Following the race workshop on whiteness during Inclusive Practices I was reminded of my Australian childhood context as a white person growing up in a remote indigenous town learning local indigenous historical ways alongside the curriculum designed through the English colonialist lens. When I moved to major global cities, the lack of others exposure to Indigenous people and learning surprised me. Early in my artistic career I felt compelled to make work about the systemic racism of Australia’s historical cultural propaganda imagery, which included the representation of Indigenous people. When my work was censored owing to my being white, I was confronted with my own ‘white progressive’ racism [DiAngelo in Amanpour & Co. 2020]. A behavioural example DiAngelo offers that echoed my racism was the separation of collective systematic racism from individual overt racism, framed as “goodness”, which DiAngelo extrapolates on in Nice Racism as causing ‘the most daily harm across race’ [DiAngelo, 2021]. The gesture of racial goodness as progressive racism palpably effected me as the complexity of my experience attempting to draw attention to systemic racism as racial “goodness” consequentially led to my relocation to the UK and my continued interest in the frameworks perpetuating the unconscious bias of white progressives. This context and experience informs the development of my intervention aimed at BA-level students who are white mature-aged middle-class females studying in the rural environment of West Sussex (West Dean College).
Initially for my intervention, I wanted to develop a collaborative practical research session within the Art & Society project to mobilise individuals’ intersectionality by inviting them to paint/draw a symbolic representation of a hidden aspect of their identity. This would be timed so the object/image remains in a state of ongoing metamorphosis to mirror how each artwork is shaped via each interaction with a different individual. Through visually sharing authenticity I hoped to invoke a discussion related to persona pedagogy and Haraway’s notion of “oddkin”. Owing to the lack of racial diversity within the West Dean student cohort, the workshop initially had “Faith” as a focus as there is a mix of Christian, Buddhist and Atheists amongst the students. Following a tutorial with Shani, she encouraged me to focus on the dominance which is oppressive within the group (and what was missing within the group) and the intervention went in a direction towards addressing the whiteness in the student cohorts. The workshop included three activity phases that were punctuated by critical reflection discussions to allow for “double-loop learning” [Thomas 2022 p.12] and respond to the power distribution across the group. Rather than use personas to create empathy towards others, the session aimed to mobilise mark-making and symbols to act out unconscious behavioural gestures that could be “seen”, critically reflected on, discussed and possibly changed. To instil equality across tools and materials, the same size brushes were to be distributed, and pre-mixed colours would restrict a tonal range of one colour and white (to open a discussion of dominance and white colonisation of aesthetics). The final feedback from my tutor about my proposed intervention was not overtly positive or encouraging to continue with it so I reconsidered and looked at practical methods of student growth development that I recognise as effective and work already with students. During the Summer School I used a Find 40 activity for students to quickly research methods and materials efficiently towards their final projects. The Activity structure seemed suitable for adaptation and I decided to adjust it towards a diversity focus for theory based research with the idea it would shape their written assessments.
My ARP idea continued to evolve from my racially white dominant situation at West Dean College that is depleting the value of plural perspectives on offer in the world. Collectively the department and student work is suffering from a lack of culturally diverse richness and the students are unable to see themselves and what they represent, along with genuinely appreciating the complexity of black and brown aesthetics. I wanted to shift this even if in a small way, along with the awareness of the students as a racially white dominant collective who are contributing to progressive racism or simply not recognising their own racial dominance (reinforced by their use of the term “Universal”, as if their perspective was the same as others owing to “everyone being human”). The goal of my project is to ‘generate the development of perspectives’ for the students to be initiators of change, even on a micro-level. (DiAngelo, 2011). The idea was based around believing the students might start acknowledging other perspectives if they came into contact with them, on their own terms. I had been exposing them to diverse artists through lectures but they seemed to not connect with them so I figured if they felt like they discovered them for themselves, this might start shaping their outcomes. Hence using the research stage as a means for tackling the problem.