[This weekend on the Artblog Reader Advisor: Matt collects inspiration to look critically at ourselves, our biases, and our weaknesses. — the Artblog editors]
Our Invisible Selves
This weekend, we celebrate America and the culture and history that binds and defines us. But for many Americans (myself included), a large portion of what actually comprises our position in the world–our heritage, our race, our sexual orientation–remains largely obscured from our daily life. For me, being white, straight, and male is something that I rarely think about or am forced to think about. So infrequently are these distinctions acknowledged that they tend to disappear altogether, leaving both a tremendous void in our self-understanding and a terrible blind spot in which prejudices and privileges can safely operate unseen. So for this week’s Reader Advisor, I offer a series of links that reveal the unseen and hopefully motivate us to keep looking.
This short video documentary does a good job fleshing out an important yet extremely complicated conversation: How white people talk about race. Or, more specifically, all the hows and whys that go into a collective avoidance of the conversation. From one of the all-white participants: “I really did not know that I had a racial identity. I knew I was white, but I didn’t know what that meant. How it shaped my outlook on life; how that had shaped my sense of optimism, sense of belonging, sense of safety,” via The New York Times
An old blog but a good one. Giving non-whites a field guide to navigating a white, liberal world since 2009.
Stuff White People Like: Being an Expert on Your Culture
Stuff White People Like: Having Gay Friends
Stuff White People Like: Irony
Dr. Robin DiAngelo is a clear and unflinching purveyor of what it means to be white and talk about white supremacy. This is a good account of her thoughts, via Good Men Project
People not getting slavery, via Vox
Teary-eyed, these Catholics take a courageous stance against same-sex marriage. These “coming-out” videos reveal a deep desire to mask a position of privilege with its opposite, via AdWeek
