Interrogating race with a thousand questions

Responding to Race Cards by Selina Thompson

The power in performance artist Selina Thompson’s Race Cards lies in its simplicity: a Black woman in a room, alone, reading one thousand questions about race. She kicks off with a quote by Black American prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore in acknowledgement that matters of race are matters of life and death. It becomes clear that this is the gravity by which her performance is anchored. The expectation is almost for Thompson to appear detached or austere, instead, she reads with emotion, in a friendly Brummy accent which lures audiences into a space of quiet introspection. 

This space can be tense at times, as we’re reminded that analytical thought is more integral in dismantling systems of oppression than any black box posted or petition retweeted. She encourages a generation committed to social media activism to embrace their discomfort around addressing race offline, because maybe discussing something as abhorrently insidious as racial injustice is supposed to be uncomfortable.  I eventually came to recognise the anxiety swelling in my stomach throughout the viewing as guilt; partly for my complicity in the more subtle functions of racism that Thompson brings to light and partly for the lack of consideration I’d given these topics before.

There’s an honest vulnerability in Race Cards that could touch both the disillusioned white man and the (rightfully) angry black woman alike. The questions tackle a whole spectrum of issues, from the relationship between liberalism and racism, to variations in jollof recipes across West Africa. In the variety, Thompson makes room for humour while mounting that issues of race are all-encompassing and that our approaches to them are based entirely on perspective.

There were three questions in particular that stood out to me and gave me pause for further musing.

“Question 167. How do you reconcile emancipatory politics with the desire to ‘get low’ ‘drop it like it’s hot’ or ‘dutty whine’?”

The mocking treatment of Megan Thee Stallion and her recent shooting at the hands of Black men in her industry was problematic. It provided further proof of the relationship between misogyny across genres of Black music and notions of misogynoir that are killing Black women and femmes. This knowledge, however, has not stopped me listening to the very same artists whose thoughtless lyrics, I’m convinced, directly endanger Black womanhood. 

The music, albeit largely sexist, is central to my cultural identity and beneath the disapproval, I feel an odd sense of pride and protectiveness towards it. In listening to it, am I allowing that pride and protectiveness to override my solidarity with other Black women? Does the empowerment I feel twerking and whining to these tunes contribute to the disempowerment felt by Black women who are objectified and over-sexualised as a direct result of stereotypes fortified by this music? Does this make me a bad Black feminist? 

“Question 349. What is the most urgent issue for us to deal with in regards to race right now?”

My initial response, prompted by the memories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Shukri Ahmed and Belly Mujinga to name but a few, was the state-sanctioned murder of Black bodies. In the wake of recent events both here in the UK and in the US and the aggressive police response to ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, this seemed the obvious answer. Then I sat with it for a while and wondered if, instead of fighting to prove our humanity on white-owned soil, the answer could be to cultivate and thrive on our own lands?

I arrived at the climate crisis. It was a race issue in its birth, thanks to the rapid industrialisation of Europe as funded by imperialist theft and remains so today. It disproportionately affects Africa, Asia and South America; the droughts, floods and other disasters that occur because of it cause conflict in these regions, further dooming them to the economic turmoil that is the fate of most post-colonial nations. 

The looming threat of a climate refugee crisis feels very urgent to me; it will surely heighten racial tensions in the West, and in a society where Black and Brown people have very few habitable lands to call home, they’ll be opened up to the exploitation and traumas of displacement. Though topical, climate change isn’t something that’s often examined through the lens of race, perhaps because that would entail closer analysis of the relationships between globalised hyper-capitalism, white supremacist imperialism and the destruction of our planet.

“Question 397. Why did Europe colonise the world in the way that it did?”

As newly industrialising states, Western Europeans were interested in the further development of their economies through the employment of ‘exotic’ materials and resources. They soon discovered that amongst the most valuable of these resources was the hard labour of Black and Brown people. They also saw that paying properly for the labour and goods would result in the rise of competing economies, with all the material potential to overtake their own. In order to excuse the bold-faced pillaging in the eyes of their own people, they spent years constructing a dehumanised image of the natives from whom they stole.

Once in control, they used violence to uphold that dehumanised image to sustain this new brand of capitalism. The legacy of which lives on in deportation centres, hostile environment policy, transphobic rap lyrics, police brutality and the melting of our ice caps, to name but a few. 

In answering Thompson’s questions, I was able to make links between issues that I didn’t previously see as connected. Race Cards opened me up to both the self-consciousness and the self-discovery involved in pondering race. It inspired me to take more responsibility for protecting myself and my community from the toxic implications of racism and to expand my education in Black history and Black liberation. It reminded me that, as a Black woman, I simply cannot afford to stop questioning the racism I encounter in my everyday experiences.