Hope & Dread Extra: Maya Benton

Hope & Dread Extra: Maya Benton features photography curator Maya Benton, who talks about staring down Neo-Nazi protestors. 

Hope & Dread Extra is a series of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring your season favorites from Hope & Dread. Our guests were brimming with additional ideas and extra insights that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting room floor. Join hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman for new Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns:

This is Hope & Dread Extra. I’m Charlotte Burns.

Allan Schwartzman:

And I’m Allan Schwartzman.

Charlotte Burns:

Hope & Dread was a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art. We’ve heard from people who are making change and from people who are resisting change.

Our guests were brimming with ideas and off-topic thoughts that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting-room floor. So now, we’re bringing you a set of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring some of your season favorites, which we’ll be dropping twice a week.

Today we’re bringing you more from the curator Maya Benton who organized an exhibition that is exposing many of the fissures running through American democracy.  

Maya Benton: 

It's an exhibition of photographer Gillian Laub's photographs of racially segregated, proms and homecoming rituals in the American South. This is in the 21st century. This is while Obama was president. So people always hear the story and assume I'm talking about the Jim Crow era and these older black-and-white photographs, but no, this is happening today. 

In the exhibition, we have the yearbooks from the segregated schools; the black technical school, and the white school. The year that they were integrated, all of a sudden there was the White queen and the Black queen. There was the White homecoming and the Black homecoming. The White prom and the Black prom. And even little girls, a five-year-old, six-year-old girl was told you crown the Black queen, you crown the White queen. The kids were being taught to be a race. And White kids could go to the Black prom. The Black kids couldn't go to White proms. Interracial couples weren't sold tickets.

As we planned the travel of the exhibition to Portland, I wasn't aware of the racist founding doctrines of the state of Oregon. And that was something that was really shocking to me. I grew up on the west coast in California and we're neighbors with Oregon and it was just a history I had never known growing up. And in the 1920s, one in every 20 Oregonians was a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan. It's just a shocking number. That's including children and the 20% of the state that weren't white. Also, there were a lot of Chinese immigrants who were the victims of racially-motivated violence. It wasn't just against the African-American community, but there was just a history of White supremacy in the state that was part of its founding doctrine. I was really shocked by that. 

Of course, bringing a show to Portland that deals with racial segregation in the American south, you have to start to think about the history of Oregon. And I had, like you, thought about “Portlandia”. You know, and all the kind of vegan restaurants and indie bands.

Charlotte Burns:

Right, right, right. 

[Laughter]

Maya Benton:

And I was so shocked by the alt-right presence in Oregon. And so the museum partnered with Don't Shoot Portland. And it was a really wonderful opportunity to bring together the Black community and the Jewish community and the art community in Portland. 

But, as we were working on the show and installing it, as a curator, who's worked in museums for many years, you kind of get used to installation hiccups. I had been approached by a staff member of the museum who said “We have a problem”. And I thought it was going to be like one of the vitrines hasn't arrived for the objects. And I said, "Oh, don't worry. We'll work it out," thinking I've seen these things before and we'll work it out. They were like, "Well, the Klan is coming to protest."

I was so perplexed. And it's just not something that you expect to hear. And having been raised by Holocaust survivors as a first-generation American, I'm particularly sensitive to the history of the Klan and my own feelings of threat and vulnerability when I hear those words. Alt-right and neo-Nazi are not just abstractions or part of America's history but are also a part of my own family's very painful history. And I thought, okay, well, this is going to be a learning experience. 

And I remember thinking also, it's a good thing that the show is coming here because these are conversations that need to be had, but also wondering what the power of an exhibition would be to change hearts and minds? How powerful are these, is there always this preaching to the choir component to it? The people who come to the exhibitions are the people who already agree with the change that is being advocated by those shows. Are people from the alt-right going to come in and hear the words of the subject to the photographs? Are they going to be changed by that? What can affect change? 

I think one of the decisions we've made early on about the exhibition was to have the captions be the experiences of the subject so that their testimony and their own words. And so people talk about their own experiences of the town, what they were thinking and feeling when the photographs were taken. And we made the decision—because Gillian's photographs of this town span 10 years—to go back to these students now that they're young adults and get their take on it now.

And there's this rashomon take on what is happening in the town, which is, I think the take on race in America in general. Some say it's worse than it's ever been. Others say it's getting better. Some say it's never going to change. Some are hopeful. But I think that that's part of the beauty of Gillian's work and her photo project, is that there isn't this clear black and white. There's this sense of history being two steps forward and two steps back. 

So you have this progress of the integration of these homecoming rituals and prom rituals, but then you have the racially-charged murder of this young unarmed Black man by a White town patriarch. But then you have the horror that ensued nationally from the attention that was brought to this, and you think change is coming. There were a lot of kind of two steps forward, two steps back.

