Visual Art as a Racemaking Technology: Implications for Education

Visual arts education must outline a defensible vision for our discipline that acknowledges the arts are White property. In this article, I argue that visual art itself should be recognized as a racializing technology contributing to the production and ranking of human difference. I show how a previous iteration of visual arts education—visual culture art education—also called into question the role of visual art in producing the cultural superiority of the Enlightenment subject, who was key to the historical emergence of whiteness itself. However, this approach to art education was more concerned with the political ontology of the image rather than the human. Drawing on Al-An deSouza’s studio practice, negotiated refusal, I begin to outline a vision for visual arts education that recognizes the arts as White property, and yet does not give up on either fine art or the human.

"The analysis of the arts as White property must therefore not be limited to values, objects, practices, and institutions." Denmead / Visual Art as a Racemaking Technology I s there a viable case for teaching visual art in education once we acknowledge the claim that visual art is White property (Gaztambide-Fern andez et al., 2018)?I argue below that such a case, if there is to be one, must reckon with the fact that visual art emerged historically as a racemaking technology.Put otherwise, the capacity to make visual art that could be judged as beautiful, and the capacity to judge the truthful beauty of visual art, was presumed to be a refined property of whiteness itself.This presumption emerged through a structured relation with those presumed to lack this same aesthetic capacity of reason.To recognize visual art as a racemaking technology has significant implications for pedagogy and curriculum in visual arts education.It requires engaging with visual artapprehending it, making it, historicizing it-in ways that reckon with the role of visual art in the production of human difference and value.In this article, I show how a prior effort to counter the privileging of the Western European White propertied male subject in visual arts education-visual culture art education-did not fully engage with the role of aesthetics in sorting and ranking humans.I then point to possibilities for a visual arts education that propagates ways of being and knowing that do not conform to the privileging of that White subject.In particular, I discuss a studio practice outlined by Al-An deSouza (2018) called "negotiated refusal" (p.282).Through deSouza's example, I make a plea for visual arts education scholarship and practice that illuminates ways of engaging with visual art and reckoning with its role as a racemaking technology.

Visual Art as a Racemaking Technology
In this article, I argue that visual art should be recognized as a technology that makes race.This claim, of course, recognizes that race has no material basis, but that race itself is a significant factor in how state power distributes resources, opportunities, and threats.My theoretical orientation is less concerned with the seemingly exceptional ways in which state institutions mobilize racist ideologies to repress and oppress people, such as Nazi Germany or the Jim Crow South of the United States.Instead, critical race theory has advanced the argument for decades, that apparatuses, such as the law and education, not only discriminate on the basis of race, but are also fundamental to the project of racemaking.In legal studies, Crenshaw et al. (1995) argued that critical race theory as a project has been concerned with "uncovering how law was a constitutive element of race itself: in other words, how law constructed race" (p.xxv).This point of view counteracts the view of racist outcomes in the legal system as merely the product of racially biased judges or juries.Alternatively, critical race theory has maintained how the American legal system and others, such as education, construct and regulate race in dynamic ways to protect the value of whiteness as a form of property.
To support this claim, Cheryl Harris (1993) argued that whiteness should not only be understood as an aspect of identity.In addition, whiteness should also be understood as a valuable property interest that can be used and enjoyed.Through the example of the United States, Harris showed how whiteness was enshrined as a form of property through law-that is, how the law constructed (and protected) whiteness as a valuable form of property.From hypodescent laws of biological inheritance to segregationist laws in education, Harris (1993) argued that "the possessors of whiteness were granted the legal right to exclude others from the privileges inhering in whiteness" (p.1736).This right to exclusivity increased the value of whiteness itself.George Lipsitz (2006) extended this important argument in the cultural sphere by showing how anyone can invest their time and energy in the property value of whiteness.He called this phenomenon a "possessive investment in whiteness" (p.vii).
