Art & Racism

Art & Racism

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to expand the boundaries of our knowledge by exploring some relevant facts and figures related to Kara Walker's artistic work. In this paper, the author will relate the work of Kara Walker with readings from the book "Race-ing art history" by Kymberly Pinder or “How race is lived in America" by Joseph Lelyveld. Kara Walker is an accomplished artist who has exhibited around the world and one of the youngest recipients of the prized MacArthur Fellowship. Walker moved from California to Georgia at the age of 13, which was a major culture shock for her, as the south represented a place that spewed with a history of slavery, racism, and oppression for African Americans.

Discussion & Analysis

In the book "Race-ing art history", the author uses a broader, more historical lens. It presents a sampling of art historical scholarship addressing issues of race and ethnicity in relation to the, primarily western, visual culture of the last two thousand years, with an emphasis on the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. This emphasis on the modern period stems from the propensity of historians of this era to be more open to multicultural issues. Racism is the ideology of difference, which takes as its foundation the idea that particular (usually negative) attributes regarding behavior, intelligence, or culture are inherent within particular racial groups. This ideology is then used to justify arguments for the superiority of one racial group relative to another, which leads to the production of inequality between racial groups (Pinder, 2002).

The normative understanding of racism is often limited to acts of violence, malice, or economic exploitation that are motivated by racial prejudice. Examples of these types of racism are hate-based crimes, or decisions by employers not to hire workers on the basis of their race. This narrow definition of racism does not acknowledge the informal ways in which racist ideology has been incorporated into economic, legal, educational, and other societal structures. The following sections discuss the dominant theoretical engagements with race and racism in geography, as well as some of the methodological challenges inherent to research on race/racism issues (Pinder, 2002).

Critical racial theorists engage in a type of ethically motivated antiracism research agenda. Rather than treating race as an objective category, they use social constructionist theories to illustrate the way in which the idea of race is mobilized in various contexts to exploit, disadvantage, or otherwise disempower particular racially defined groups of the population. In critical racial theory, racial categories provide the framework for a set of power relations that protects the dominant group's position of power. The process through which racial ideology is applied to social actors (who should be understood as not just people and processes located in places but also as landscapes, systems of governance, education, or any other socially produced phenomena) is known as racialization (Pinder, 2002).

Similarly, in the book “How race is lived in America", the author has identified the issues of racism in ...