Typologies of Whiteness (2016–ongoing) is a series presently made up of seven videos that, collectively, act as a study of whiteness. The series orients whiteness as a structural position requiring violence for its reproduction. Most commonly, Typologies uses appropriated video collage to position the continual formation of whiteness as repetitious and necessary to reproduce a hierarchized human difference.
Mundane Spectacle is an experimental video essay by activist ethnographer Kate Bedecarré and artist Heath Schultz. The video collages photographs of quotidian political expressions (bumper stickers, yard signs, t-shirts, etc.) that span the US political spectrum with appropriated youtube videos concerned with the spectacle of political divisiveness. In the form of a voiceover, we read this apparent political division instead as a ‘crisis of whiteness’, that is, a conversation between Whites regarding what to do about Black struggle. More simply, we argue it is a conversation over what kind of police do we (white people) want to embody?
Using body cam footage and critical theory, this video attempts to think abstractly about the unending repetition of racializing (police) violence that perpetually (re)constitutes whiteness. The video might be thought of as an artist statement as much as an artwork, setting course for how to think structurally and abstractly about white supremacy and whiteness.
Call Me Daddy interrogates a call for Law and Order as a white supremacist paternal instinct. The film intermingles commentary on the missing black father from Moynihan to O’Reilly, liberal propaganda of police tying ties, and excerpts of Barry Goldwater’s reactionary 1964 campaign film Choice, among others. The dialog between related but distinct discursive tropes notices a pattern of criminalizing and pathologizing racialized and resistant culture in moments of political and social crisis—Post-Watts, Post-Obama, Post-Ferguson, etc. The resulting discourses, liberal paternalism on the one hand and conservative Law and Order on the other, are born of the same impulse to reproduce white supremacist violence.
Sympathetic Cops collages appropriated sounds and images from popular police television dramas, police press conferences and news interviews. The film searches for linkages between white reactionary politics, liberal apologetics for police, and structural violence of whiteness.
White People Love Police uses appropriated images varying from popular music to protest footage. The film searches for linkages between white reactionary politics, liberal apologetics for police, and structural violence of whiteness.
Typologies of Whiteness: The Great White Hope juxtaposes a scene from the underdog sports film Rudy with an image of then Presidential candidate Donald Trump. The simple juxtaposition climaxes with the orchestral swelling of an inspirational movie’s score and the emergence of Trump into the frame. The heavy-handed inspirational music along with the title—The Great White Hope—coyly condemn popular media’s complacency in Trump’s call to “make America great again.”
White Men Cover Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on my Trail” is comprised of several YouTube videos of white men singing Johnson’s classic Delta blues song coupled with text excerpts from various anti-racist theorists. Hellhounds is a reference to slave-owners sending bloodhounds to track the scent of escaped enslaved persons. The re-performing of the song by white men is dubious at best, but also illustrates a common trend of appropriating, and thus occluding, Black pain and expression. The excerpted texts act to destabilize the comfort of the men singing—to put the videos (and action of appropriation) on trial, so to speak, in order to call into question the structural position the white male singers occupy in relation to Johnson’s original expressions.
heath schultz 