My use of "technology" slightly shifts attention away from institutional mechanisms of racial oppression to the auto-production of selfhood and political subjectivity.In the most generic sense, technologies are tools that people have made to help themselves and others make things.In critical theory, Michel Foucault (2020) used the term technology to describe a form of power in which people construct their selfhoods based on socially constituted norms about proper ways to be, which, in turn, reinforce (and potentially undermine) dominant social, political, and economic structures (p.249).To say then that art is a racemaking technology is to focus less on how the art world as an apparatus of state power penetrates individual consciousness, and, for example, implants racist ideologies.To say that art is a racemaking technology is to say that engagement with art-making it, appreciating it, learning about it-has historically been implicated in reinforcing norms that produce ideas about types of people and their relative worth.Below I argue how fine art emerged as a discourse that makes the Enlightenment White subject superior through a constitutive relationship with those deemed to lack the capacity for refined engagement with art.
Approaching art as a racemaking technology builds on recent arts education scholarship that interrogates whiteness and racism in visual arts education (see, e.g., Bae-Dimitriadis, 2020;Denmead, 2021;Gaztambide-Fern andez et al., 2018;Grant, 2020;Kraehe, 2015;Lewis, 2018).In particular, Gaztambide-Fern andez et al. (2018) made the important claim of the arts being White property.They made four points to assert this claim.First, they argued how "the objects and practices traditionally categorized as 'the arts' are those … presumed to belong to European cultural 'tradition'" and "also serve as evidence of European cultural superiority" (p.17).Second, they argued that the historical emergence of the discourse of "the arts" was "based on values which, although framed as universal, are in fact particular to whiteness" (p.17).For example, a painted image in the 19th century could only become a painting under particular discursive conditions that made whiteness happy, such as a canvas, oil paint, a frame, and a museum wall devoted to its contemplation.Third, and relatedly, they argued that the arts are "institutionalized within structures that protect the property values of whiteness, such as schools, museums, and galleries" (p.18).For example, the 19th-century art museum had a vested interest in protecting the value of the above paintings because they were necessary to the property value of whiteness itself.Such museums, therefore, set the terms for what visual images registered as visual art and what images registered as, for example, visual ethnographic evidence of a particular culture.This fact leads to their fourth point: When a cultural artifact never intended as fine art, such as graffiti, becomes treated as fine art by such institutions, the object in question has become "whitewashed" (p.18).I want to amplify this theoretical framework as I make the case of visual art as a racemaking technology.To state that the arts are White property is also to claim that the arts have functioned historically as a racemaking technology that make people White and superior in relation to those deemed not to be White and therefore inferior.This language of racemaking does not accept "race" as an actual ontological thing.Instead, the concept of racemaking draws attention to the ways in which humans are sorted and ranked at the intersection of a variety of categories, including ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and physical differences.I am using the term racemaking rather than racialization because the latter, for me, is most effectively used to describe the process of dehumanization that occurs through racemaking.In his reading of Frantz Fanon's original use of the term, David Theo Goldberg argues that to racialize should be understood as antonym of to humanize (Goldberg, 2002, p. 12, see Footnote 1).But White people are humanized (not racialized) when they are made White.
Processes of racemaking can imagine race in both biological and cultural terms, floating between them to construct racial groups and hierarchies in contextually specific ways.Key to this foregrounding of racemaking over "race" is the idea that race itself should not be understood as generational, or simply passed from one generation to the next.Instead, race is relational.To understand race as relative means, as Brigette Fielder (2020) put it, race is "not simply embodied by an individual but constructed as racialized bodies are placed into relation with or comparison to one another" (p.5).Gaztambide-Fern andez et al. (2018) pointed to the arts as a racemaking technology, as they asserted the claim of the arts as White property.They argued, for example, that arts should be understood as discourse rather than an ahistorical or universal concept.This discourse of the arts, they argued, emerged "within the context of a specifically European social historical moment when concepts of the 'human' came to replace 'God' as central to human experience, or what is better known as 'humanism'" (p.15).I want to amplify this point to illustrate how visual art can function as a racemaking technology.
Humanism was only possible through relative racemaking.Individuals who were imagined to be human at the center of the universe were constructed in relation to those deemed as not having the same capacity for being human; a relation that was established in and through transatlantic slavery, imperialism in Asia, and colonialisms in the Americas and Africa (Lowe, 2015).This racial and colonial Other functioned as what Grace Hong (2015) called "the structuring exception" (p.29). 1 That is to say, the racial and colonial Other is not placed outside the figure of the human as a thing that is not human.Instead, this figure is always and continuously being brought into being so dominant subjects can become human in relation.This figure as a structuring exception provides the conditions for particular individuals to be deserving of liberal rights, and indeed, to become White.Put otherwise, there is no way for the human to become human and deserving of liberal rights without a constitutive relation continuously being established with figures who are deemed to be undeserving of such rights, and therefore disposable.Yet this relation of violence bringing the liberal subject into being must be disavowed for a dominant subject to be constructed as if he is superior and deserving of those rights (Hong, 2015).
There are a variety of ways in which this relational racemaking can occur.Denise da Silva (2007) has argued a crucial way it occurred in European history through a relational construction of mind.It was the European subject's presumed superior capacity for reason-his capacity for enlightenmentthat entitled him alone to historical selfdetermination.It was his capacity for reason, which could only be understood in relation to a structuring exception who was denied the same capacity, which entitled him to possess the earth in the name of what he thought was progress.This focus on the mind, rather than other race analytics such as skin or blood, points to the significance of aesthetics in the hierarchical construction of human difference.Several scholars from a variety of fields have advanced this analysis in recent years, from Kandice Chuh in American studies to Monique Roelofs in philosophy (Chuh, 2019;Roelofs, 2018).Their analysis draws attention to the ways the European Enlightenment subject was presumed to be superior based on his unique capacity for aesthetic judgment, and his capacity to determine the truthful beauty of an object such as the arts.He alone had a special capacity to become further refined through aesthetic experience.He alone could judge the truthful beauty of something without any concern for its immediate material consequences or self-benefit.Those who were dehumanized (racialized) in relation to this subject were simultaneously brought into being as someone lacking such capacity to the same degree, if at all.Perhaps they might be recognized as subjects who could benefit to a lesser degree from aesthetic experience.This relation subjected them to imperial benevolence through, for example, colonial forms of education.Nonetheless, their ascribed diminished aesthetic capacity meant a logic was established and prevented them from catching up.Their potential to be as civilized as the European subject through aesthetic experience would always be deferred (see Nguyen, 2012, pp. 83-132).
Kandice Chuh (2019) pointed out how this relational and hierarchical construction of human difference could be understood as aesthetic in two applications of the term.First, as I have outlined above, the relative capacity for aesthetic judgment as a structuring relation was entangled in "imperialism and colonialism, White supremacy and capitalism, environmental devastation, patriarchy, and compulsory normativization of multiple kinds" (Chuh, 2019, p. 3).
Second, this political process of constructing and ranking human difference can also be understood in and of itself as aesthetic.In other words, Enlightenment thought made race, racial difference, and racial hierarchy sensible.Chuh (2019) drew on the philosopher Jacques Ranci ere to argue that Enlightenment thought made human sorting and ranking both available to apprehension and common sense (pp. 18-19, 43).Constructing this common sense required disavowing the constitutive relationship with the racial and colonial Other that made the cultural superiority of the Enlightenment figure apprehensible.Otherwise, he would be recognized for the fact that he was only a particular genre of being human, not the universal one.Moreover, he would also be recognized for the barbaric subject he was, and is, rather than the civilized and tolerant subject he claimed to be.
The analysis of the arts as White property must therefore not be limited to values, objects, practices, and institutions.It is also necessary to attend to the figure of the human and the relational and racial construction of the human through aesthetics, in addition to an aesthetic process in and of itself.Through the aestheticization of racial difference, we recognize how the arts are implicated as a technology in the construction of a particular genre of being human understood to be White and superior.Visual arts education requires a vision for apprehending and making art, recognizing this historical fact and the continual presence of that history.

From Everyday Sensory Experience to the Aesthetics of Racemaking
Previous iterations of visual arts education have reckoned with the haunting aesthetic legacy of the Enlightenment subject.In the later 20th century, postmodern and sociological schools of thought challenged conceptions of art curriculum and pedagogy oriented toward producing subjects in the mold of the Enlightenment conception of the human.
The main target of these postmodern and sociological criticisms was discipline-based art education (DBAE).DBAE deemphasized the making of art in the name of self-expression for understanding art historically and appreciating art aesthetically.Postmodern and sociological criticisms challenged this approach to education.It disapproved of its division between high and low culture, highlighted the politics of constructing the canon, and reframed artworks as cultural texts to be read and decoded, just like any other image found in everyday life.
Visual culture art education (VCAE) was an important intervention in this debate.This intervention is relevant to this discussion because VCAE scholars sought to transform how our field understood aesthetics.Particularly influential at that time was Ralph Smith (2004), who argued for the study of exemplary works of art as the primary source of aesthetic experience.VCAE drew our field's attention to the discursive construction of the arts as a particular effect of Western European bourgeois sensibilities rather than an ahistorical and universal phenomenon (Duncum, 2002).VCAE was also critical of modernist aesthetics that carried forward Enlightenment ideas.Modernist genres of art and literature, such as abstract expressionism, were conceptualized as if they occupied a disinterested privileged position from which they could resist the intrusion of politics or commerce (and therefore provided a means for children to express their authentic selves).
VCAE therefore turned to a conceptualization of aesthetics that was not predicated on a false separation between aesthetics and politics, or low and high culture.Instead, it recognized that the distinction between high and low culture had "imploded" in this postmodern world as members of different social classes could "borrow freely from one another and both producers and audiences move between them" (Duncum, 2001, p. 103).This recognition led to the reframing of aesthetics as everyday sensory experience amid a highly saturated visual field that was principally organized to teach people to consume.From this point of view, consumer capitalism bombarded children and young people with visual images encoded with meaning in service of legitimizing inequalities structured in and through capitalism itself (see Eisenhauer, 2006, who discusses this vocabulary of "bombardment").VCAE was arguably motivated by the paranoia that children and young people lacked the epistemic resources to critique these ideologies, such as racism, sexism, and homophobia.Through a social reconstructionist lens, it was therefore the job of the visual arts teacher to help children and young people see what they could not see to break this cycle of cultural reproduction (Freedman, 2000).
The conception of aesthetics as everyday sensory experience does not necessarily help us see the function of aesthetics in the relational production of racial difference and hierarchies.Indeed, this orientation to aesthetics has been largely concerned with how racist ideologies bombard people through visual images and then become warehoused in tricked minds.From this point of view, visual arts teachers must concern themselves with teaching students to recognize in grown-up ways how their everyday aesthetic experiences are always already ideological, and how they are saturated with racist imagery and messages.That task, of course, remains important.However, this visual culture education approach to aesthetics springs more from a concern with the political ontology of the image rather than the political ontology of the human.In other words, VCAE has been more concerned with how aesthetics as a discourse produces an arbitrary construction between everyday images and fine art that has since imploded.It is not concerned with how aesthetics as a discourse has made racial difference and hierarchies.Following F. Graeme Chalmers's (1992) important, but underappreciated, intervention in the early 1990s on the origins of racism in the public school art curriculum, I am arguing here for an approach to aesthetics that recognizes how this Enlightenment discourse has been implicated historically in sorting and ranking humans based on differential assumptions about their relational capacity for reason, which is thought to be determined by biological and/or cultural factors.
Contemporary artists such as Titus Kaphar have challenged this relational construction of the human through destabilizing the presumed viewer of art that emerged in the early modern period and still haunts the present.For example, in his 2017 painting Shifting the Gaze he loosely copies a 17th-century family portrait by Dutch artist Frans Hals (Figure 1).With excessively broad brushstrokes, he whitewashes the White subjects in the painting, leaving a Black boy, presumed to be the family's servant, as the only person visible.In so doing, the role of painting itself as a technology enabling the White viewer to make themselves superior (and therefore White) is both illuminated and undermined.
The aesthetic process of racemaking may still be in play whether one is teaching "low" or "high" culture (or images that were once considered "low" or "high").It ultimately does not matter.For example, teaching a White student to decode racist imagery and messages in advertising may enable him to imagine that he has a superior aesthetic capacity to another White subject who has failed to do so.That White subject, an inferior one who is not quite White because he has betrayed norms associated with whiteness, including tolerance for difference, becomes the real cause of racism.Relative processes of racialization may contribute to that assigned blame.As Shannon Sullivan (2014) argued, "good" White people-that is, relatively affluent White people who believe they are antiracist or nonracist-tend to distance themselves from people they construct as not-quite-White, or an abject form of whiteness, through processes of racialization accounting for class (pp. 23-58).She calls this relational distancing strategy "dumping on White trash" (p.23).This same process of abject racemaking might occur as White teachers teach White children critical race media literacy skills through decoding racist images circulating in advertising or on the internet.Of course, I do not want to suggest that children should not learn how to decode or jam, say, racist imagery in a Super Bowl commercial or on food packaging.However, the aesthetic capacity to recognize beauty or critique beauty for its ideological investments can be entangled in both human sorting and hierarchization through its modern investments in reason.
This analysis shows how reckoning with the arts as White property cannot be as simple as, say, recognizing how the arbitrary distinction between "high" and "low" culture has imploded or transformed studio practice into cultural criticism and media literacy.Moreover, it is not as simple as thinking about aesthetics as everyday sensory experience rather than a refined capacity of reason that is aware of the truthful beauty of something.To claim the arts are White property is to claim visual art is a racial technology that has been historically used to sort and rank humans based on their ascribed relative capacity to make, judge, and critique images for their aesthetic value.This aesthetic capacity is also presumed to be the property of whiteness.As a result, justifying visual arts education today requires developing pedagogic and curricular practices that recognize the role of fine art and aesthetics in the making and ranking of human difference.
In some ways, my call for this vision resonates with Arthur Efland's (2004) search for a visual arts education that recognized the "entwined nature of the aesthetic" (p.234).In this article, Efland explored "a middle ground between two rival visions of art education" (p.234).These two competing visions were found in Ralph Smith's investment in refined aesthetic experience "as the point and purpose for the arts and thus a major purpose for arts education," as well as in visual culture art education, which sought to "transform art education into a form of cultural study" (Efland, 2004, pp. 234-235).Efland was ambivalent about a vision for art education that made a hard choice between studying art that had been assigned exemplary value or studying everyday visual culture.Instead, Efland (2004) argued for a model of visual arts education that gave students the "freedom of cultural life, that is, the freedom to explore multiple forms of visual culture to enable students to understand social and cultural influences affecting their lives" (p.250).I am interested in how this freedom of cultural life is differently constituted through aesthetics itself.Indeed, I share Efland's ambivalence because choosing to approach art as a form of cultural study does not necessarily overcome the ways in which cultural study remains implicated in the construction of racial difference through the capacity for aesthetic reasoning.So instead, I am calling for a vision for art education that engages with multiple forms of visual culture as a means of reckoning with, to paraphrase Kandice Chuh (2019), the difference aesthetics makes.

