“It’s cool to be oppressed” is poking fun at the increasing recourse to a kind of identity-based points system used to dictate whose voices we might hear, as an index of how oppressed they are deemed to be. This drives a concomitant festishization of victimhood. Deciding who may or may not speak, or indeed, who may or may not be worthy of our compassion, on the basis of single identity characteristics is a form of psychopathy. I chose the abc cursive font because it’s child-like and annoying.
“Try to be less white” is taken from a Robin-Di-Angelo-based anti-racist training, recently inflicted on its employees by Coca Cola, amongst other companies. I chose futura because it has a slightly totalitarian-feeling heft for me. Whilst the self-contained absurdity is obvious, I suspect most people in the art world would read this piece as anti-racist activism without the satire. Because this kind of thing satirises itself, even a hard troll becomes hard to spot.
CRT reaches it nadir, entirely removing the mask, with ‘whiteness studies’. Donald Moss, an academic in this ‘discipline’ (and, but of course, a white guy) says ‘whiteness’ is a: “malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility”. It is obvious to people outside of this religion that ascribing characteristics to people on the basis of race should not only be unacceptable as an academic pursuit, but is a patent manifestation of racism. If you need someone to make the point that wokeness and racism are the two faces of the same nasty homunculus, nobody does it better than Ryan Long.
These were actually my first Con-She completed works, and I truly believed they would never be shown in my lifetime. But it was my little mental rebellion – I would know I’d made them; I would know my mind was still free. But as it turned out, about 3 years after their creation they were shown in an excellent little free speech show called 2+2=5 at NotForSale Gallery in Hackney Wick:
