It’s surprising to me that anyone is surprised by the US Supreme Court’s decision last week to ban affirmative action in college admissions. I’ve heard scolding about politics since I was in high school in the 1970s and was accepted into Ivy League Brown University as a beneficiary of the action positive. The prevailing assumption is that the more deserving whites lose out to the less deserving members of minority groups. There is no acknowledgment that less than academically brilliant children of white donors and alumni are accepted into elite institutions over other applicants with higher academic standing. This hypothesis also ignores the value of the resilience, courage, and ingenuity of minority students who make it to elite colleges despite having fewer social ties and undervalued cultural capital. The resentment towards affirmative action held by many people – mostly white people – is not always expressed openly because it is politically tricky for liberals to openly express their elitism and racist prejudices. At the root of this resentment is the persistent belief that racism is reducible to individual acts of abuse, preferably physical and visible. This resentment also reflects white people’s refusal to accept that systemic racism gives them privilege, regardless of their personal views.
It’s easy to point to extreme conservatives and white nationalists as the leaders of the multi-pronged effort to dismantle civil rights legislation. But it is myopic to limit his view of resisting anti-racist efforts to these groups. The elite schools at the center of this affair have been dominated by liberals and have been for a long time. The same goes for the art world, despite the fact that some of its money comes from conservative individuals. America’s liberal elites are so narcissistic and so convinced of their intellectual and moral superiority that they can only accept affirmative action as a favor it is entitled to bestow on others, for it still enables its members to retain power. Herein lies the root of the “white savior” complex that puts members of the elite in the position of choosing what type of minority person to defend. It produces the endless search for a student of color from the most economically and socially marginal sectors who has miraculously managed to be considered for admission to elite universities with no orientation, SAT prep, Advanced Placement Courses (AP ) or extracurricular activities. It also generates endless debates about whether other minority students whose parents have struggled with limited means to obtain scholarships for preparatory schools and special programs for their children, or students who have raised abroad outside the hellish conditions of American public education, should be considered at all for affirmative action programs. Forget the insular, provincial mindset of most Americans and the potential benefits they can derive from learning about the rest of the world with people whose cultures, histories and living conditions are different from their own. . These conditions do not apply to white candidates.
Similar phenomena appear in the world of art. Studio art and art history departments were far more resistant than other areas of the humanities to affirmative action and multicultural scholarship, but the recent success of African-American artists on the art market and the rise of collectors and institutions in Asia and the Middle East, coupled with changing student demographics at universities that now require courses on non-white artists, have forced these fields to embrace diversity to a limited extent. Younger generations of art historians, whatever their origins, are now eager to embrace “world art history”. It’s a big change from my university years, when art history departments limited their coverage of non-Western regions to courses on the arts of antiquity, presented modernism as the exclusive property of Europeans and white Americans and generally handled the work of non-whites. artists as popular art. There’s a lot of complacent rhetoric circulating these days about the supposed “new era” after Black Lives Matter in which museums show and even acquire more works by African American artists. The mainstream art media has turned into a team of cheerleaders for these museum efforts, which is particularly ironic considering that some of the critics leading the charge were the most arrogant of disregarding the work of artists of color. 20 or 30 years ago. I can’t forget that the infamous 1993 Whitney Biennial featuring many artists of color, including myself, was slammed by the arts press and scorned by blue-chip gallerists who used to have instant access for their white artists. What the current hype masks is the reality that these gains for black American artists are exclusive to them and underpinned by their induction into the upper echelons of the art market through the longstanding efforts of black curators and philanthropists who have spent decades cultivating the private sector. support. No other ethnic minority in this country has benefited from a similar effort.
White liberal resentment of affirmative action has a long history and is here to stay. There will always be those who believe that no one but themselves and their friends deserve access to elite perks, which in the art world means their efforts are recognized as art. relevant, rather than an unintended expression of an artist’s personal story. .
I remember the sideways glances from some professors who expected me to be inarticulate, and the indifference of those who simply didn’t pay much attention to me because they knew I wasn’t. was unable to donate to a program they wanted to start. I remember my editor told me Voice of the village that he no longer needed a Latina to cover Latino topics and the Art in America editor who found it strange that I wanted to write about a British experimental filmmaker and not a Latino filmmaker. I also know that after my job interview at Columbia University over two decades ago, the committee chair grumbled that he had already hired a person of color and didn’t see why he had to hire one. another one. At another job interview at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a board member told me my work wasn’t really art — it was anthropology. . I doubt German artist Lothar Baumgarten, who spent several years making ethnographic museum art, would have been approached or assessed in the same way. I also listened to an editor of a major European TV channel tell me that Cubans couldn’t have postmodernism because they had no experience of modernism, and I couldn’t afford to correct it . Moreover, I faced a review board for my doctorate headed by a philosopher who questioned whether postcolonialism, the subject of my thesis, even existed.
Hardly a month goes by that I don’t have to deal with some kind of evaluative comment that betrays the speaker’s biases, or some dumb question meant to elicit comment that would turn three decades of my artistic practice into simplistic expression. of racial identity – although Latinos are not a race. Of course, this resistance to believing that others are just as intelligent or qualified as you are also comes with ad hominem attacks when critics lack substantive arguments, as minorities we are often portrayed as too lively, too loud, too vehement, too political, or just “too much”. These are all variants of the idea that non-whites are less capable of abstract thought and “disinterested” aesthetic judgment, an argument that has its origins in the writings of Immanuel Kant. What this leaves out are the many ways white elites have historically used violence, political force, and crude ethnocentrism to safeguard their privilege. There is nothing “selfless” about it. what goes around comes around (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”).
