Assignments and personal notes

Text: White Friend

Harassment can also be understood as hardening of that history, a history of entitlement, a colonial as well as patriarchal history, a history of who gets to do what; who is deemed entitled to what; who is deemed entitled to whom. These hard histories are not just out there; they are in here. They are not just about what happens in hostile institutions; they are about what happens in spaces we might otherwise experience as warm and intimate. A hard history can be between friends.

This part pretty much sums up how these solutions to harassment are deeply imbedded systematically. The harassment black and brown people face in these white spaces, whether it’s their place of work, group of friends or other institutions, and the “solutions” people come up with in order to wipe these harassment complaints under the rug is because they can: if they do not get “it” (the racial motives behind these forms of harassment) is because nothing compels them to do otherwise.

“Racism is not just an idea about who is worth what or more, about higher and lower become properties of persons organized into clear and distinct groups. Racism is how ideas are expressed in or through actions; how some try to make others smaller, less significant; less valued.”

This has happened in that same history that Sara Ahmed speaks of. These same people make their white spaces most comfortable from their point of view. This is why being dismissive of harassment is so common in these white spaces. The white person who is the harasser becomes the innocent party (white innocence) because of the redirection of sympathy. This can play out in many different ways when we talk about racial harassment complaints: Sympathy can be used as removal in white spaces, in order to show sympathy, they remove you from the occasion. Another form of this is the “white tears” in order to gain sympathy in an invalid situation to redirect the guilt.

This all boils down to entitlement, as Sara Ahmed concludes. The colonial roots of this problem set in history are not just in history, it’s here, as we speak. I found this part to be the most compelling part because it sums up and concludes exactly what the blogpost is about; it all boils down to history and where it all began but also the connections these problems have with the problems about race that we still face today.

Favorite quote: “What is most unsurprising is often what is most hard.”

a. piece of design/work made by a Black woman.

b. a piece of design/work made by a public/community or doesn't have a clear author

c. made by a minority in the country in which you live (or grew up in) (this could be you)

d. that is made by a queer person

e. that is made by somebody who is not able-bodied

f. a memory, memorabilia, family, personal (draw a picture or write a description of)

A: Kara Walker, Shadow-play, The Tate Modern London

B: Unknown, Marrakech

C: Iris Kensmil, Jeje disi. Centraal Museum Utrecht

Monument excercise

Collectively we had to form
a monument consisting of one chosen image and building a story containing images around it. We chose to go for empowering images for the black culture and wanted to show powerful images in various forms. Added the all female bike gang as a modern day nod to the cowboy story, while also referring to Bessie Stringfield, the first black female motorcycle rider.

Julie's Homework assignment week 38:

Read Adrienne Rich’s Politics of Location. After that, write a short text describing your position in relation to the makers of the pieces you have collected for Amy’s class. Add these small descriptions to your notebooks.

How I experience these privileges Adrienne Rich speaks of is only I guess in the last name that I cary; It's a dutch surname. This is ever so clearly when you get invited to. a job interview and the people there expected you to look "different"

Other than that I cannot think of an instance here in the Netherlands, However whenever I visit friends in New York it shows that the "light skin privilege" is what it is called, does really play a role in society, even as a passerby, a tourist, it showed. Either by other black people staring at me or white people in department stores being so nice that it actually made me feel uncomfortable.

Amy's Homework assignment week 39:

HOMEWORK

“Collaboration is work across difference, yet this is not the innocent diversity of self-contained evolutionary tracks. The evolution of our ‘selves’ is already polluted by histories of encounter; we are mixed up with others before we even begin any new collaboration. Worse yet, we are mixed up in the projects that do us the most harm. The diversity that allows us to enter collaborations emerges from histories of extermination, imperialism, and all the rest. Contamination makes diversity. This changes the work we imagine for names, including ethnicities and species. If categories are unstable, we must watch them emerge within encounters. To use category names should be a commitment to tracing assemblages in which these categories gain a momentary hold. Only from here can I return to meeting Mien [people] and matsutake [mushroom] in a Cascades forest. What does it mean to be “Mien” or to be “forest”? These identities entered our meeting from histories of transformative ruin, even as new collaborations changed them.” Mushroom at the end of the World, by Anna Tsing. P29.

A) Document an object that tells a story about your cultural or family history. You can choose to document it visually via photography, drawing, video or audio.

