Toward a Pedagogy of Solidarity (or: Thinking Beyond Equity and Inclusion)

This presentation offers a tentative theory of a pedagogy of solidarity that problematizes institutional platforms of Equity and Inclusion as performative discourses of “official antiracisms.” Critic Jodi Melamed theorizes “official antiracisms” as discourses of the state that control what counts as race matter and structures legitimate knowledge in the domain of law, public policy, and the economy. From this perspective Equity and Inclusion might be interpreted as a managerial response to racial and economic crises that help maintain capitalist arrangements of local and global hierarchies. Within our field, we can consider the protests of the 2019 Whitney Biennial—the most racially diverse in Biennial history—unfolding as I write this proposal. The protests are being launched against the Whitney for a failure to remove Warren Kanders, a law enforcement equipment manufacturer who supplies police across the world with tear gas, from the Board of Trustees. The protests insist upon the limit of inclusion discourse: a diverse Biennial cannot also remain complicit in racialized state violence in Ferguson, Palestine, and elsewhere. This presentation considers an inclusive classroom that simultaneously attempts to provide structural critique within an arts context. I will discuss a course I developed entitled Constructions of Race in Visual Culture, which aims to arm students with a historically informed critique of white supremacy and deindividualize politically informed artmaking. Through efforts like this, I hope we might restore pedagogy as a site of struggle, one that can work within collective frameworks of solidarity.