The Jefferson Davis statue stands at the corner of Canal Street and Jefferson Davis Parkway, about three blocks from where I live. Last Wednesday I took the photo on the left on my way home from work. On the base of the monument it was written, "FOR JUSTIN SIPP," and a bit higher up paint was splattered vividly in red and green. By Friday the paint had been pressure washed clean by Roy Pennington, a private citizen concerned with how tourists in town for the Final Four would perceive the city. He had this to say: "I was angry. People will see this, our city defaced. I don't think so. Not if I can help it." On his attitude toward the killings, he added: "There’s nothing racial to it in my mind. Someone defaced our city times three. I can’t change racial relations, but I can clean a monument."Pennington's decision to pressure-wash the graffiti off of the monuments is the next page in an old story, one that begins in antiquity. It's a story about how images matter, how they not only reflect culture but can actually create and reproduce it. It's a story about how the worship of a particular image birthed a deep cultural prejudice, and how our culture's worship of certain images permits that prejudice to continue. It's a story about paint and racism, and the relationship between the two.
My life changed forever the first time I read Clyde Taylor's essay The Art of Ethnic Cleansing.* Taylor, art historian and eradicator of cultural myths, calls to attention one simple fact that forever altered the way I thought about beauty, history, and everything: the Greeks painted their statues. Vividly. In bright and flamboyant colors. Temples and public buildings too. The whole notion of pristine white marble adorning the landscapes of ancient Athens and Sparta? That was actually a really big misunderstanding, brought about by something called weathering.
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| Alabama State Capitol. This photo has clearly been dulled down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alabama_state_capitol,_Montgomery.jpg |
How did this come to be? Well, things got pretty exciting in Europe right around the 14th century. After hundreds of years folks were finally pulling themselves out of the Dark Ages and into the light, largely crediting Greek and Roman thought as the driver of the Renaissance engine. "Humanists of the Renaissance and Enlightenment [...] found in Greek philosophy, politics, art, literature and life-style the very type of human perfection," writes Taylor. "The exaltation of ancient Greece was a way of declaring and legitimizing the identity of those qualified to exercise refined taste and judgement." In other words, the cultural connection between ancient Greece and Early Modern Europe wasn't some sort of linear progression, but a "creation of instant cultural history" that functioned to lend some credibility to Europeans' chosen forms of intellectual and artistic worship.
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| From Taylor, The Mask of Art |
Now consider this. You're an early American colonist. You need labor. Lots of it. Cheap. And quickly. You're a Christian, so you can't do something wicked unto your brother. But those Africans, they're not your brothers - according to scientists they're just a step above the apes. They're undercivilized, hypersexual, unchristian beasts. Now you don't just have a labor force, you have a culturally sound rationalization to enslave them - a rationalization grounded in "science;" science grounded in the arbitrary worship of an image; an image grounded in a gross misunderstanding about something called "weathering."
Soon there's a whole culture built up around this idea - that Africans are something between apes and Greeks. It's American culture, circa 1800. At this point it's no longer even recognized as an idea, it has become a cultural "truth." The arbitrariness has been forgotten, cast aside, washed away.
In this process we come to see that images matter. By idealizing white marble Europeans began to idealize their own whiteness, and in turn began to vilify African blackness. "The Greeks became the template of those who were both beautiful and capable of recognizing beauty," writes Taylor, "while [...] the Africans became the anti-type of beauty." We often think about how images reflect what's real, whether it's culture, nature, or events. Taylor shows us that a parallel process occurs simultaneously: images create what's real. When Europeans represented Africans as inferior in European art and science, it became "truth" in the minds and practices of Europeans and their American counterparts.
Now it's not to say that slavery and the colonization of Africa only happened because European thinkers were able to justify their exploits through the use of racist images. Obviously there were other elements at play, like the demands of building a nation-state or the need to acquire resources to fuel an industrial revolution. But the images did form a crucial part of the regime of European supremacy during the colonial age. And for those who had an interest in making Euro-white society look really good, the images mattered enough for them to fight tooth, nail and quill to see that they went unchallenged.
When archaeologists began to discover traces of pigmentation in Greek art and architecture, some began to realize that maybe that whole white marble thing was actually a really big, really ironic mistake. But by then it was too late; artists and scientists had already drawn too much of Europe's self-image upon their incomplete template of Greek beauty.
To acknowledge that the Greeks painted their statues would have been to admit that the entire European understanding of beauty was not only based on mistaken assumptions, but also totally arbitrary and self-serving. And let's not forget the Europeans' nasty habit of mixing sculpture with biology and biology with race. In this light, acknowledging the paint would have called into question the very foundations of art, science, and European cultural superiority. Taylor puts it mildly, with more than a hint of irony: "The knowledge that the Greeks painted their sculptures did not meet with enthusiasm."
Art historians and intellectuals did not simply ignore the fact of Greek paint. They actively denied it, reinterpreting, revising and repressing Greek art to fit their idea of what it should have been like. "The clamorous discussion around such a discovery [...] never happened," Taylor writes, "Nor has it ever been allowed to enter popular knowledge."