B) Document the same object in writing. It can be an anecdote, (family) memory, historical research or a combination of all:

Historical research: What is depicted in the wood carved statue is a kotomisi (women in traditional Surinamese attire)

"Waarschijnlijk is de koto niet van de ene dag op de andere ontstaan, maar langzaam uit Afrikaanse en Europese elementen samengesteld. Zeker is dat slavinnen die uit Afrika werden aangevoerd de Afrikaanse lendedoek (panji-paantje) droegen. Het bovenlijf was onbedekt. De jaloezie van de Europese meesteressen, de kerk en de Europese mode stonden echter niet toe dat vrouwen met blote borsten liepen. Daarom werd waarschijnlijk de panji zo veranderd en verlengd dat er een soort rok ontstond die tot onder de oksels werd opgetrokken en zo het bovenlichaam bedekte. Op de tekeningen van Benoit (1839) is zo'n opgetrokken rok ook te zien. Toen later de Europese blouse werd toegevoegd, kon de (te)lange rok weer naar beneden geslagen worden. Dit zou de karakteristieke overslag van de huidige rok kunnen verklaren.

Wanneer en door wie werd echter het kussentje (koio= queue) onder de kleding aangebracht? Veel mensen zien in de kotomisi-dracht, met name in het wijd uitstaan van de rokken, een nabootsing van de Europese mode met haar crinoline. Afrikaanse elementen zijn waarschijnlijk niet vreemd aan deze kleding. Zo geldt in Afrika het accentueren van de lichaamsomvang door middel van doeken en kussentjes als schoonheidsideaal.

Afrikaans is ook de hoofddoek (anjisa) en de geheimtaal die zij spreekt. Het naam geven aan bepaalde patronen in de stof en manier van binden is typisch Afrikaans. De "namen" bestaan vaak uit spreekwoorden (odo's). In Afrika werden spreekwoorden in de dagelijkse taal geïntroduceerd door wijze oude mensen. In Suriname zijn het de vrouwen die het gebruik van spreekwoorden hebben voortgezet. Het fijne weten we niet van de kotomisi-dracht en de jaloerse meesteressen. Er is weinig over geschreven." http://www.svcn.nl/collection.aspx?aid=2840

This shows the influence of the African heritage blended with the Surinamese heritage that started forming once the colonies were established and slavery started to take shape.

Many relatives and other Surinamese people I know have this or something similar hanging on the wall at home. By this time (2020) it is also sold as souvenir.

My mother has lived in Surinam when she was in her twenties, we always had a lot of wood carved Surinamese objects at home. Growing up my mom would sometimes tell me and my sister how she got certain items and how bringing some of these back to the Netherlands was sometimes a hassle (some items were too big to fit in a suitcase) Now that my mom has passed away it feels good to have these object still, on one hand because of the memories surrounding my mom and on the other hand because it directly refers to my roots and those of my father.

Julie's Homework assignment week 39:

Document something that is already lost (from memory). It can be an object you had, a piece of art you cannot find anymore, a website or a blog that went offline, a poem you cannot access anymore, a building that was destroyed, a recipe, an event you witnessed...

The documentation can take any form you like. It can be a factual account, a poem, a drawing, a schema, a reconstitution, an oral account …

I chose an airbnb building in Brooklyn where I resided at every time I went to visit friends in New York. The building stands in a part of Brooklyn that was at the time not gentrified yet. The owner of the airbnb was the only white person on that block. Unfortunately, as we know happens when gentrification occurs in a neighbourhood the airbnb is no longer there and are now 10+ tiny apartments with sky high rent.

Teana's Homework assignment week 38:

A: Write in your own words how you understand the terms above and how you see them at play in society today..

Superstructure:
The economy(the organisation of labour and resources in a society) was the foundation built on top of material reality
Politics, culture, religion and families are the superstructure built on top of reality

Modes of production:
"Stages of history" defined by a combination of forces and relation of production.

Forces of production:
Technical, scientific and material parts of the economy (Tools, buildings, material resources, technology and the Human labor that makes them go.

Modern capitalism: factories, oil and the eternal combustion engine but also includes cultural and social technologies like mass production.

Material parts of economy; human labour, factories

Relations of production:
Defines how people organise themselves around labor, do people work for wages? Or does produce and sell their own good. How does ownership and property work? These questions are important because this decides how the surplus is used.

Means of production:
That is the materials you need to use in order to labor and produce goods. The actual physical stuff that makes up the forces of production (example the tools of machines you use) The bourgeoisie controls the means of production which controls the means of labor and how much people are being paid because of capitalism in order to make the largest profits.

Hegemony:
The domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class which manipulates the culture of that society — the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores — so that the imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm;[1][need quotation to verify][2] the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.

Conflict theories:

B: What is the difference between a manifest and a latent function of things that society develops to keep it going? (such as institutions)

Manifest functions are the obvious and intended consequences a structural feature displays in the maintenance of the steady state of the system of which it is a part. Latent functions are less obvious or unintended consequences.

