GUSTON, WHITENESS, AND THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF THE VILE WORLD. by Steve Locke, artist and educator based in Brooklyn. "I AM IN ART SCHOOL, my first year in an MFA program. 1999. I am the only Black student in my painting-major studio class. Our professor is showing us slides (yes, actual slides) of paintings. It is a classic art-school moment. A group of young people, an older professor, flashes of light on a studio wall. Paintings, one after the other, that have something to do with the current lesson and have a particular interest for people in the class in terms of technique and subject. An image of a Klansman appears on the wall. I gasp. The slide seems to be up for much longer than all the other slides." "Guston made a choice to reengage in the world and to image its circumstances. He took on his own whiteness and complicity and silence and showed them to the public." "I learn about his work Drawing for Conspirators, 1930, which shows a group of Klansmen lynching a Black man while a large hooded figure in the foreground slumps in what seems to be regret. Seeing that work from thirty-nine years before he painted The Studio signals to me that this imagery has been with him for a while. I learn that I am not seeing what I think I am seeing. Instead of evidence of an artist’s racism, I learn that, for the first time in my life, I am seeing a white artist—one of the giants of American art—grapple with his own complicity in white supremacy. I learn that I am seeing a great abstract painter turn his back on abstraction—and all that word contained in that moment—to engage with his whiteness and complicity in racism. Instead of putting the Klan hood on someone else, in 1969, he puts it on himself. " "Because it must be said that there is a specious notion that race is solely about Black people. White people have been allowed to claim that because they are white, they do not understand race, cannot understand race, and should not ever discuss race. If race ever comes to the fore, then, white people insist, Black people need to be brought in as the authority and must educate white people about race. To my mind, this absolves white people of any responsibility to examine their own racial identity and allows for the persistence of the myth of white racial innocence. White people know what racism is, and they know what white supremacy is. They are the organizing principles of American life. Black people don’t need to explain to white people the system of oppression white people created to ensure their dominance. But white people often outsource their emotional labor and guilt about white supremacy to Black people so they can claim, “I could never understand what it is to be Black.” The myth of white racial innocence is married to the lie of inscrutable Blackness."