Meditations on Privilege (inspired by Rent-A-Negro.com)

We don't realize that we are playing for high stakes even in the smallest of small talk...
Robin Lakoff, quoted in Bakewell, Liza, Image Acts, American Anthropology, March 1998.

America is a diverse country, racially, economically, and ethnically. And our institutions of higher education should reflect our diversity. Yet quota systems that use race to include or exclude people from higher education and the opportunities it offers are divisive, unfair and impossible to square with the Constitution.
President Bush,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030115-7.html

This isn't some kind of metaphor... goddamn this is real!
Steve Albini

As a person from a culturally dominant group (visibly Anglo, male, heterosexual with no apparent disabilities), it's always an awkward moment for me to outwardly contemplate privilege and oppression without resorting to rhetoric that simultaneously projects apologetic guilt and defensive superiority. Like now - as if I should I get credit for writing this because it's awkward for me. It's become easy to seemingly criticize my unequal privilege gifted through violent histories while distancing myself from those histories. The rejection of institutional racism and sexism can be accomplished intellectually and emotionally with little change in the material practice of everyday life. It's easy to do when I'M not part of the institution. And who really identifies with The Institution in an Althusserian sense anyway? Most of the spectrum encompassing the various ideologies of the dominant culture sees itself in opposition to The Institution - from the Right's opposition to state-sponsored affirmative action to the Liberal critiques of mass culture. To be sure, I don't want to regress into non-dialectal positions like atomistic relativity and/or autonomous responsibility, but the terms of institutionalization are important to consider. How is it that both Liberal Senator Ted Kennedy and White Supremacist Thomas Metzger can oppose the same systems, but for completely different reasons? Althusser's definition of ideology as the perceived relationship between an individual and material conditions serves as a good starting point. (http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/cultural_studies/althusser_ideology.htm)

I should be clear that this is not meant to be a thorough investigation of institutional oppression, but rather an attempt to establish a jumping-off point, so to speak, for looking at these issues through cultural production. Specifically, cultural objects that can be seen to provide other ways of interrogating privilege, with the goal of aiding in the more equitable distribution of power. One such cultural object that brought these issues to bear for me is damali ayo's Rent-A-Negro.com. The work is a visually simple web site designed with simple bold text and table cells using flat colors, devoid of any photographic or iconic imagery. This first web-based work of ayo utilizes textual motifs and emotional tones that are found in most of her other activities as a visual and performing artist (http://www.damaliayo.com). Here the artist establishes a commercial service in which she provides diversity to those lacking it in their lives - something her Otherness as a black woman accommodates. ayo will provide services like attending a party, confronting racist relatives, and give a "black opinion" to those willing to pay a fee. Personal experiences as an African-American artist in many predominantly white settings are blurred with the fictional and theatrical aims of the site. The services ayo peddles are not just satirical devices, they come from requests she's actually received from strangers, like *Can I touch your hair?* A tactic that is of the utmost importance to the project is the lack of photographic and iconic imagery. There are no images of ayo, no iconic logo, no stock photography of African-Americans, nothing but text, tables, and the colors blue, red, yellow (ochre), and black. There is a recognition of how images work here. The specificity of ayo's personality is denied, and the memorized images of *blackness* and *femaleness* are fore grounded. This is the *blackness* auctioned by keith obadike (http://Obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html) and the disembodied *female* of Mouchette (http://mouchette.org/), nameless prostitutes and service workers.


There is a refusal, in this work, of the utopian outlook of earlier new media work, especially Internet-based work, that saw incompatibilities between racial and gender recognition and the technology. The material presence of oppression is visible, even if not in pictures. We may not see the person's gendered, racialized body, but this invisibility, rather than making such distinctions unimportant, makes mediated stereotypes all the more powerful. While illusionistic imagery and even physical appearances can be dismissed as *unempirical,* newer imaging techniques like genetic mapping are said to abstractly represent reality in a kind of mathematical purity. But as the much-debated book The Bell Curve, and more recent discussions of standardized testing, illustrate, such abstract data is no less ideological than pictures. Despite the lack of imagery, this can be read as a deliberate *image act.* Anthropologist Liza Bakewell and others have theorized a practice of images, not as representation, but as actions that affect material culture and language. This conception of images problematizes theories of communicative action (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/300024/0) by disavowing the dichotomy of material and speech in favor of a view that sees communication as both dependent on and transformative of material environments. Bakewell asserts that a study of image acts would begin with the body, not texts or objects. While this could easily fall into traditional notions of essentialized humanness, the body here is not a universal one, but rather is one where the social collides with the perceived individual in an ideological implosion.


