Shattering whiteness: using porcelain as a tool to promote racial justice

As an artist I’m approaching what I do with a sense of responsibility about what academic and curator Maurice Berger called “the most vexing and intransigent issue of our time: white racism in all its forms”. What my interdisciplinary research asks is: can using porcelain as part of an activist art practice work positively in the service of collective antiracist action?

I use critical whiteness as a theoretical framework, and the literature in this field has shifted from its original focus on how the oppressed experience whiteness – Du Bois and Fanon, for example (Du Bois, 2016; Fanon, 2008), to how people racialised as white understand the advantages that whiteness grants them – McIntosh and Di Angelo (McIntosh, 1995, Di Angelo, 2018). While this move aims to expose white unconsciousness, it can be argued that highlighting the fragile, innocent, ignorance of white people tends to let them off the hook, denying their active agency in white domination. This trend suggests critical whiteness is in danger of underplaying how whiteness embodies, enacts and maintains structures of white supremacy, which prompts me to question whether critical whiteness can be used positively for racial justice and refrain from further bolstering narcissistic whiteness? Can an artist racialised as white, with all the privileges and blindspots this brings, work effectively in solidarity with those striving for black liberation and not simply perform what I call ‘woke whiteness’? As Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee remind us, genuine attempts at antiracism have to fight against “powerful currents of individualism, opportunism and empty liberalism” (Shafi and Nagdee, 2022, p.3).

To counter this shift within critical whiteness, and following Leonardo (2004, 2013) and Matias and Boucher (2021), I attempt to take a ‘black whiteness’ approach to the critical study of whiteness, which requires an amplification of black voices and black experiences of whiteness. Understanding how whiteness operates can, I hope, lead to an active rather than passive racial awakening for white people. Only then can whiteness start to be dismantled.