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Race in our feeds

7/6/2015

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It is important for white people to look at their experiences and deconstruct them, look into events and find their meaning, in order to become conscious of how race operates, writes anti-racist activist Chris Crass in this essay. 

One way race operates is through social media; through feeds and neighborhood listservs we find out about some restaurants and not others, some dentists and not others. Absolutely we hear the news about a white man shooting nine black people in a church, but we will, if we are white, not usually hear about a black-owned house painting or landscaping business. It's not that the people in our feeds are racist or discriminatory, but that race is a factor in the computer algorithms that create our feeds—it is one of the subtle ways race operates. 



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Public and private

6/4/2015

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Things we worried about: 

  • if participants brought up One Large, whether the business owner would feel patronized, objectified, romanticized (we expect some felt all of these things, and more)
  • the border between public and private (even in a public business)

Would a white or Asian participant, for example, intrude on the atmosphere of a store where there are mostly black clientele? If a certain barbershop is a place people come to let their guard down, to get a break from the microaggressions directed at them every day, would the project wreck that atmosphere of ease? 

Black business owners in Pittsburgh said that they were used to all kinds of customers coming in and surmised that if there were discomfort, it would be on the part of a white person. (This proved to be the case.)
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Collaborator Reflections

6/2/2015

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As we look at these stories all together for the first time, we have an impulse to parse everything. Who took photos of themselves? Of the business owner? Who went to new places, who expressed discomfort, who identified their race? Is there something that all of these details reveal about who we are (as city dwellers, citizens, people going through our days)?

One Large is a register of enthusiasms, discomforts, excitement, emotion, no emotion, ordinary hours, surprise, routine.

Surprisingly, the most unremarkable stories seem in a way the most hopeful to us. Shopping at black-owned businesses as a matter of course is not a new idea to everyone. We are inspired equally by matter-of-factness as by  transformation.

At a concert in Baltimore after Freddie Gray's shooting, Prince said: “The system is broken. It’s going to take the young people to fix it this time. We need new ideas, new life. … Next time I come to Baltimore, I want to stay at a hotel owned by one of you. I want to get out of the airport in a car service owned by one of you. I want to play in an arena owned by one of you.” 

In the coming days, we will post more of our thoughts and consider next steps for One Large. We invite you to add your thoughts.


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We are live!

6/1/2015

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Just a day late, and all of the stories are up. We've worked around the clock to interpret the data and upload the words and images of all who participated. We are thrilled to finally launch the 100 stories of One Large.
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First Thoughts

5/31/2015

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Things we worried about: 

  • being white artists making work about the black  economy
  • whether anyone would participate 
  • how the project might be misinterpreted


Things we discovered:

  • each participant became a site of performance/art/engagement, and that is inspiring
  • each business became a site of performance/art/engagement, and that is complicated
  • while we are not the authors of the stories on the site, we feel a great deal of responsibility for the voices here. How do we resolve our role and theirs? As much as we learned about ourselves making this work, the work still isn’t about us

We trusted participants to carry out their agreement. They trusted that there was no subterfuge on our part. Those who pushed back believed we were listening. Participants assumed good intentions. This fact seems stunning in its unlikeliness, given the mistrust on all sides of our current national conversation about race. It makes us feel hopeful, excited.


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    Ifyoureallyloveme
    an artist collective

    Co-founders
    Cindy Croot and Joy Katz

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