Redacting Man Through Visual Arts Practice
Kandice Chuh, a scholar of English and American studies, has been a key voice in the critical analysis of the role of the aesthetics in making and ranking human difference.Chuh is not ready to give up on the idea of the human, humanism, or the study of the humanities.Instead, she seeks methods of engaging with arts and letters that, as she puts it, "proliferate ways of being and knowing radically disidentified from its liberal iteration" (2019, p. 4).Through this approach, Chuh is neither theorizing possibilities for life after or post the human, nor is she decentering ways of being and knowing associated with the human.Instead, she sees a role for the arts and humanities in proliferating ways of being and knowing that do not conform to the norms of this particular iteration of being Human.As Sylvia Wynter (2003) has argued, this "genre" of being human has "overrepresented" itself as the universal figure of the human when in fact it is a particular genre of human imagined through and for whiteness itself (p.317).As a result, Chuh ( 2019) is motivated by the need for "more rather than less attention to and accounts of human activity and behavior" (p.4).Chuh's (2019) contribution is an important reminder for visual arts educationists at this moment in time.To reckon with the arts as White property, and the ways in which aesthetics produces and ranks human difference, we should be seeking to understand and establish imaginative learning environments that allow for the proliferation of ways of being and knowing that are radically disidentified from their liberal iterations.This liberal iteration, this particular genre of being human, is autonomous, possessive, and accumulative.Human life is deemed to be protectable through a constructed relationship with other forms of human life that are deemed disposable.Through a biopolitical framing, Grace Hong (2015) argued that this subject is always predicated on a structuring relationship "between two existential states of enslavement and freedom, social death and social life" (p.27).Those are the stakes.We must imagine a visual arts education that divests in the arts as White property.And this vision must be committed to generating expressions of human life that are not predicated on that relation or those values.
Of course, articulating this vision is the collective responsibility of everyone invested in the future of art education, including those scholars who, like me, are White.However, it is always risky, and potentially counterproductive, when people in my position attempt to do this kind of envisioning.White scholars who do antiracist scholarship can be more concerned about making whiteness a tolerable place for them to dwell, rather than transforming systems of meaning and control that make whiteness a valuable form of property.This nonperformative approach to scholarship, as Sara Ahmed called it, often features a rhetorical "stealth narcissism" pattern (Hill, as cited in Ahmed, 2004, para. 12).Here, White scholars acknowledge their complicity in interpersonal or institutional forms of racism to distance themselves from other White people who fail to do so, and therefore must be the cause of racism.This nonperformative approach to antiracist scholarship follows a liberal script in which racism is framed as an individual problem requiring an individualized cure.By contrast, the intellectual and political challenge I have posed for myself as a White scholar is to think critically with concepts and pedagogic approaches that trouble and move beyond liberal framings of racism and antiracism.
Indeed, in this article, I want to call attention to one studio practice that illuminates the possibility of visual arts education seeking to proliferate ways of being and knowing that break from the liberal genre.Curiously, this studio practice is neither dismissive of modernist aesthetics in art nor does it imagine modernist aesthetics as a sacred, incorruptible, and disinterested space for human experience.Moreover, this studio practice does not simply replace artworks made by White people with artworks made by people who are not White.Instead, this studio practice, articulated by Al-An deSouza in their book How Art Can Be Thought (2018), recognizes the claim that the arts are White property and fine art has always been a racemaking technology.Yet deSouza's practice, which they call "negotiated refusal," also allows those who have been historically minoritized and dehumanized (or racialized) through the discourse of the arts to find pleasure and possibility in and through the arts (2018, p. 282).This account then does not merely deal with the damage done by the arts as White property.It also holds firm to the notion that studio art practice remains an unpredictable site for desiring and enacting possibilities for being human that do not conform to this liberal iteration that Chuh (2019) and Hong (2015) so forcefully critiqued.
