Did you ever ask yourself how Afro Americans would respond to this? Be man enough to say damn it, I did it, this is what I feel, I know about you people, think what you like. And you think we’re childlike.
“That is clearly not the case!”
What we’ve gotten so far is a verbal apology—which absolutely means nothing.
“Well what do you want? What exactly do you want?”
Because along with that apology the same practices, the same discriminatory practices still exist in this gallery that exist in the whole art system in this country. A truly constructive apology would be one in which you would consciously sit down and figure out ways to make this, truly make this an alternative space it’s supposed to be, to truly address yourself to the question of Black artists. Then I might be persuaded that you were genuinely sorry.
A pause. The low hiss of the tape deck.
She nods. Perhaps she is agreeing, perhaps she is parrying. Maybe it is a reflex, a pulse of empathy or of loathing. It rankles him.
And this head-shaking nod—“Oh, I’m so sorry, we’ll try in the future not to do it.” You will try in the future not to do precisely what you’ve been doing all along—which is excluding Black artists from a dialogue.
Another woman’s voice, coarse and petulant, issues from the bounds of the circle.
It’s just a word.
Someone responds, If you speak English you know what that word means.
It could lose its meaning.
Someone asks, What does it mean to you?
The woman speaks louder, snarling and angry and low.
It’s just what was lying around the culture.
The pitch of her voice rising, her words gathering velocity.
For you to tell me what it means when it’s being used in so many contexts that I can’t say it only means this and therefore it can’t be used again.…
Let me tell you what it means to Black people! It means castration. It means hanging.…
This is not a Black community.
Another pause.
What? What did she just say?
She repeats, louder, with an edge.
This is not a Black community.
The din again. The voices.
Oh here we go. This is our community! This conversation is over. What are the neutral meanings of “nigger”? What else can it mean but “nigger”? This is a multi, this is a multi, this is a multi… The man wants to be heard. This is a multiracial community, this is a multiracial country here.
So what’s the matter with using that term?
It’s not our term it’s your term.
No it’s not my term! I didn’t invent the fucking language.
It’s not a Black-invented term, it’s a white-invented term.
Who cares? WHO CARES?
We do! The community.
I’M NOT trying to take responsibility for ALL THIS.
* * *
A week later, the Artists Space staff released its final public letter on the matter. “We wish to expand our programming to include more artists active in other communities. The way in which we can do this is to see more work or to have it brought to our attention,” it read. “Our concern is a result of an increased awareness that a large community of artists are not approaching us.”42
Howardena Pindell, Camille Billops, and Benny Andrews went to Washington, DC, to meet with NEA officials to discuss the exclusion of artists of color from artist grants. They left with promises to increase the number of artists of color on peer selection panels.
Winer made amends with the NEA. She promised NYSCA that Artists Space would add more people of color to the board, meet with artists of color to increase representation, and do more exhibitions with other organizations in different communities. She hired the young Black artist Tony Whitfield, who said he had been an unwilling signer of the March 5 letter, to pursue artists of color for the program.
Ragland Watkins weighed the episode with a mixture of professional duty and personal regret. “We were very proud of what we were doing and we were doing a good job, and suddenly we fucked up,” he said. The Nigger Drawings episode had brought him back to McComb, feeling stuck in the middle as history raged all around him.
“Coming where I came from, I believe totally in freedom of speech,” he said. “But let me put it this way: I believe in good manners.”
He reached out to Janet Henry and tried to convince her to do a show at Artists Space. Together they visited a movie set where Donald Newman was acting, perhaps to seek to some sort of closure. Henry thought he “looked like a junior executive on his day off,” and decided she didn’t want to meet him. Later Henry wrote a note to Watkins, thanking him for his courtesy and explaining why she could not in good conscience ever accept a show at Artists Space.
A month later, Lucy Lippard’s exhibition, Some Art from the British Left, opened in the same gallery where The Nigger Drawings had shown. Of the seven artists Lippard had chosen for the show, four were women, two had recently been involved in a censorship controversy in a London gallery, and one was a Black artist prominent in the antiracist movement there. The title was spray-painted onto a wall near the gallery entrance.
Donald Newman, once the rocket launched at two, saw his career briefly ride higher. All the media hype had made him a minor sensation. By the end of the year, he had followed Julian Schnabel and Ross Bleckner to Mary Boone’s gallery. Charles Saatchi bought three of The Nigger Drawings. Bruno Bischofberger exhibited him in Switzerland and bought more of his work. Newman then moved to Annina Nosei, the gallerist whose list included Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer and who once had the young Jean-Michel Basquiat in her basement painting canvases as fast as he could. Some in the Artists Space clique felt Newman was not getting attention for his work, but for his notoriety.
But as Schnabel, Basquiat, and Haring blasted off, Newman did not. Critic and gallerist Mitchell Algus wrote that the downtown art world had been invigorated by Donald’s “reckless punk posture,” a move that temporarily eclipsed “the earnest, mid-century obsessed post-conceptualism” of the Pictures Gen artists and challenged “the art world’s newly evolving, ambivalently liberal, ethical order.” But soon enough, when the art was separated from its title, Donald’s work “began to seem thin and worse, mild-mannered.”