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| Al Jolson in blackface, one of the few representations of blackness that's no longer culturally acceptable http://image.qpicture.com/image/a/artist-al-jolson/al-jolson-297644.jpg |
And still the images remain. They surround us. They're inescapable. They continue not only to reflect culture, but to create and re-produce it. Images that juxtapose dark-skinned people with animals. Images that tell us, often subconsciously, who is a threat and who isn't. Images that allow anyone to believe we can know enough about somebody in an instant to draw a gun and pull the trigger. Images that cause people to believe the worst about themselves, telling them who they are and are not, what they can and cannot become.
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| Note the Angel/Devil binary in this advertisement. Its subtlety does not mitigate its effect on our perception, but actually enhances it. http://www.toptenz.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/benetton-560x382.jpg |
Now consider Trayvon Martin. Consider Justin Sipp or Wendell Allen. Could an image have had anything to do with this? Could a cop perceive a suspect a certain way because of what she or he saw on television or in a film or in training? Could images have had something to do with why history played out in the particular way that it did? With why 150 years after the abolition of slavery people of African descent in this country still lack equitable access to opportunity, power and resources? With why the crime and incarceration rate among people of African descent is so scandalously high? With why people of European descent hold a disproportionate share of the wealth, PhDs and political offices in the United States? Is it possible that all of these circumstances are partly the result of perceptions and self-perceptions derived from the Greeks, their marble, and everything that followed?
As a society we're failing to ask hard questions about the collection of images that help shape our culture. As those images developed from the earliest idealizations of Greek beauty they added layers of complication to the problem of the original paint. One of those layers is the subtle and steady persistence of racism in American society. Racism is our Greek paint.
European intellectuals and art historians ignored and repressed the Greek paint at great human cost. We continue to repeat their wrong, and for many of the same reasons. To acknowledge our paint would be to admit that our culture is not what we've made it out to be. It would call into question whether we're even approaching the image of post-racial equity that we so worship. It would compel us to consider that perhaps racism and sexism and heterosexism and classism and all forms of prejudice not only exist in our culture, but are inseparable from it, and have been from the start.
Too much is at stake for our society to challenge the images that form our self-perception.
Images that seem harmless, that we claim don't matter anymore, that allow us to say things like "There’s nothing racial to it in my mind."
Images that can be traced with bright and flamboyant colors starting with the European Renaissance and continuing through the colonization of African, through slavery in America, through Jim Crow segregation, through the blatant violence of the Civil Rights Era, all the way through to the persistent, insidious, and often invisible aesthetic violence of Hollywood, television, and mass media.
Images that can be traced with bright and flamboyant colors starting with the European Renaissance and continuing through the colonization of African, through slavery in America, through Jim Crow segregation, through the blatant violence of the Civil Rights Era, all the way through to the persistent, insidious, and often invisible aesthetic violence of Hollywood, television, and mass media.
Images that we continue to draw on because they're all we know. Because people identify most strongly with stories they've already heard and pictures they've already seen. Hollywood will keep telling tales of violence and despair in the hood because it's easier, flashier, and sells better than a story about redemption or forgiveness in the hood. And every time a film tells a particular story or represents a particular image, it becomes that much more likely to appear true. It becomes that much harder for an image-driven culture to become something different, something better.
Seen in isolation these images may seem benign. Seen in the context of a history in which images matter, in which images can do real harm, the images of today take on new significance. Seen in the context of a story in which the maintenance of an image is tantamount to the maintenance of an entire culture, it becomes crucial for us to ask "why?," "how?," and "for whom?".
Roy Pennington is not the bad guy in this story. There is no bad guy in a story where an entire culture and its entire history need to be held accountable for past and present wrongs. But last week when Roy Pennington pressure washed the paint off of three monuments in New Orleans - three monuments representing this country's history of racism, no less - he wasn't just tidying up a city for its guests. He wasn't just doing his civic duty, preserving beauty for the public good. He was maintaining an image: that racism is a thing of the past; an image grounded in a historical process of repression and erasure; a process analogous to a thing called "weathering."
As we mourn the deaths of Trayvon Martin, of Justin Sipp, of Wendell Allen, and as we seek explanations and solutions and solace, let's demand accountability from the police, from the law, from the government.
Let's also demand accountability from Hollywood, television and mass media for their role in maintaining images that cause harm. Let's demand accountability from our schools to teach young people that images matter, that they have histories and meanings and consequences. Let's demand accountability from ourselves and from each other, recognizing that the images on our screens and in our minds have more power over us than we might imagine.
Until we're ready to look deeply into the foundations of our culture - to reflect on the imagery in our history and in our present, to admit to the depth and breadth and subtlety of racism in our society - we can't even begin to heal.
Next time let's let the paint stand, if only as a reminder.
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*If reading this article is not a semi-annual ritual for you, do yourself a favor and make that happen.
**There are dozens and dozens of recorded instances of European attempts to create universal ideas of beauty and civilization, and well-documented evidence of the scientific and anthropological conclusions drawn from them relating to levels of intelligence, morality, sexuality, and more. Here are a couple of examples:
The Return of Sara Baartman - Zola Maseko
The History of White People - Nell Irvin Painter
Primitivism and other Misconceptions in African Art - Ekpe Eyo
***Though perhaps racial images play into why slavery still exists, and is in fact legal, in prisons:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
- 13th Amendment, United States Constitution
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