You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.
Kerry James MarshallRead
For black people, everything we do has to be ratified and endorsed by a power structure that is white. And that reinforces a kind of racial hierarchy where whiteness is the privileged position to be in, and ethnicity is problematic.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the systemic racial hierarchy that privileges whiteness and marginalizes Black identities and actions.
Kerry James Marshall's quote reflects on the societal dynamics where Black individuals must seek validation from a predominantly white power structure, illustrating how this dependency creates a hierarchical system that privileges whiteness. This systemic endorsement challenges the intrinsic value of Black culture and identity, marking it as 'problematic' within the prevailing social order, and emphasizes the need to confront and dismantle these inequities.
Themes
Racial HierarchyWhitenessPower StructureBlack IdentityEthnicity
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on systemic racism in a community meeting.
More from Kerry James Marshall
All quotes βIn Western Catholicism, darkness was evil. In the colonial and imperial context, dark skin was always weak, powerless, subjugated. If you see these images all the time, they become commonplace, and they no longer become a spectacular or sensational thing.
Kerry James MarshallRead
My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at.
Kerry James MarshallRead
If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I'm not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures.
Kerry James MarshallRead
When you go to an art museum, the thing you're least likely to encounter is a picture of a black person. When it comes to ideas about art and about beauty, the black figure is absent.
Kerry James MarshallRead
The history of political movements in the African diaspora is that the solution to the problem is never in the hands of people who are advancing the movement. I try and operate on my own terms.
Kerry James MarshallRead
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