“That is what accountability looks like.”

Whewwwww….

“Because it must be said that there is a specious notion that race is solely about Black people. White people have been allowed to claim that because they are white, they do not understand race, cannot understand race, and should not ever discuss race. If race ever comes to the fore, then, white people insist, Black people need to be brought in as the authority and must educate white people about race. To my mind, this absolves white people of any responsibility to examine their own racial identity and allows for the persistence of the myth of white racial innocence. White people know what racism is, and they know what white supremacy is. They are the organizing principles of American life. Black people don’t need to explain to white people the system of oppression white people created to ensure their dominance. But white people often outsource their emotional labor and guilt about white supremacy to Black people so they can claim, “I could never understand what it is to be Black.” The myth of white racial innocence is married to the lie of inscrutable Blackness.

White people have a race. Guston is the first artist I ever saw make paintings about white complicity and silence in the face of white supremacy, putting on a Klan hood to examine his white selfhood. As Toni Morrison said to Charlie Rose back in 1993, “If you can only be tall because somebody’s on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is white people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they can do about it.” Guston’s paintings are an opening into Morrison’s call for white thinking about what whiteness is and does.”

Excerpted from, “Guston, Whiteness, and the Unfinished Business of the Vile World” by Steve Locke at ARTFORUM.