MAMA, I THOUGHT ONLY BLACK PEOPLE WERE BAD This project is brought to you by The Negro Art Collective. "Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African-Americans." (Renee Cox, Fo Wilson & Tony Cokes)

Summary: This street postering project was produced by a collaborative of African-American artists. The work questions stereotypical representations of Black men, especially the white supremacist projection of violent and criminal labels onto Black bodies. The dissemination of abhorent fictions animates the past and present of racial discourse in this society. We "flip the script" of these racist, discriminatory constructions to amplify and make legible the ways inaccurate labels impact and reduce subjectivity, allowing scapegoating and disavowal to function. The name of this game is interrogating whiteness.

"In raw numbers, European-American whites are the ethnic group with the most people in poverty, most illegitimate children, most people on Welfare, most unemployed men, and most arrests for serious crimes." (Charles Murray, conservative scholar)

The first public intervention by The Negro Art Collective is a series of 24 X 36" street posters co-sponsored by Gee Street Records, Inc. and Creative Time, Inc. The project confronts stereotypes of Black male violence and criminality by means of strategic inversion. One poster juxtaposes images of white criminals with text captions of the racist epithets usually reserved for Black men. The title work MAMA, I THOUGHT ONLY BLACK PEOPLE WERE BAD quotes the poignant and distrurbing confession of a child. Another poster decontextualizes the Charles Murray quotation above. Scheduled to be seen on the streets of Los Angeles in the summer of 1995, the photo and text constructions have a point-blank, Black Pop Attitude and read the animal, the brute, the mean, bad, ugly image of Black males in this culture as the projection and displacement of white desires and fears.

There is a history of representations (images, texts, statistics) which systematically distort Black people in the interest of maintaining relations of unequal political, economic, and social power. How can we produce a counter-discourse that underlines the violent criminalities of a white supremacist culture? How did the Black male come to have a particular symbolic franchise on violence? Whether its Gangsta' Rap, or the nightly spectacle of Black men being incarcerated on the news, we wonder about the ubiquity of this ideology, how the criminal potential of the Black male becomes common currency for both (fearful) whites and (proud, or fearful) Blacks. Media manipulators, even those critical of our current social arrangements, feel free to reach for the criminal card in a symptomatic response to this history of image circulation without questioning.

We are not racists, but we do isolate and play back the racist epithet. We live in a racist society, so we "flip the script" on the stereotype to reveal an image of a white criminality that generated the term in the first place. Some will find the implications of our work unsettling, but the tension between image and text (or text and context) points to a history of distortion beneath the conflation. If the slur (or manipulated statistic) seems out of place, too broad for the image or social group it describes, then some value or desire distorts the construction, and you better check yourself. If it makes you uncomfortable, welcome to the club. When white institutions run the show, isn't this inaccuracy always the case? And yet so many fail to question (disavowal), or smugly embrace the validity of a stereotype (scapegoating). As African-Americans we know these distortions occur all too commonly, but for this moment we're controlling the horizontal and the vertical. By publicly restaging this dynamic with an allegorical twist, we call attention to its negative effects both past and present. The name of this game is interrogating whiteness. It's about time for the payback, and payback is a bitch!

The Negro Art Collective is composed of Renee Cox (photographer), Fo Wilson (graphic designer), and Tony Cokes (multimediaist). We are three cultural producers dedicated to publicly "flipping the script" on white supremacist notions and representations. The fun has just begun.

The Negro Art Collective: "Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African-Americans."

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