deSouza is a professor of art at the University of California, Berkeley.They are of Kenyan-born, American Indian descent.In their 2018 book, How Art Can Be Thought, deSouza outlined their studio practice of "negotiated refusal" through their discussion of their vexed relationship with Mark Rothko (p.282).On the one hand, they learn from and find pleasure in Rothko's treatments of surface and color.On the other hand, they recognize how Rothko's position as a modernist painter depended upon their own professed kinship with what they called "primitive and archaic art" (p.282).Rothko's own mythology as a modernist painter, who constructed abstract color fields for aesthetic contemplation, hinged on a selfproclaimed capacity to inhabit the position of the primitive.This kind of leap into otherness is a familiar racist and colonial trope (Morrison, 1992).Here, the modern subject becomes modern through claiming other people's bodies, identities, and resources as his own, without any regard for their histories or desires.Maile Arvin (2019) referred to this phenomenon as the logic of possession governing whiteness.The capacity to wear this otherness temporarily becomes a mark of universality.This universality is constructed in and through a relation with "primitive" subjects who are denied the capacity to leap out of their own bodies or experience disinterested aesthetic contemplation.deSouza (2018) therefore challenged Rothko's claim that his relationship with the primitive is based on kinship.They argued that Rothko's relation with the primitive is based on kingship (p.282).
To deal with their vexed relationship with Rothko, deSouza proposed a studio practice of what they call negotiated refusal.deSouza argued that their relationship to fine art is always a negotiated one.They claim the right to knowledge, pleasure, and experience through art even as they must also refuse what they describe as "assimilation's active forgetting" (2018, p. 282).Through referencing assimilation's active forgetting, deSouza's concept of refusal is in conversation with Lisa Lowe's (2015) concept of the "economy of affirmation and forgetting" (p.39).Lowe introduced this concept to describe how liberal humanist understanding is predicated on affirming ways of knowing and being that do not threaten its logic, while also forgetting the racialized relations of possession, violence, and death, which threaten the very construction of liberal humanism as a force of historical progress.We see this economy of affirmation and forgetting in the valorization of Rothko.For Rothko to become celebrated for his capacity to create refined moments of aesthetic contemplation, we must forget his self-professed relationship with the primitive that is based on kingship rather than kinship.He cannot come into being as an artistic genius unless we forget the very epistemic and ontological conditions of his own making.deSouza refuses to assimilate into the logic of the arts as White property through forgetting this fact.And yet, while they refuse to forget, they do not let go of the possibility that Rothko's color fields might still open up new vistas of knowing and being for them.
Crucially, deSouza enacts this practice of negotiated refusal through the practice of painting, and looking closely at deSouza's paintings becomes a means to apprehend affectively this practice of negotiated refusal.In an image titled Calypso (wmnndchldrn), an artwork that is part of their Rdctns series, deSouza selects a sample from the furthest point in one of Paul Gauguin's Tahitian paintings (Figures 2 and 3).Gauguin, like Rothko, repeated the same leap into otherness through his Tahitian paintings by exotifying and fetishizing the magic power of the primitive Other amid his disillusion with modernity.deSouza then uses digital tools to redact elements of this furthest point of the painting, a point that symbolizes the distance that Gauguin presumes he can cover but the subjects of his paintings cannot.deSouza (2012) described this process of redaction "as a process that falls somewhere between the accumulation of a rubbing-where the textures and contours of a surface beneath are 'rubbed' onto a surface above; and a rubbing out, or an erasure" (n.p.).This erasure becomes an act of refusing to forget the primitivist relation that Gauguin established for himself, while, at the same time, learning closely from how Gauguin applied paint to the surface.There are, of course, other examples of artists who erase, or rub out, other artists' work.For example, Rauschenberg erased a Willem de Kooning drawing in 1953.However, in deSouza's case, they are reckoning with the exotic distance that Gauguin established between himself and the Pacific Islanders of Tahiti through his racial and colonial imaginary.Gauguin imagined he could make this leap in time and space to know and occupy their bodies without regard for their futures.In this sense, rubbing the furthest point in the Gauguin painting redacts, or refuses,  how Gauguin claimed Tahitian islanders as far from modern, and yet fetishized them with their