Algus wrote, “Perhaps this is the inevitable fate of the precocious sophomore. It was the context after all, not the art, that had changed.”43
At the end of April 1979, in the same Village Voice issue where Richard Goldstein trashed Artists Space and Winer in a second editorial, punk critic Lester Bangs’s piece “The White Noise Supremacists” appeared, an indictment of the downtown scene’s racism and a ringing personal mea culpa.
Bangs wrote of drunken escapades improvising blues lyrics in front of singers like David Ruffin and Bobby Womack about wishing he “wuz a nigger / Then my dick’d be bigger.” He wrote:
[T]o this day I wonder how many of them hated my guts right then. Because Lenny Bruce was wrong—maybe in a better world than this such parlor games would amount to cleansing jet offtakes, and between friends, where a certain bond of mutual trust has been firmly established, good natured racial tradeoffs can be part of the vocabulary of understood affections. But beyond that trouble begins—when you fail to realize that no matter how harmless your intentions are, there is no reason to think that any shit that comes out of your mouth is going to be understood or happily received. Took me a long time to find it out, but those words are lethal, man, and you shouldn’t just go slinging them around for effect.44
In 1982, the year hip-hop blew onto the downtown scene like a fresh wind, Newman quit the art world to become a computer programmer.45
Helene Winer left Artists Space to cofound Metro Pictures gallery. With its roster of Artists Space vets like Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Jack Goldstein, Metro Pictures would become one of the most influential. But when she wanted to represent David Hammons, he refus
ed. It was a reminder that she had once gotten it wrong.
Years later she would say that that she had not understood that the protest “was really about this fairly exclusively white art world, not the title of the show.” She said, “It could have been a really productive thing, where everyone would have ended up feeling pretty good. I knew all these people. It wasn’t like I was some distant white person and that they couldn’t get in the door or something.”
“And we could have just planned something, and made a big statement.…”
Winer had little occasion to speak to Howardena Pindell again. Not long after The Nigger Drawings Pindell left the MOMA. Her time there had been marked with sudden disinvites to the museum’s exclusive social events. Now it ended with loud whispers among staff that she had turned into a Black female Jesse Helms. She was a censor, the art world’s version of a snitch.
“Never mind that women and Blacks and people of color were censored out of the system,” Pindell said, “the issue was: you’re censoring a white male artist.”
Pindell felt voiceless. Up to that point she had done conceptual pieces constructed meticulously from tiny paper circles she had hand-punched, colored, and sometimes numbered—as if she were fragmenting and reassembling herself into bits of order. She had drawn and numbered arrows on color photographs she had taken of televised sports contests. The arrows made the blurry images seem like maps of ocean currents. They swirled into impossible, impenetrable systems. They moved against each other.
But in 1979, her art changed. She survived a life-threatening auto accident. Her new art helped her recover her presence, her memory, the very sound of herself.
She made a video art piece entitled Free, White and 21, in which she split herself in two: playing herself earnestly describing her personal experiences with racism, then donning a blond wig to rejoin, “You ungrateful little—after all we have done for you. You know we don’t believe in your symbols, they are not valid unless we validate them. And you really must be paranoid.”
She began making large self-portraits, collaged and sewn canvases whose surfaces rippled with intensity, bristled with weaponized words—Imposter, We Will Not Listen to You, How Dare You Question. In some of the paintings of her Autobiography series from 1987 through 1990, her face and body seem to be carried away by that river of suggestion, that shimmering toxic wash. But the images also suggested a refusal to be submerged.
Artists Space would move on, remaking itself as a major supporter of new artists exploring multiculturalism and identity. When former intern Susan Wyatt became executive director in the late eighties, the organization came under national attack by cultural conservatives who attacked an exhibition on the AIDS crisis entitled Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, and called for the defunding of the NEA. Suddenly the Nigger Drawings protest appeared both as a distant moment and a shuddering portent.
In years to come, after the national language had found the words to describe the fight, some might come to debate whether this moment had marked the birth of “hipster racism” or “political correctness.” But before that, just around the bend, there would be protests over images and stereotypes, marches and shouting matches over school curricula, many more words over quality and exclusion, the lines distinctly drawn, the engulfment of all into obsessive disputes, post and riposte increasingly ritualized, hyperbole and spectacle the ascendant modes.
“‘Freedom for me, or freedom for him!’ is a current theme which is running throughout this society,” Linda Goode Bryant had written in her letter from the early days of the Nigger Drawings protests. “Perhaps naively, I still believe in freedom for all.”46
Now the future’s staring back at me like a vision
from the past.…
Oh we know the culture war
We don’t know what it’s for
But we’ve lived your Southern strategy
We know it’s never gonna last
—Arcade Fire, “Culture War,” The Suburbs
PART TWO
WHO ARE WE
1980–1993
Students protest at Stanford University for more faculty of color, ethnic studies classes, and stronger action against hate incidents, May 15, 1989. Fifty-six were arrested. From left: Cheryl Taylor, Gina Hernandez, Richard Suh. Photo by Chris Eisenberg. ©The Stanford Daily.
