Kara Walker and Barack Obama

Kai and our Papa and I went to see Kara Walker's show at the Whitney yesterday; it's closing on 2/3, and it's really worth checking out if you have the chance. Walker's work is so dark, even so disgusting at times, that I was jarred at first: fetuses falling out of orifices, excrement everywhere, rape, fellatio, incest, racial stereotypes. In another context (on TV, in a book, etc) that jarring would have been enough to make me walk away. But Walker required me to keep looking, to look beyond my knee-jerk, liberal, "it's too much to bear" attitude and explore a dialogue with her about what happened in this country during slavery, and what the legacy of that tragedy has been for all Americans up to the present. We have a cultural tendency to look away: to turn off the television when the footage of Katrina is too much for us to bear; to accept that the AP isn't actually showing us the daily body-count in Iraq. 

I was shocked to learn that when, at the tender age of 28, Walker was granted a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, there was a huge outcry from a number of African-American artists, a few of whom called for a boycott of the grant. In a piece at the exhibit in which Walker responds to this outcry, she levels a claim back at her detractors, who, according to Henry Louis Gates Jr. (he was whispering in my ear via a gallery guide), were particularly concerned that Walker's art would make African-Americans "look bad" to whites; Walker writes (and I'm paraphrasing here): "Final Solution: depict racial stereotypes of white people." And then, at the bottom of the page, she adds, in smaller letters: "For balance." That's the other thing I like about Walker: she's funny. And I guess you'd have to be, when such work is coming through you. Humor and darkness are interwoven; as are birth and death, love and hate. 

Walker's work also got me thinking about Obama's speech the other night after winning the South Carolina primary. Clinton's campaign has made some real missteps by trying to racialize the race for President; her assertions that Hispanics, for example, won't vote for Obama, is just one example. I liked what Obama had to say in response to that: yes, we're different, but we all want the same thing, and that's change (much less eloquent in my version). And that's what I wanted to say to the folks who feel Walker should be censored, who feel she is drumming up racial stereotypes long since buried. It's true, America doesn't do slavery anymore. It's true, Walker can only make her art in a relatively reflective world, one with distance from the horrors of slavery, and an innate distaste for the transactions that occurred during that time. But what Walker does in exploring those transactions is to ask us to look at our own lives and see the ways in which the legacy of slavery still lives on. Socio-economic disparity, the war in Iraq, the crisis in Darfur. Obama is a great candidate because he is requiring his supporters to do exactly what Walker is requiring her viewers to do: to look past their own discomfort, straight into the heart of what is wrong with America. Not because we hate this country. But because we love it. (mbw)