White cluelessness

Let me preface this by saying that I am white. I need sunscreen to go pick up my morning paper. So I can say things such as the fact that white people are clueless about many race issues. Really. I can read all of Maya Angelou's books and watch all of Spike Lee's films, it doesn't make me an expert on the black experience.

But, clueless as I am, I do know certain things: for example, if I am the coach for a basketball team, I know enough that I shouldn't call my players by a certain word even if they use that word amongst themselves completely casual. This has actually happened, the coach was on the news. Also, I know that if I am an art photographer, I shouldn't take a picture of a white man in blackface. Taking a picture of a black man in blackface is also taboo. But what about taking a picture of a black man in whiteface?

Apparently, white artist Nathaniel C. Shannon thought that yes, that is okay. Last week I went to an art show near Detroit's Eastern Market. Nathaniel there had a whole series of photographs of a black man in whiteface playing golf in unlikely locations around the city. It was titled "Detroit Community Golf Course," if I recall correctly.

Maybe the whiteface wasn't the most offensive thing about those photographs. Maybe it's the idea that Detroit as a setting for photographs is only good for pictures of urban decay and poverty, what is sometimes called "urban porn."

Now, I will confess that I don't know much about art. Why should I pay ten grand for a large canvas painted with a uniform shade of green with a red dot in the corner if I can drive to Home Depot and hire someone to produce something exactly like that for a fraction of what the artist is asking for? Art photographers are usually not much better. At another show, I think it was at CCS, there was a very blurry photo that looked like two men having sex. The tag said $500. A lot of these modern artists, it seems to me, are just using bold concepts as a means of compensating for weak technical skills.

Going back to Nathaniel's photos: the man has technical skill. If I had been at his side with my Canon Powershot taking pictures of the man golfing, my pictures wouldn't look anywhere near as polished as his. But, if he has skill, why does he need to resort to race-baiting to sell his work? Alonso Delarte wrote a very short article on Examiner.com about Nathaniel's work that prompted quite a few white people to bash the writer, spilling far more ink on the topic than the original writer.

If you had any doubt that Alonzo's Jewish, this proves it: Mark Penxa remarked, at the end of a long diatribe: "I hope you enjoyed the free food and drinks, you *seemed* to be having a great time the entire night." You can just imagine one of Adolf Hitler's friends in 1917 pointing out that the Jewish critic at his art opening last night ate all the mini burgers yet had the gall to write a negative review of Hitler's paintings.

Alonso was also taken to task for not asking the photographer about the meaning of his work. But why should he have? So that Nathaniel could spout off some clueless rhetoric pretending to understand what black people go through in Detroit? Or so that he could admit that it was just a ploy to sell off an entire series of photographs?

He did ask black men for their opinion (and they were tough to find in that gallery, at most there were five black men among three hundred people or so packed in there). But there is only one man who would have anything meaningful to say about those photographs, and that is the black man who agreed to have a make-up artist put him in whiteface so he could be photographed around the city playing golf.

So in summary, I won't be expecting an invitation to speak at an NAACP event any time soon. Neither should Nathaniel C. Shannon.