I keep obsessing on a work of art, an instillation. Signs, each big enough to read at several hundred feet. Each sign will have one word. That one word will be a racial, gender, sexual, or ethnic epithet. Haunky, corncracker, peckerwood, whitey, spic, wop, n-word, coon, darkie, bitch, whore, slut, skank, c-word, hole, fag, cocksucker, buttplunger, mud packer, pooner, etc. You can imagine all the words. We have tens of them. I want to find a landowner with a long fence and put them up like Burma shave signs, without the cutesy rhyme. Or houseowners who will put one or more signs up in their yards. But there would have to be a concentration. One here and one there will only cause problems for that household.
Call it the Hate Project. It would be a confrontational way to approach these problems no one wants to face. In other words, bring into light of day that which is often held privacy in cliques, groups, and like-minded people–as well as that which we as a society have in our cultural DNA. It is an attempt to take these words and show them prominently in public where people have to see them and be upset by the kinds of hateful ideas that lay latently in our culture or that once in a while bubble up to the service. Make parents get angered over having to explain these things to their children.
A better world. That’s what I want. This is just the start of a larger effort to move the whole racial blob into the black hole of classism and reveal the ways that the few have always waged class war but always thrown the epithet of class warfare at those who seek fundamental change.
We do it now and we make people uncomfortable. We don’t do it now, heads will role.
Patrick
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