Earlier this month, Dylann Roof, the twenty-two-year-old avowed white supremacist, was sentenced to death for murdering nine black parishioners at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, South Carolina. His defense attorney, David Bruck, the anti-death-penalty advocate, argued that Roof was “abnormal,” “delusional,” and “suicidal,” but Roof, acting as his own attorney during the sentencing phase of his trial, denied it. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done, only that it had to be done in the first place, because, as he confessed to authorities in 2015, he wanted to start a race war. “I have to do it,” Roof told Felicia Sanders, a survivor of the attack, before pumping bullets into her son’s body. “Y’all are raping our women and y’all are taking over our world.”
Whose world exactly was Roof referring to? Is it real or imagined? Would the answer make him any less guilty? And, if it’s the latter, how do you disarm someone’s imagination? Questions like these have been central to the work of the poet, writer, and artist Claudia Rankine. In 2011, she published an open letter addressed to friends inviting them to share their thoughts and experiences on writing about race, hoping to learn if the respondents believed that race could be decontextualized from history, what compelled them to write about race, what the difficulties and advantages were, their fears, expectations, and anxieties. A bevy of responses came in, and Rankine posted many of them on her Web site. She called the project the Racial Imaginary, which, with the help of her collaborator, Beth Loffreda, became a book in 2014.
In the book’s introduction, Rankine and Loffreda explain that the racial imaginary is concerned not with who has the right to write about race but, rather, with where the desire comes from, and how to detect when race is “taking up residence in the creative act.” In other words, how to recognize when people’s “imagination is not entirely their own,” and the real-world consequences of our culturally constructed biases.
“These systemic problems have infiltrated the mind so that when someone asks the white policeman who shoots someone, ‘Why did you shoot him in the back?’ his answer is ‘I don’t know.’ Many of them say, ‘I don’t know,’ and it’s because they’re being propelled forward by some imaginary conception of being under attack when they’re not under attack,” Rankine said recently. “I think sometimes we’re dealing with racists who go out to murder and I think sometimes we’re dealing with people who have in their consciousness a built-up idea of who they are and who the ‘other’ is, and are inside a fight that doesn’t exist except in their imagination, and because their imagination is armed, the person on the other side ends up dead.” These racist constructions in the imagination throw people of color into a “false fight for their humanity,” she said, paraphrasing the poet Fred Moten. “We’re spending a lot of energy just trying to stay human.”
Last year, Rankine announced that she would use the money from her recently bestowed MacArthur “Genius” Grant to help establish the Racial Imaginary Institute in Manhattan, a brick-and-mortar extension of the original project where artists will present talks, read essays, host podcasts, and exhibit work focussed on race and the creative imagination. She is currently fund-raising while scouting locations on the Lower East Side, in Chelsea, and in SoHo, and envisions the institute as a mobile enterprise, headquartered in New York City with pop-ups and satellites all over the country, and maybe even the world.
The timing for the Racial Imaginary Institute could not be more auspicious. Many Americans were shocked that, despite the racism and racist language seen and heard throughout Donald Trump’s campaign, Trump was elected, suggesting that the critical thinking needed to understand how racism functions and spreads is still sorely lacking.
Rankine told me that the Racial Imaginary Institute is not a response to the incoming Administration, but it does aim to look at the ways our lives are being influenced by people’s understanding and misunderstanding of race. In an ironic twist, one of the goals will be to educate people about whiteness and white supremacy, a task that echoes the rhetoric used by white ethno-nationalists like Richard Spencer. But Rankine hopes the institute will be a place where artists will discuss, for example, “why whiteness isn’t written about as whiteness, as race, or the ways in which black life or the lives of people of color are codified inside the media in ways that are negative and confirming of different stereotypes.” One project she may stage there is a forthcoming play she wrote that started out as an adaption of “Citizen”—her best-selling book about quotidian encounters with racism—but has since evolved into an entirely new project. “It’s the kind of thing that would belong in the institute because it’s interested in how race is read and how perceptions that flow along racial lines end up both limiting and creating our freedom,” she told me. Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight,” a film adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” is another work that would make sense. “I’ve seen the film three times, and each time I think about it in terms of the kinds of decisions that are being made by a conscious person who is making a work of art and also thinking about how race functions in our society.”
In addition to being a gallery space, the institute will have much in common with social-justice-oriented organizations that investigate themes of injustice, inequality, and accountability, places that help people understand that Dylann Roof isn’t just an aberration. “The making of Dylann Roof is a cultural making, and we see variations of him all over our society at this point, maybe not overtly shooting nine people, but there are different ways that it gets articulated and implemented, that kind of ideology,” Rankine said. For example, unarmed black men can be filmed being shot in the back by a police officer, as Walter Scott was, and somehow still be held responsible. “Ten years ago I would have said, ‘I’m sure the policeman shot him in the back.’ And the people sitting around the table with me, mostly white, would say, ‘Well, that’s your perception. You can’t really know that.’ And now because the neighbor of the man who died took out his phone and filmed it and uploaded it, I can say, ‘No, let’s look,’ ” Rankine said during a panel at the Albertine Festival, at New York’s French Consulate, in November. During our recent interview, she acknowledged that videos aren’t enough.
“One of the things that we are seeing, even with the evidence, and we saw this with Rodney King, was the fact that evidence does not change the drive to eradicate the black body, to erase it, to kill it, to bury it, to remove it. But what the videos do do, at least for me, is they present the counternarrative. If the counternarrative has the power to change the law, it still exists as a counternarrative. It doesn’t change the fact that racism is systemic to the justice system, it’s systemic to the consciousness of white jurors who let many of these people off, but it points to that fact, and that’s all I feel like I have been doing, and many others have been doing, is pointing to the fact.” She laughed at how simple that may sound.
There is no official timeline for the opening of the Racial Imaginary Institute, because, as Rankine put it, “no grant that I have received will allow me to walk into a gallery in New York City and buy it.” She and her curatorial and organizational teams, which include Loffreda, the playwright Casey Llewellyn, the poet Monica Youn, and the activist and scholar Margo Okazawa-Rey, among others, are still in the process of fund-raising. Aside from money, Rankine said the biggest challenge—what work they will get—is also the thing that’s most exciting. But, like the response to her open letter, Rankine believes the work that will make the institute what it is already exists, and that people are ready to share it and to learn from it.
Artists have been doing this work all along, she said, but they are so various and out there in so many different ways that it’s time they all had a place to live. “Maybe the institutions that show this work are not interested specifically in seeing the kind of work that we want,” Rankine said. “It will be really wonderful to be able to say to people, ‘That work that somebody else wouldn’t show, we’ll show it. That reading that somebody else wasn’t interested in, we’re interested in it. That paper that you wanted to give, come here and give it here.’ ”
“It’s a challenge to want to hold what you don’t know exists,” she continued. “But when it comes it will be incredibly exciting.”
