A Stunt, a Spoof, and a Lesson on Racism

Joe Scanlan is marginally known in the art world for his obviously racist stunts where he either performs under the guise of a black man or has black actors perform his art for him. Justin Wong decided to take this charade even further and satire the absurd exercise by "creating" Joe Scanlan as a version of himself. This is a satire, and it is a brilliantly incisive take on the politics of "dressing up." As he writes,

The idea for Joe Scanlan came a few years ago when I became interested in the presence of straight white men within the art world. In so many other realms straight white men are deprived of social and political ‘authenticity’: look at the white appropriation of black music from blues to hip hop, the white idolization of black athletes, or the apotheosis of white politics (Bill Clinton) resting in black folksiness. In the art world, however, the discourse around art produced by straight white men often casts them as singular and generative geniuses.

This struck me as a curiosity. I wondered what it would be like to create a figure that, through a practice of what I’d like to term “willful white male idiocy,” could not only point to, but also test the limits of and explode the boundaries of straight white male positionality within the art world. Could such a project, were it successful, help to undo some of the myth of the white male genius (and its corollary: the ghettoized queer, female, poor, colored “political” artist) we have inherited from European modernism?

The idea of "willful idiocy" is especially illuminating here, and it's not a concept I had a term for before reading this article. This is probably best encapsulated by occurrences where someone acts in a racist manor or brings up a racist comment while explicitly denying that their behavior is racist. By at least playing up this factor in Scanlan, Wong has hit at one of the most bizarre yet prevalent aspects of the current American conversation surrounding race.

For example, it's not uncommon to hear liberal people saying the problem with black America is "single mothers" or talking in panicked terms about the coming "white minority." Or trying to dredge up the old straw man of "black racism." They say on one hand that they want to see black people succeed (or oppose "racism") all while blaming something endemic to black people for dysfunction in their community (or pretending that "racism" has white and black victims). You see this thing happen all the time. Even Jonathan Chait kept repeating these lies during a recent debate on race.

As Ta Nehisi Coates always emphasizes, the problem is not poverty, or marriage, or even bigotry, the problem is white supremacy. Everything else is a distraction from that crucially important fact.

The importance of Joe Scanlan is multiple and tied fundamentally to a concept of erasure. White people are terrified of being accused of being a racist, because they equate racism with a certain uncultured bigotry that's no longer acceptable. Think Cliven Bundy. But this hysterical attitude towards "racism" actually serves racist ends. It makes the conversation about individuals' behavior instead of social hierarchy, even though the latter is the real problem.

Race and bigotry were invented to justify exploiting an entire class of Americans. That exploitation has not stopped, and little effort has been spent to solve it. In fact, by "erasing" bigotry, we've spent a lot of the capital needed to address hierarchy while making it nearly impossible to acknowledge how our attitudes and assumptions perpetuate the real problem. Like it or not, as white Americans, we are all racist.

So it's not just Justin Wong, Scanlan's "creator" and author of this article. We are all Joe Scanlan in the ways we (un)consciously reinforce American white supremacy. Solving this problem starts with acknowledging that fact and investigating our own history. We say and do racist things, we benefit from racial exploitation, and we owe it to ourselves to admit that. Only then can we see through the caricatures and fictions of racism in America and gain a true appreciation for what it means to be American.