SOCIAL RASTERING: IS RACE A GENRE
Exploring these ideas of categorization and the assigning of information to rigid boxes, it becomes understood that Race is too forced into a rigid filing. Race is contained by its label that allows for its recognition and filing while at the same time doing the work of containing the data associated to it. What doesn't fit is often ignored or seen as "a problem."
We looked at W.E.B. DuBois's "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" as an exploration of social harmony, a three-part chord: Work, Culture, and Liberty. This work opens with a bar of music, which has been transposed -Listen Here
DuBois disconnects Lyrics from Music (and sound from seeing) introducing an understanding of "the social" as being in connection with hearing (or not hearing for those who can't play or don't care to translate). He then moves to another sense, seeing/analyzing the text. Through the combination of music (sung lyrics)--an unignorable social practice--and literature, DuBois situates a conversation of race amidst the chords of emotions that cannot be voiced by a just a single person. A chorus of voices is required as one person cannot sing more than one part at a time. This is precisely a burden of the rigid filing systems race is defined by.
Read the full post, Social Harmony Measured in Common Time?
←Hannah Craft's The Bondwoman's Narrative does not stand alone in the discussion of race in America. Rather, Crafts (and Gates the editor) insistently frame it as an individual account that exists alongside others in the conversation. These four images display class lecture notes and outside work regarding Craft's line "It sometimes seems we need sympathy more in joy than in sorrow."
With an odd sort of word, this line instigated deep exploration of what would mean for races/communities/societies/cultures to recognize the conditions of those outside of them. What would it mean for these sorts of collective populations to remain at a distance from each other while at the same time recognize the joys of others as simply being happiness for that respective group rather than a loss for themselves?
For a community of people to say 'I see where you're coming from and I feel for you" in a positive context would mean to validate the successes of another community form a distance without feeling as if it took something from you.
It is easier to be "sympathetic" to the pains of others, even at a distance, but it is more difficult to be sympathetic to the joys of others because they are gaining in ways we are not. In historical terms, white sympathy for the pains of others (of separate communities of race) in the antebellum United States meant physically sacrificing nothing that would lead to lasting discomfort (because there was little threat that the explicit pains of other races would be attached to middle-class white communities). Even if the effects of this sympathy were positive in some ways, we should consider this wrinkle.
On the other hand, separate communities often share certain instances of joys and comforts (i.e., "empathy" or collective social experience). Here, by contrast with sympathy, it is almost as if we push ourselves away from each other's pain with one hand while we reach into the collection of joys (where we believe each joy only exists once) with the other. Crafts's idea of "sympathy in joy" introduces a complicated reflection on who we harmonize with and how.
Further exploration of this topic: Sympathy In Joy
←Programmed Greatness: The wundertopf as a representation of sympathy in joy. Here I reflect on a class discussion bringing together the wundertopf assignment and these ideas about race. (Dr. Guerra: "How does the wundertopf collection figure race? How does it figure 'sympathy in joy?'")
The container is equivalent to social identity, race, and other forms of social identity. The wundertopf is a collection in a finite space, only allowing the items that can fit. All things that we associate to a specific race must fit and whatever information that does not fit is rendered unimportant or too ill-fitting to possibly belong. Wundertopfs can only exist outside of/next to others of the same size. Joys are contained and made separate from other wundertopfs, they are seen through and protected by clear material which leaves these joys to be understood by all but only felt by some.