urban, white audiences, she wonders whether they
have the cultural frame for her exploration of whiteness. A clear example is
“Cracker Dress,” a performance piece where Howell parades in public wearing a
sundress fashioned out of saltine and oyster crackers. “Sometimes it just goes
over their heads,” she said with a laugh and a wave of her palm skyward. She
continued:
Maybe
it’s a good thing that people don’t get the reference to “crackers” as a
derogatory term, but I made the dress as visual representation of what I felt
like to be stared at as the only white person in a community. I know that
people of color get those stares all the time. I wanted to get people to think
and talk about what it means if you’re white.
At its core, art is about finding the humanness in
all people, she told me. It’s about bringing people together, not pulling them
apart. When people think about these things and find the courage to talk about
them civilly, then racial understanding is inevitable.
Howell finds it amusing that some people question
whether she’s really white, given her work and her determination to confront
white people with being white. “People ask me that all the time: ‘What are you
trying to get at?’ ‘Are you really white or multi-racial?’” she said. “The
assumption is that if you’re white, you’re not going to be challenging
whiteness. You just embrace it.”
But that’s not possible for her. She believes
whiteness demands examination with the same detail and precision that attaches
to being black in America.
“I don’t want to speak for black people or presume
what they think in my work,” she said. “I don’t want to make those assumptions.
That’s something white people are really good at. I work from the spaces I know
best.”
About the author: Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow
at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact
of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority
by the year 2050.
This article was published by the Center for
American Progress.
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