It’s time for the arts world to look hard at its own misogyny and racism, starting with language, says Bidisha.
The cultural world is undergoing a slow and long overdue reckoning with racism. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has rightly changed the archaic, Orientalist, exoticising, offensive or unthinkingly racist titles of more than 100 artworks including the use of the word “negro” for Afro-Caribbean subjects and “Mohammedan” for Middle Eastern subjects. In the US, a Harvard University emblem featuring the insignia of a slave-owning family is the subject of a student protest. Meanwhile, in the UK, Oriel college, Oxford, is under pressure to remove a statue paying tribute to coloniser Cecil Rhodes, following a student-led protest inspired by similar demonstrations in Cape Town, South Africa. Even though they haven’t yet decided what action to take, Oriel has been admirably direct in naming the problem and saying it “does not condone [Rhodes’] racist views or actions”. In that case, why keep a statue aggrandising and lionising the man who held those views? To keep the statue is indeed to condone those actions; the prestigious Rhodes scholarship in his name can easily be renamed and, indeed, I wonder why it’s taking so long.
More ambiguously, a Quaker school in suburban Philadelphia has taken Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – about a young white boy fleeing his abusive father with Jim, an escaped black American slave – off the syllabus because of its heavy dosage of the N-word, which made students feel uncomfortable. I’m wondering if the students were mainly white and their discomfiture was from having to confront the history (and present) of white racism as embodied in that word, or if it goes deeper than that and the racist stereotyping of Jim as emotionally naive, sentimental and simple was what stuck in their throat, as it does in mine... Keep reading on The Guardian
The cultural world is undergoing a slow and long overdue reckoning with racism. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has rightly changed the archaic, Orientalist, exoticising, offensive or unthinkingly racist titles of more than 100 artworks including the use of the word “negro” for Afro-Caribbean subjects and “Mohammedan” for Middle Eastern subjects. In the US, a Harvard University emblem featuring the insignia of a slave-owning family is the subject of a student protest. Meanwhile, in the UK, Oriel college, Oxford, is under pressure to remove a statue paying tribute to coloniser Cecil Rhodes, following a student-led protest inspired by similar demonstrations in Cape Town, South Africa. Even though they haven’t yet decided what action to take, Oriel has been admirably direct in naming the problem and saying it “does not condone [Rhodes’] racist views or actions”. In that case, why keep a statue aggrandising and lionising the man who held those views? To keep the statue is indeed to condone those actions; the prestigious Rhodes scholarship in his name can easily be renamed and, indeed, I wonder why it’s taking so long.
More ambiguously, a Quaker school in suburban Philadelphia has taken Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – about a young white boy fleeing his abusive father with Jim, an escaped black American slave – off the syllabus because of its heavy dosage of the N-word, which made students feel uncomfortable. I’m wondering if the students were mainly white and their discomfiture was from having to confront the history (and present) of white racism as embodied in that word, or if it goes deeper than that and the racist stereotyping of Jim as emotionally naive, sentimental and simple was what stuck in their throat, as it does in mine... Keep reading on The Guardian