Read in this way, ayo's work can be seen as participating in something other than the representational strategies of identity politics, yet still grounded in the coded body. We are not presented with the artist's identity, or personality via ocular representation. This work is not educating us about the artist's humanness, nor that of the larger demographic she is part of. The target of the gaze is inverted, in a manner similar to Gomez-Pena's *reverse anthropology* and Adrian Piper's various public interventions (like wearing clothing reeking of fish in the subway at rush hour). The performance, while initiated by the artist, is actually carried out by the audience - it is their re/actions that are up for scrutiny. But here, not only is the identity of the observer reflected back, the material conditions of the gaze become the framework for the "transaction" of looking. Multiculturalism is big business, from ecotourist adventures with indigenous people to One World festivals in places like Branson, MO, where the dominant culture is not perceived as culture, but as a vacuum that consumes differences as commodified experience.


What is different here from the strategies of representational identity politics, coming from a strong humanist tradition, is that emphasis is placed on the action of privilege rather than on the set of symbols that we read privilege through. While not dismissive of symbolic and semiotic analysis, Rent-A-Negro.com focuses our attention on the manner in which privilege is exercised in material terms. In fact, it practices a form of exchange overdetermined by historic and ongoing symbolic systems, but an exchange that is contextualized economically as well as psychologically. Scientific, popular, aesthetic, and other systems of understanding, like the color identification systems explored by the Obadike's in The Interaction of Coloreds, (http://blacknetart.com/interaction.html) are becoming inseparable from market imperatives - biology is now biotechnology. If it's something worth understanding, it's something that should be exploited in the *free market.* If multiculturalism is truly a wanted concept, it will also be profitable, so goes the rhetoric from the neo-cons and liberals alike. But as is fairly obvious, exposing the contradictions of capital does not so easily alter the order of things; the battle between moral fundamentalism and libertarian enterprise is a pillow fight where the pillows are stuffed with the dead bodies of the oppressed and the rules change to keep everyone else out of the bedroom.


In the end, we're left with policies that reflect sentiments like those spoken by President Bush, decrying the *unconstitutionality* of affirmative action policies in Universities, and I assume anywhere. We are to celebrate diversity, including *economic diversity.* But what does that mean, *economic diversity?* In such Orwellian terms, we have managed to separate poverty and lack of political power from its material roots, as if economic differences have no ties to other forms of diversity. Only then can we applaud that both rich and poor manage to exist in the US, so that the myth of the middle as norm can be represented in the abstract language of averages, statistics, and sitcoms. How does one resist this? Or can one even create alternatives from a position of privilege? Maybe as many, including Deleuze and Guattari, have suggested, the answer is not to attempt to restrain the further development of globalization, but rather to push it forward, accelerating its progress. Resisting the global economy through global tactics different than what I'm writing about here, but what if we took ayo up on her offer? What would the impact of such *image acts* be? Thinking of this not in terms of subversion, but as moments of exchange capable of generating normative behavior as well as disrupt it, the act of *renting* the artist for a party does provide the possibility for learning and transformation. Reparations owed to the descendents of African slaves certainly involve economic analysis, as much as the practice of slavery itself did. Multiculturalism does cost something - consideration of how and whom it benefits in its current form seems important to consider. ayo gives us at least some hints on how to begin this line of thought by presenting racism/sexism within the US economies of service and information, where highly visible wage-based service work replaces production labor rendered invisible by geography and a lack of representation.


One thing that I keep coming back to, however, is that escaping privilege is extremely difficult. We remain involved in a situation dependent on *expendable income,* the space of art, sex, and service industries. Someone always looses when there's *expendable income.* Isn't that one of the infamous contradictions of capital: that profit is by definition the difference between the money someone's work generates via a product and what s/he actually gets paid for the labor? Of course, the classical argument is that access to the means of production, which requires investments of capital, makes all the difference. Here, ayo's body, or the idea of it, is both the object of consumption and the site of production, but not necessarily the means of production. That still rests with those that have the privilege of celebrating *economic diversity.* Speaking of which, maybe I should be saving my money... there's a party I'm going to that could use some *difference.*

ryan griffis

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