Rankine is extremely interested in whiteness, believing that “it’s important that people begin to understand that whiteness is not inevitable, and that white dominance is not inevitable.” One reason Rankine wants such a center to exist is because she recently went into a bookstore at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art “and I asked them for books on whiteness. The man was like, ‘What?’
“I said, ‘Well, you know. Books that address the ways in which white contemporary artists deal with whiteness, interrogate it, analyze it, work in ways that push up with constructions of whiteness.’ He’s like, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’”
Rankine had a similar conversation in three different bookstores. While she knew they would have had books on African American art, these art bookshops never had anything to deconstruct race in general or whiteness in particular.
“Conceptions and constructions of whiteness,” she explained, have been “made and then propped up with eugenics and propped up with false science and false rhetoric and maintained through the justice system in every way”. They then become invisible. As writers and artists, she said, “it’s our job to point this out, because I really believe that people don’t know” – about what makes whiteness, or about how broad the life experiences of white people are.
MLK:"White folks are not right...It's time for America to have an intensified study on what's wrong with white folks...Anybody that will go around bombing houses and churches, it's something wrong with him."
boom.
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