CHAPTER 6
THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
WHITENESS, THE RAINBOW, AND THE CULTURE WARS
The culture wars over art are really battles that the dominant culture stages with itself.… But the culture wars over race are more about whether former outsiders will ever be given a new status, either inside the mainstream or, at least, closer to the inside.
—Michele Wallace, “The Culture War within the Culture Wars: Race”
Harvey LeRoy “Lee” Atwater was a son of the South, the kind of infectiously loud and rude American boy obsessed with conquest. He wore his gold-buttoned blue coat, blue tie, and khakis with a bully swagger. He taunted his enemies, told lies about them little and big, treated the world like it was his sideline to stalk, firing up his players and working the refs. When he won, he let out a scream and put on a smile that looked like a grimace. When he lost, he was still trying to figure out how to win. During the 1980s he almost never lost.
Lee Atwater loved Black music. Growing up he had admired people like Steve Cropper, the Southern blue-eyed bluesman from the famous Stax studio band who had cowritten “In the Midnight Hour” and “Knock on Wood” and backed Otis Redding, Booker T. Jones, and Sam & Dave. After Atwater got George Herbert Walker Bush elected the forty-first president—politics was Lee’s chosen adult sport—his first act was to organize an inaugural party that he told the media, without any irony, would be “the Woodstock of rhythm and blues.”
On the appointed night he appeared onstage in his gold-buttoned blue coat, blue tie, and khakis, accessorized with black Ray-Bans and a red Fender. Then, in front of his heroes Cropper, Ronnie Wood, Stevie Ray Vaughan, B. B. King, Percy Sledge, Carla Thomas, and Chuck Jackson, he took the mic—whites and Blacks together, American music, good rocking on the nation’s grandest stage.
When Lee Atwater played the blues, he frowned, pursed his lips, and jutted his chin forward. He got on his knees and fell back like a believer catching the spirit. He exploded into a manic dance that ended in James Brown splits. He screamed and made that grimacing smile. If it all looked like something you might have seen before, maybe it was—Atwater playing Michael J. Fox playing Marty McFly playing his parents’ desegregated 1955 high school dance in Back to the Future.
This neocon boogie made perfect sense. Reaganites had tried to evoke imperialist nostalgia—transfiguring the memory of the thing destroyed into beautiful, romantic delusion. Native American author David Treuer called the phenomenon “kill the Indians, then copy them.”1 Ishmael Reed summed up the performance in a word: “Blackface.”2
After the party, Atwater returned to his new job, running the Republican Party, where he would mentor an operative named Karl Rove and plant the idea in the head of the president’s son—a young, smiley, former frat boy like himself—that Junior, too, had a bright future in politics. Atwater had arrived on the big stage by helping to mastermind the post-Watergate resurgence of the Republican Party. Neoconservatives were reviving Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, and Atwater was the perfect person to take the reins. Who better understood power in America than a white boy who aspired to the heavenly soul of a bluesman and the earthbound entitlement of a good ole boy?
The facts of Atwater’s career are the weird stuff of American irony. When he graduated from high school, his band the Upsetter’s Revue had been offered an opportunity to hit the road backing Lee Dorsey, the New Orleans R&B singer who would soon have a regional hit entitled “Yes We Can.” The song began:
Now is the time for all good men
To get together with one another
Iron out their problems and iron out their quarrels
&
nbsp; And try to live as brothers
Instead Atwater enrolled in Newberry College and took his first political internship with Strom Thurmond, the diehard segregationist who had fathered a daughter with his family’s Black maid.
Harry Dent, the architect of Nixon’s Southern strategy, became Atwater’s mentor. In 1980, at the age of twenty-nine, Atwater stopped a Democratic congressional challenger in South Carolina by arranging for anonymous phone calls to white voters letting them know that the candidate was a member of the NAACP. Impressed, the Reagan administration came calling, and so began Atwater’s rapid rise.
He believed that the best way for the party to cement a coalition of segregation-sympathetic “populists” and market-minded “country clubbers” was to exploit “social issues.”3 He told the journalists Thomas and Mary Edsall how he did this: “In the 1980 campaign, we were able to make the establishment, insofar as it is bad, the government. In other words, big government was the enemy, not big business.”4
More to the point, Atwater’s new Southern strategy would wrap the iron fist of pro-corporate policy in the velvet glove of anti-Black racism. He explained to political scholar Alexander Lamis and an unidentified newsman:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern strategy] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South for Reagan is to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 … and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the [1968 candidate George] Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace Voter by doing away with Legal Services, by cutting down on food stamps…?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] Blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”5
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