potential to save him from modernity.deSouza's studio practice is an illustration of how artists negotiate and refuse the arts as White property and visual art as a technology of racemaking.This studio practice shows how one artist attempts to proliferate ways of knowing and being that are disidentified from liberal iterations of the human.Yet, crucially, it does not rely merely on a strategy of simply diversifying the curriculum or forgetting problematic images.In other words, deSouza still finds possibility through looking at Gauguin's paintings closely from a negotiated stance.This stance reckons with visual art as a racializing technology without eschewing "high" culture for "low" culture.Moreover, they do not abandon studio practice for cultural study and criticism.Instead, they hold on to the possibility of fine art as a technology that proliferates possibilities of knowing and being, while, at the same time, refusing to forget the fact that fine art has been, and remains, instrumental in the division between those lives deemed protectable, and those lives deemed disposable.They do so through recognizing from the start that the arts are White property, and the making and appreciation of visual art has always been, and therefore remains, entangled in the sorting and ranking of human difference.Yet they do not give up on art or the human as they seek to articulate other possibilities for being and knowing.

Conclusion
Art education has struggled with disciplinary anxiety for decades (see Siegesmund, 1998).Once modern assumptions about visual art and why art mattered became no longer tenable, the very question of why art should be taught, or whether art should be taught at all, has been a perennial question for scholars of visual arts education.Without a viable answer, the foundation for our field seems indefensible.This disciplinary anxiety is not particular to art education even if the stakes are unique due to our precarious and vulnerable position within the hierarchy of disciplines in this scientific age.This disciplinary anxiety has also been compounded in a moment defined by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.BLM has played an important role in sparking scrutiny within our field of how and why art should be taught, if at all, once art is recognized as White property.In this article, I have argued how understanding art as White property also means understanding how visual art has been used historically as a technology to establish norms for being human that are then used to create, sort, and rank human difference.Perhaps counterintuitively, this argument makes me ambivalent about simply turning away from studio practice in art education, or turning away from Western and European artworks that are so clearly entangled in these historical processes of racemaking.I have looked back at the turn to transform art education into cultural study to show how the field of art education, in forging its futures, must not only critique the ontology of the image, but also the construction of ontological human difference through aesthetic reasoning.As such, my attempt to find a way forward for visual arts education has tried to dwell in, rather than resolve, the disciplinary anxiety raised through recognizing that the arts are White property.This is the reason why I admire Al-An deSouza's images and their theorization of their artistic practice, which I believe holds such valuable lessons for us as visual arts education scholars, teachers, artist-mentors, and students.deSouza offers a model for making and studying art that still seeks to learn from a long and vexed history of artistic production while explicitly refusing the ways in which artistic production has made people objects of racial and colonial knowledge in ways that have legitimized their exploitation, dispossession, and death.This history of art is the history that has made our discipline.Rather than being frozen with anxiety or guilt when facing that history, or dismissing it altogether, as a White scholar, I am attempting to turn toward it through this negotiated stance of refusal in ways that might be generative of studio and educational practices.
These new practices, we must always hope, can both refuse and reshape the surrounding cultures of racialization from which they emerged, and therefore potentially contribute to the cause of racial justice.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
The author thanks Laura Traf ı-Prats, D onal O'Donoghue, and jt Eisenhauer Richardson for their contributions to this article through our participation in a panel at the 2021 Art Education Research Institute Symposium.Thank you to Albert Stabler for his provocation to consider the erasure drawing by Robert Rauschenberg in this analysis.Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments that allowed me to strengthen this article.

D I S C L O S U R E S T A T E M E N T
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Al-An deSouza, Rdctns, 2010-2011.Digital prints.Courtesy of the artist and Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi.