Implicit Associations

“Implicit associations are often at odds with our conscious attitudes and beliefs. This does not mean that one is more accurate than the other. Rather, it suggests that we can have two unique evaluations of the same concept -- one conscious and the other unconscious.”

This text is from the website understandingprejudice.org. The website hosts the Implicit Association Test (IAT) which Google is currently using in lectures to expose its employees to unconscious attitudes that could affect decision-making in the workplace. Google’s case involves gender discrimination in hiring, but I decided to take the test for Racism after reading about it in the New York Times. My results showed that I’m among the 12% of people who have “little to no automatic preference between either European Americans or African Americans”. I was disturbed by another statistic that 46% of the over one million people who have taken this test fall into the category of “automatic preference for white people.” 

The circumstances of the Yams Collective’s rejection of the ‘institutional white supremacy’ of the Whitney begs the question, should our art institutions take a page from Google’s HR manual when it comes to race? Should curators add the IAT to their ‘curriculum?’ The Whitney’s micro-aggressions reported in the Ben Davis interview with two members of Yams – leaving off wall tags; not screening the film until the final two weeks of the show – could be perceived as passive aggressive, an honest mistake, or the aggregate of a deep, unconscious bias. The surface of the art world is changing – black artists have institutional support and market power – leading to the feeling that the playing field is leveling, moving toward the post-racial. However, until we can tackle the unconscious biases within institutions, post-racial equality will remain a fantasy.

The Yams collective and others refer to Joe Scanlan’s fabricated black female persona Donelle Wolford as ‘the severe conceptual rape of black female bodies.’ The Yams’ critique extends further in this passage:

Everyone has the right to expression because of our freedom of speech; whatever they want to do, however they want to say it. But with all that, there’s responsibility to be an intelligent individual, and as an individual who is an artist, to think about how your work influences people. And to have a mediocre approach to “questioning authorship,” and meanwhile exploiting a group of people and not having a sensitivity about that, makes us ask: What are you trying to say?

Coco Fusco speaks to the meta-performance as another manifestation of unconscious beliefs incubated within the academic context. Fusco writes, “rather than seeing Scanlan’s work as a crude exercise in exploitation, we might conceive of it as a castration fantasy about white male erasure.” Is the origin of this work the imaginary instability of white male hegemony? Whatever the origins and implications of Donelle Wolford, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, Ferguson, A Subtlety, etc., we can see that for a problem so close to the surface (the epidermis), trauma and prejudice are systemically present albeit buried by conceptual inquiry, good intentions and post-racial rhetoric. Are the racially charged events of today the beginning of the excavation?