Two years ago I founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). We were initially a small group of three or four who expanded into a group of 10 curators, of all races, genders and sexual orientations. We met on Sundays, in person or by conference call, to talk about how to think about white supremacy. Our discussions happened as unarmed black people across the US were being killed, “alt-right” groups marched with tiki torches on Charlottesville, ending with three deaths, and the president – whose run-up to office emboldened and amplified hate against immigrants, Muslims, women, gay people and other minorities – continued to make policy out of racist rhetoric.
Black Americans were targeted by the police and white Americans were reporting people to the police because they were black. We decided to use the theorist Sara Ahmed’s “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” as an organising thesis. She argues that institutions are not “simply given” but rather that they “become given” as they repeat decisions over time in service of “the reproduction of whiteness”. Two years of collective labour culminated in TRII’s first biennial exhibition, On Whiteness, which took place in New York this month.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