Latent functions are those functions which are unintended or unrecognised consequences of any social pattern. On the other hand, the intended, conscious, or deliberate functions of the social policies or action which are created for the benefit of the society are called manifest functions.

What are important institutions in your life today?

My art school, museums I visit, Language is one of the most basic yet complex social institutions that connect us humans with one another.

What are social facts?

Social facts are the laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and all of the cultural rules that govern social life (Durkheim 1895). Each of these social facts serves one or more functions within a society.

C: At this stage can you write notes on the differences between these three perspectives: can you also start thinking about which ones you find most relevant and/or interesting to you?

What I find interesting is how the latent functions have unrecognisable consequences and that not everyone will ever be equal, also trying to change these structures does not go easy and that is because it's culturally and imbedded in our modern society.

Homework assignment for week 40 Teana:

Please read the Uzma Rizvi's quotes in the One Note Section title Decolonisation as Care.

Write back to Rizvi expressing your thoughts on all 4 of the quotes cited. Your response should be minimally 200 words per citation.

1. "A simple example might be to consider my own childhood: as a person of South Asian heritage, I was often confounded while dealing with crayons that did not have any colour to represent my skin tone. I was told by teachers to colour in bodies as ‘peach’ because that was the norm in the 1970s, in the United States. But my body was not peach.
The disjuncture, cognitive dissonance, and alienation between what I experienced as body and what I represented was unaccounted for: the tools (i.e. crayons) and the representation could not align unless I let go of wanting to see myself represented in that image. I had to make myself into something I was not, and it very quickly became clear to me that I was not the ‘norm’ in the world of crayons." p87

Response: Growing up as a biracial person in a white society (The Netherlands) I often had to deal with likewise occurrences as well, from the color of coloured pencils referring to skin tone (for white people) as finding representation in the animated shows I watched growing up in the 90's where the majority of the characters were white. People always asking me "No but where are you REALLY from?" To running into awkward situations because my mother is a white woman. (Is your daughter adopted?) There are big differences between growing up in the States and Europe, specifically the Netherlands but there is also common ground, from the colonial past we share to the racism we still experience on a daily base because of this shared history. Growing up biracial in a predominantly white society I felt the not being the norm part in my core. There was never an exception, I always had to come up with own ideas to cope or feel included, that way was not paved and from society around me there were no means to change this or make it more inclusive either way.

2. "That realization is a small gesture that has huge implications for the ways in which the material culture of schools can be changed. A key tenet of decolonization has to also include a sense of intersectionality. So another clear example might be the heteronormativity of public bathroom spaces, particularly in schools. If the architecture of our early childhood spaces structurally reiterates gender binaries, we will never grow up to really be comfortable in non-gendered bathrooms because our comfort is first introduced and developed at a young age. Prior to those moments, most children do not think very much about who is around them when they perform any biological act. If we change the gender markings of early education bathrooms, we have changed the embedded social meaning of everyday practice in the future." p89

Response: People love to hold on to social structures they came up with even if these are insulting (we see that with race and traditions too for example) For me personally, I grew up with my best friend, whom is also of biracial descent, being gay. We had this mutual understanding even as five year olds and I never judged him, looked at him differently etc, my own aunt married my "new" aunt on my birthday when I was 8. Now I know my personal experience does not happen often, not everyone especially children are in touch with let alone aware of gender, therefor we see people becoming so difficult about non-gendered toilets for example. It's like this dutch saying "wat de Boer niet kent eet hij niet" Its saying that what is or feels unfamiliar is already pushed away or written or because of peoples bias and prejudices instead of putting in the work to educate yourself on the matter and be compassionate towards others.

3. "Often we feel trapped in one system, and we feel the system is so much larger than we are; but we are the ones who are keeping that system going. So once you recognise the inequity, and trace how your own body is being disciplined and kept in a certain place, you can begin to think through how you might design intervention, as a creator of cultural material. "p90

Response: The system for me is mainly systemic racism that I am stuck in as a POC in a predominantly white society, however I feel like I am actively part of the change that us POC are trying to make in the Netherlands. "If you can not change it just let it be" does not slide. People are finally fed up with being treated as unequal and being lied to through the telling of dutch History and the Dutch not taking ownership and full responsibility for the role they played in our colonial history and slavery. No compensations nor a formal excuse has ever been issued. So in that sense a lot of white dutch people do not want to see change and do not try and actively make for change, mainly because it does not affect their lives or livelihood whatsoever. Feeling trapped in a system as a POC is something a lot of us can agree on, from the way we are being spoken to and treated, to the opportunities we get in this society to the racist traditions that are still taking place.