And the fact that this was happening in Georgia was particularly interesting because Georgia became central to the national conversation about voting rights, which was related to Gillian's show. Gillian had photographed Stacey Abrams for Time Magazine and we included her photograph in the exhibition, which she kind of adapted as it traveled. You see in this small town, Keyke Burns, who was the girlfriend of Justin Patterson, the young unarmed Black man who had been shot, her father had run for sheriff. The first time a Black man was running for sheriff in this town. And the results were very questionable. It feeds into broader questions nationally about who's able to vote and who has a voice.

And so there was the sense of progress because Stacey was potentially going to be the first Black and woman governor from Georgia and she came so close, but then the person she was running against, Brian Kemp, did everything he could to curtail voting rights in that state. And he became the commissioner for the voting rights system for the election. He was, I think, the election commissioner. So it's having the referee as your opponent.

Charlotte Burns: 

Right, yeah. It's sort of like the fox saying, I'll look after the chickens.

Maya Benton: 

Yes, exactly. 

We're installing this exhibition. You have the child of Holocaust survivors, installing an exhibition about racially-motivated violence in the American south and racial segregation, and all of a sudden we find out that the alt-right is coming to protest.

It would have been much more shocking before Trump had become president. And I think in some ways, he made undeniable something that I think it was easy if you live in diverse urban centers to delude yourself into thinking has been improved, which is that this country is incredibly racist and the racist structures that have undergirded state and government policies are still very much there and at play. 

And so that tension played out in her show. And on the one hand, it was amazing because it brought these communities together. And I think the Jewish piece is also interesting. Gillian is not...you know, if you look at the iconic photographs of the Civil Rights movement in the American south and the 1950s and '60s, so many of the photographers who created the iconic visual record were Jewish photographers like Danny Lyon and Leonard Freed and Jill Friedman and Bruce Davidson and Bob Adelman. And I think that there's this sense of both being kind of an outsider and being an insider, being able to access and have access to white spaces to document White supremacy and White racism. And at the same time, you're an outsider and you're excluded and you… So there's like White passing and access and privilege, but at the same time, you're excluded and you can see it from an outsider's perspective. And there's a sensitivity to histories of suffering and oppression and bigotry. So it was a lot of these different elements that all kind of landed in Portland. 

A lot of people in Portland are familiar with the kind of racist history of the state, but there are a lot of people who live in Portland who have no idea how central that is to the state. And I think that that can be said for America as a whole, that you wind up living—you and I have both lived in New York for a long time, and you live in these progressive, diverse bubbles where it's sometimes easy to forget what is happening right outside your door.

Charlotte Burns:  

And also the kind of everydayness of the difference, which is something that struck me about, you know, you kind of have the Klan protesting and then you get a coffee and you carry on with install. That sort of humdrumness of extreme events.

Maya Benton: 

Yes. There was a kind of quotidian backdrop to everyday life that consisted of this alt-Right and Klan protesting. And then it wasn't surprising to me that Oregon became kind of ground zero for America's racial reckoning.

I always had this hope that perhaps Trump was the kind of product of the flailing death spasms of White patriarchy. That the demography of America has shifted to the extent that in a few decades, it will cease to be a White country. And those are just demographic facts. And that it’s this signal to a new time but I had this conversation with a friend and she said, "Well, you're assuming that it will remain a democracy." 

Charlotte Burns: 

The show is obviously called Hope & Dread. As you look forward, what do you feel?

Maya Benton:

The honest answer is dread, but it's this instinct to want to say hope because it's like the Bob Hope at the end of the war show dancing to entertain the troops, which I find so horrifying, or the end of the Holocaust museum exhibition where you end with someone who risked their lives to save people.

Charlotte Burns: 

You want the redemptive narrative, but you just can't bring yourself right now.

Maya Benton: 

That is correct. I would like very much to say hope, and I recognize the impulse to say hope and it is that wanting to say the arc of history is long as it bends towards justice. I want to end with the bending towards justice. 

I don't feel that. I don't feel that. I feel that we are in a pretty dark time. I think it's really hard, particularly in the context of the history that you and I both studied and studied together and seeing the rising tide of fascism and populism to say hope. Unfortunately, I have to go with dread. I'm sorry. I hope I'm wrong about the dread.

Charlotte Burns:

You have hope that you're wrong! There you go.

Maya Benton:

That's right. That's how I'm going to end it. Okay, I'm going to end with both. I'm going to split the baby and say I hope I'm wrong about my dread.

Charlotte Burns:

For more from Maya, tune in to episode two of Hope & Dread, “American History, Axed”, episode eight, “Westward Ho!” and episode 12, “Are You Sitting Uncomfortably?”. 

Listen to Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts. 

Hope and Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. 

The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Robert Bound is our associate editor. 

Holly Fisher mixes and edits the sound. 

Additional research has been provided by Julia Hernandez. 

And our theme music is by the inimitable Philip Glass.