So earlier, Jim posted an introduction to a series of posts we’ve planning, titled the Year in Racism. The starting point was Jim’s observation that the black rage of Kara Walker and Clarence Thomas—on display in a recent museum show and book, respectively—come from similar places.

The themes they offer have huge overlaps. Both Thomas and Walker direct their anger at the whites that committed the original sin of slavery and their paternalistic, patronizing, politically-correct descendants. But Thomas and Walker are at their most unsparing and strident when addressing the role that blacks play in their own plights. They point out that black Americans have signed away some of their dignity by accepting guilt-stained handouts, while playing out their own self-hate in violence against fellow blacks. Racism isn’t a one-way street. It’s a morass that shows everyone involved in the worst possible light.

Given those similarities, we offer you, DG reader, a sample of Walker’s art, annotated with quotes from Thomas’s autobiography.

“That summer I tore off the beliefs I had learned from Daddy at the nuns, the same way Clark Kent tore off his suit. The fog of confusion lifted. I knew what was wrong and who to blame for it, and what to do about it. I was an angry black man.” (My Grandfather’s Son, p. 48)

“I was bitter toward white bigots…but even more bitter towards those ostensibly unprejudiced whites who pretended to side with black people while using them to further their own political and social ends…” (p.75)

“At least southerners were upfront about their bigotry: You knew exactly where they were coming from, just like the Georgia rattlesnakes that always let you know when they were ready to strike. Not so the paternalistic big-city whites who offered you a helping hand so long as you were careful to agree with them, but slapped you down if you started acting like you didn’t know your place.” (p.76)

“I was opposed to welfare because I had seen its destructive effects up close in Savannah. Most of the older people among whom I had grown up felt as I did, sharing Daddy’s belief that it would be the ‘ruination’ of blacks, undermining their desire to work and provide for themselves. I added that my own sister was a victim of the system, which had created a sense of entitlement that had trapped her and her children.” (p.132)

“In the fall of 1980, I changed my voter registration from Missouri to Maryland—and registered as a Republican, I had decided to vote for Ronald Reagan. It was a giant step for a black man, but I believed it to be a logical one. I saw no good coming from an ever-larger government that meddled, with incompetence if not mendacity, in the lives of its citizens, and I was particularly distressed by the Democratic party’s ceaseless promises to legislate the problems of blacks out of existence. Their misguided efforts had already done great harm to my people, and I felt sure that anything else they did would compound the damage.” (p.130)