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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Over the past week, you have probably heard a lot about the Tulsa race massacre, when a white mob killed hundreds of Black residents in the Greenwood neighborhood on May 31, 1921. Well, as the 100th anniversary commemorations wind down, we are taking a moment today to look at the Greenwood of 2021. Karen Grigsby Bates from NPR s Code Switch podcast traveled to Tulsa, and she s here with us now.
Hey, Karen.
KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: Hi there.
KELLY: So as you were talking with residents about their thoughts on this anniversary, all the attention generated by this anniversary, what kind of things were you hearing?
THE INVISIBILITY OF black women has been much on my mind of late. Asked recently to speak on the topic “Can women artists take back the nude from a voyeuristic male gaze as a site to represent their own subjectivity?” I have to discard the premise: from mass culture to high culture, white women may have been objects of the fetishizing gaze, but black women have had only the blank stare. In fact we feel lucky when we get to take our clothes off. Manet’s
Olympia, Picasso’s
Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Judy Chicago’s
Dinner Party, 1973–78, are landmarks in our unseeing erasure by both the multicolored male and the white female. I believe in the mathematics of myth, which is why I’m always asking, How many black women in this anthology? in this exhibit? in this picture? What are they made to signify? Of the 39 places at Chicago’s dinner table, 35 are set with plates painted with vaginas that glow miraculously. Sojourner Truth, the only black guest, must make it with