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Notes on Obsessive Whiteness - ethnic identities of whites
Art Journal, Spring, 2000 by Ernesto Pujol
Note no. 1
I remember viewing the Robert Ryman exhibition at The Museum of Modem Art in New York in 1993. I felt as if I were surrounded by the austere puritan heritage of a Protestant church in New England. Afterward, friends asked me to critique the show, and they reacted with surprise as I described it as a profoundly ethnic experience. They only conceived of ethnicity in terms of the Other, as if there were no ethnicity to whiteness. Years later, in 1999, I remember watching Martha Stewart during her daily CBS morning show, presenting her very Polish mother making pierogis. It was a mildly embarrassing moment for the queen of upper-middle-class whiteness, but a daughter's love allowed her pristine whiteness to crack briefly and show a working-class immigrant ethnicity.
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Note no. 2
Whiteness in the United States is publicly constructed as de-ethnified. Generations of immigrant European families shed what made them culturally different. Thus, unlike European whiteness, American whiteness is generic. I remember sitting in a large shopping mall last winter with a group of very bright, white, Syracuse University undergraduates who complained of having no culture. They envied the strong and color-full cultural identities of hyphenated Americans: African Americans, Asians, and Latinos. And they admitted to appropriating their music, slang, mannerisms, food, and fashion in order to achieve a cultural identity of their own. I welcomed these middle-class kids' good intentions, but felt that this was the contemporary face of colonialism.
Note no. 3
The messy colonial safari has given way to much cleaner visits to the mall, Disney World, and surfing the Internet, our new endless frontier. Analog and online shopping for the sensual cultural products of the Other at The Body Shop has replaced white people's sweaty journeys to mosquito-infested environments perceived as primitive, magical, exotic, and adventurous. As Frantz Fanon stated in The Wretched of the Earth, and Toni Morrison brilliantly observes in Playing in the Dark, blacks have traditionally served whites as conduits to their emotional lives. Whites have selectively entered a place they have constructed in their minds as the space of color in order to gain insights into their civilized but repressed selves. Free of class constraints and professional reputations to uphold, their temporary anonymity has allowed them to explore their for-once-unrestrained sensuality. But no people should be condemned to be another's performative facilitator. White is a many-shaded color, and white people need to be gin to do their homework; whiteness must become hyphenated. IN the new age of unbridled global capitalism, it is far too dangerous for whiteness to remain invisible. To remain a white person without examining one's original European cultural roots is to enter the twenty-first century, the Shopping Century, as an uncritical and therefore superficial, but dangerously powerful, consumer, still irresponsibly searching for a cathartic journey to self-discovery at the expense of the Other's color.
Note no. 4
I remember moving from the Caribbean to the United States in the late 1970s and being struck by the extent to which color was still understood in terms of extreme racial purity. Whiteness obsessively operated as if it were a fortress under siege, defining everyone outside itself as people of color, so that whiteness ceased to be a color with many shades. And blackness, traditionally disempowered, uncritically accepted this simplistic polarized construction of race and took the world into its fold, as if there were nothing between whiteness and blackness. Of course, the Caribbean colonial notion of the mulatto as a tragic figure, neither white nor black, is highly problematic. But having been born and raised in the Caribbean, I see it as a notion that ultimately robs whiteness of its power because it engenders an intrusion. The so-called purity of whiteness is made suspect by a third people, a new people neither white nor black, a people who provide whiteness with many shades, making it less pure, turning it i nto a richer color. I have always believed that the future truly belongs to them.
Note no.5
I remember telling the critic Coca Fusco about the subtle Caribbean elements encoded in the work of F[acute{e}]lix Gonz[acute{a}]lez Torres. Felix and I had done our undergraduate work together at the University of Puerto Rico in the late 1970s, before he moved to New York. I have always been struck by his use of the Caribbean's overwhelmingly blue sky; by the abundance of sugar, so Cuban, in his work; and by his notion of romantic love and very dramatic sense of mourning, so reminiscent of Federico Garcia Lorca's plays and poetry. And while presenting this analysis might make his work less white at The Museum of Modern Art or in October, the work would finally be seen in all its layers, as both a colonized space, and as a space of transcendence. But when whiteness is the unspoken standard of quality for visual art, whether hidden within modernism, as in the New York School of painting, or behind the aesthetics of Minimalism, Conceptual art, or the 1990S international style, addressing it is perceived as dist asteful, if not anti-intellectual. And yet, whiteness remains the high aesthetic fascism into which everything, regardless of its culture of origin, must be translated within the new globalism in order to be exhibited and sold.
