What is “Whiteness is…”? What does it mean?
This poster was designed as an intervention in public spaces and calls attention to the racialized hierarchy that structures our society today. By naming whiteness, which is often not named in our society we are calling attention to the ways power is enacted in our lives openly or most times subversively. One of the overt ways in which power is exercised in our society is policing; it is present in the way we treat each other and it is present in the way we police ourselves. Often, power makes it impossible to oppose injustice without fear of serious repercussions. Our notion of power is usually deeply ingrained in us. How we exercise power is tied to social conditioning and our identity.
“According to Foucault (1980b), power relations embedded in social practices are manifested in the construction of specific identities, which in turn support those same power relations by making the social practices seem justified and reasonable. Thus, one of the ways in which hierarchical academic and social practices come to be constructed and construed as reasonable is through the discursive constitution of different identities — that is, the constitution of identities differentiated in a manner that suits them to operating within hierarchical systems.” (Briscoe, 2012, p. 119)
The current election has confirmed what most of us did not want to admit to ourselves. We live in an extremely prejudiced society that attributes value according to race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, religion and nationality. Using these unjust evaluations of people’s worth, the country becomes further divided and that can lead to violence against each other. Trumps victory as President-elect has allowed people to be hateful in public. His bigoted declaration’s during the election season fueled the fire of hate and we see an acceleration of hate crimes since the elections towards African-Americas, Indigenous people, Latinos, Asian-Americans, women, LGBTQ communities, Muslims, and undocumented immigrants to name a few.
So, who are we? We are the NYU Flash Collective composed of students at New York University who are interested in challenging the intricacies/complexity of power, in particular police brutality in our society. The NYU Flash Collective was formed in September 2016 out of a workshop conducted by Avram Finkelstein, an artist and activist who is a member of the art collective Gran Fury. The Flash Collective according to Avram “is a new paradigm that Avram has developed for rethinking the public sphere, an experiment in political art-making in which he assembles a collective of limited duration to produce a single intervention in a public space.” (http://avramfinkelstein.com/flash-collectives/)
Avram facilitated the process of developing and articulating our collective’s mission to speak to the issue of policing, a current issue that we had identified together as a problem in our society today. We worked together to brainstorm the idea of “policing” first in relation to our own selves and then our daily experiences living and working in NYC. This brainstorming led to thinking about the image and text we would want to convey in a poster that we would plaster around the city. Our work together, lead us to design a poster on whiteness rather than specifically on policing and also create this blog as we felt the need to create a platform for a more engaged dialogue on race/racism and policing.
This online platform is a place to share our reflections with you. We began this collective before the Presidential election and given the increased polarization in our country after the election, we feel that it is even more important for us to come together to talk about the issues that divide us and just as importantly those that connect us in these uncertain times. We intend to share our thoughts, what’s happening around us and to familiarize ourselves with what type of conversations and actions are taking place. We will continually post news, reflections, and events that will spread awareness and engage in ongoing conversations about abuse of power, racism, and policing.
