Race and MoMa

This week, I visited The Museum of Modern Art in the city. Studying social theory this semester has made me more acutely aware of the importance interpretation and perception play in decision making and the construction of intellectual products. My academic pursuit has always been one of understanding—I’ve sought to answer how the ugliest of attitudes can develop, and even become pervasive, in a society. Still, ingesting readings on phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, structuralism, standpoint theory and other contemporary sociological theories has opened my eyes to concepts such as a priori knowledge, that not only effect the development of theory but also research methodology, fiction writing, and even works of art.

Hannah Deinhard (1970) writes that the main question that the sociology of art asks is “ How is it possible that works of art, which always originate as products of human activity within a particular time and society and for a particular time, society, or function -- even though they are not necessarily produced as 'works of art' -- can live beyond their time and seem expressive and meaningful in completely different epochs and societies?” Obviously, the beauty to art work is often its ability to be perceived, to hold different meanings to different people. Art clearly becomes socially constructed, and can be used to represent and transmit our own social constructions of concepts such as race and ethnicity. Additionally, it can be used to at least highlight and explain trends in race and ethnicity. These are my interpretations of some of my findings.

This piece is Joseph Kosuth's "The Word Definition." He lists various definitions for the concept of defining. To me, this shows the vast differences we can have in our process of defining. Morning's research on race is on racial conceptualization: what race is, how race differs and what the origins of race are. Race holds different definitions to each of us that are developed through processes of defining, that are different to each of us, even if regularities exist. Kosuth's "defining" is similar to Morning's many measures of conceptualization.

This picture is by Glen Ligon. The texts are inspired by prose from Zora Neal Hurston's "How it feels to be colored me" and Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man." While you may have trouble reading the black on black text, it reads “I am an invisible man…I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” The materials Ligon chooses to use to display these quotes make them difficult to read and understand--this, to me, represents how it is difficult for me, as a white male, to understand feelings of black existentialism and alienation. Also, it represents the difficulty to understand deeply rooted race problems. This invokes thoughts of standpoint theory, pointing to the conceptualization of race according to those of different races. It highlights our difficulty to understand what it means to be a certain race or ethnicity to someone.

This final picture I've chose to note in this blog entry is by Robert Colescott, a favorite artist of mine, and is named "Emergency Room." The piece has a lot going out, depicting racial hardship and even stereotypes. He paints a chaotic emergency room, what in Colescott's words he sees as an "allegory for the whole country." The scene has several different characters being shown. There's a group of apes stabbing eachother with knives in the upper corner; a sickly skeleton with a black female head recieving a blood transfusion; a priest holding a decapitated black head. To me, the picture shows Colescott's view of race in American society as one where blacks are put at a serious disadvantage, suffering from attacks in several areas.

The reason Morning's research is so important is that she provides a multidimensional outlook at defining notions of race. By showing the way race functions in several different contexts we see that only race is a social construct dependent on environment AND that these different context-dependent functionings can relate to racial attitudes and eventually even preference for policy and creation of policy. Kusuth's "The Word Definition" strongly sums up Morning's research, as different ways of defining is at the heart of Morning's studies.

references

Morning, Ann. 2009. “Toward a Sociology of Racial Conceptualization for the 21st Century” Social Forces 87, March 2009