4. "If, due to your body experience, you have never had to question how the world looks at your race/class/ethnicity/ gender/body, or if that has never impacted the way the world identifies your research or work, you should know that that is a privileged experience. And that privilege or lack thereof, informs you and your praxis." p86

Response: Especially white privilege is what this makes me think of, mainly because of where I live(The Netherlands) What we see here a lot in white bodies is this colour-blindness and avoiding the conversations about race, class, ethnicity and even gender at times. People like to keep things the way they were without showing any empathetic ability, we see that a lot with this weird, ridiculous, outdated "tradition" of black Pete aka white people dressing up in black face like the minstrel-shows from back in the days. If you would do this anywhere else in the world there would be outrage, and actually there was. But the majority of the white dutch people show their true colours when you are trying to change a tradition they have such fond memories of, although no one is touching these memories and we are only trying to make it inclusive, they do not see it that way(for a big part because of their privilege)

WEKKER

Philosophical worldview. Because Wekker's work is a part of a collection of answers to fundamental questions of the universe, based around common concepts, normally grounded in reason. The philosophical worldview is often arising from the teachings of an influential thinker, in this case Wekker represents that influential thinker. She breaks through striations placed in societies and questions them. For example whiteness in the Netherlands and directing this phenomenon by arguing how this happened and also looking at the history behind it.

What is the focus of Wekker's introductory chapter?

AFFINITY

List subjects interested in working on during this minor

- The representation of black people
- Hall's representation theory
- Code switching
- Black and brown bodies in the art and animation field
- Black characters in the animation field
- correct representation and visibility

Think about the perspective- world view you want to take

Do you already know something about this / these subjects

Where is your knowledge from:

Experience (embodied knowledge)

Social media

Newspapers / journalism

Observation

Academic literature

Julie's class week 45

Teana's class week 38 Gloria Wekker:

Look up the author, what field are they in? :
- Anthropology, specialised in genderstudies, Caribbean studies, and studying sexuality, ethnicity and post colonialism.

Choose parts of the text that interest you most, or reflects the most compelling ideas (write between 300 and 500 words about this). :

- Of course, those who can phenotypically pass for Dutch, that is, those who are white, are in an advantageous position. It is migrants with dark or olive skin who do not succeed in enforcing their claim on Dutchness or have it accepted as legitimate. The main model for dealing with ethnic/racial difference is assimilation and those who cannot or will not be assimilated are segre- gated (Essed 1994). Thus, notwithstanding the thoroughly mixed makeup of the Dutch population in terms of racial or ethnic origins, the dominant representation is one of Dutchness as whiteness and being Christian. This image of Dutchness dates from the end of the nineteenth century, with the centralization and standardization of Dutch language and culture (Lucas- sen and Penninx 1993).

Being biracial myself with part of my roots laying in Surinam, which used to be colonized by the Dutch. You are often seen as not white enough but also as not black enough, the idea that Wekker highlights about the phenotypically white passing or being and others dives into the shared history but also shows that although these are intertwined, because it did not take place on Dutch soil, the color blindness and ignoring the racial problems or speaking about race takes a negative notion for white Dutch people. “Displacement”

Pick your favourite quote from this reading and put them on your hotglue as well:

- There was, until the last decade of the twentieth century, a stark juxtaposition between the Dutch imperial presence in the world, since the sixteenth century, and its almost total absence in the Dutch educational curriculum, in self-image and self-representations such as monuments,14 literature, and debates about Dutch identity, including the infamous debates about multicultural society in the past two decades, which have resulted in the almost unani- mous conclusion that multiculturalism has failed.

Also think about what this text means for the body you are in: is she speaking about you? In what context does she speak about you? How does this make you feel? Describe the words there is no limit and they can be contradictory:

- In the context that one of my parents came here as a black migrant from a former colony, but also my own blackness and how the Dutch see and treat me as a person of color and for my on a more personal note, also being part white and how even some of my own relatives treat me and my sister compared to other relatives that are not black. People rather not speaking about the issues of race and colonialism or people making sure you unwillingly feel hyper visible at times.

Identify a passage from the introduction that invokes any sense of discomfort. Highlight this passage and return to reading it periodically as you work through the minor. What does this passage reveal about your socialization into the Dutch cultural archive? Does your discomfort shift over time? If so, what supported that shift? :

- Being biracial and having both dutch white as black surinamese roots at this point its a hard task to make me feel uncomfortable, growing up surrounded by white relatives, of whom a few always look at you with distaste or have no filter saying racially charged things, I have to say I kind of got used to learning to filter these things out, for my own peace of mind. The homogeneously white roots and wanting to maintain that is always visible especially when people talk to my mom in a specific way, with her choosing not to stay homogeneous and having bipoc children.

What do you think is missing from the Dutch cultural archive? :

- More information accessible about whiteness and learning how to stop denying this, also the falsification of our shared history that is taught in schools and other institutions.