blog 3
“The process of stereotyping someone is akin to viewing them through a lens—a lens that sharpens our focus on certain, typically overgeneralized attributes, while blurring or obscuring the qualities that make that person unique.” (Petsko, Rosette & Bodenhausen, 2022, p. 763)
Race is often seen through such a biased lens, where stereotypes give rise to negative associations that hinder individuals’ ability to understand each other, restrict freedoms and create barriers to meaningful integration within communities.
As a defence to these lens’s people create masks. Uncertain how to fit in, you can hide and mask your identities, adopting the cultural norms and behaviours of the dominate culture, as protection and defence in fear of negative stereotyping.
History teaches us that creating mystery and legends is often preferable to revealing our non-normative selves, hiding real narratives with distortion and lies.
Through my research and discovery of Black artists and writers who work explores identity, and anti-racism, I have reflected on my own lived experiences, as a person with a hidden disability and how masking was and is something I have always done- having to hide my mistakes, short-term memory, and my extreme energy and emotions, these feelings of ‘otherness’ are uncomfortable and sometimes painful, at times creating an internal feeling of exclusion.
In the book Black and British: A Forgotten History, Olusoga describes the how in the book Mandeville’s Travels classical authors from the medieval period ‘freely mixed elements of genuine travel writing with what to the modern eye is evidently the fantastical and the mythological.’ (Olusoga, 2016, p. 64)
These written interpretations of ‘other’ cultures shaped beliefs and created misconceptions about Africa, reinforcing the idea of the continent as both mystical and monstrous. These narratives arguably, played a key role in justifying European colonisation.
Artists and designers are skilled at storytelling creating narratives that connect to and hold the viewers’ attention. As educators within art and design what holds our attention and what do we hold up a desired standard?
Frantz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks written in 1952 is one of the most important anti-colonials works of the post-war period, Kiambu Anita Waithira Israel, writes in the response to this book: ‘Education and whitewashing of the curriculum reinforces this idea that Black people never made a contribution to history and that we only existed as slaves…Black people deserve to see themselves as more than an oppressed people. Blackness is not a fixed identity.’ (Israel, 2023, p. 17)
In Campt book the Black gaze she talks about the ‘growing and increasing influential cohort of Black artists’ who are ‘choosing to look after, care for and reclaim an uncomfortable visual archive that makes audiences work through and toward new ways of encountering the precarity of Black life’. She goes on to ask, ‘what would it mean to see oneself through the complex positionality that is blackness’ (Campt, 2023, pp. 8)
With these changing viewpoints, learning to see what is more honest, how do we interpret and respond to images in art when we understand the narratives differently. Can we still look at this work with through the same lenses?
- UAL, Decolonising Arts Institute. UAL Decolonising Arts Institute. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/ual-decolonising-arts-institute
- Olusoga, D. (2016) Black and British: A Forgotten History. London: Macmillan.
- Campt, T.M., 2023. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Petsko, C.D., Rosette, A.S. & Bodenhausen, G.V., 2022. Through the Looking Glass: A Lens-Based Account of Intersectional Stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123(4), pp.763–787.
- Israel, A.W. (2023) Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: Interpretations, Art & Pedagogy. In: Decolonising the Arts Curriculum: Perspectives on Higher Education. University of the Arts London. Available at: https://decolonisingtheartscurriculum.myblog.arts.ac.uk/frantz-fanon/