Conceptual poet and U Penn professor Kenneth Goldsmith posted this status on Facebook after viewing a tweet by a poet on Saturday, March 13th. Her tweet was about Goldsmith, but not directed at him in his mentions, and was in response to his uncreative desecration of the body of Michael Brown at Interrupt 3, a conference held at Brown University, March 12th-15th, 2015. Goldsmith read an autopsy of Michael Brown, reordering it to end with the description of Michael Brown’s penis. He titled it “The Body of Michael Brown.” Outrage from Goldsmith’s followers poured forth over the tweet in response to this performance, with one person telling him to “take care of you and yours.”
Goldsmith, invited to perform his work at the White House for President Obama in 2011, seems able to take care of himself and his own. However, a quick Internet search showed no results of Goldsmith’s support for #blacklivesmatter, nor of #blackpoetsspeakout, a point well made by Kima Jones.
In adherence to a long tradition of taking care of his own, Goldsmith is concerned with death threats, or at least this one made against him. But did the poet actually make a death threat?
“A death threat is a threat, often made anonymously, by one person or a group of people to kill another person or groups of people. These threats are often designed to intimidate victims in order to manipulate their behavior, and thus a death threat can be a form of coercion. For example, a death threat could be used to dissuade a public figure from pursuing a criminal investigation or an advocacy campaign.”—Wikipedia. Death threat. Death threat. Countless others have gotten far more explicit threats from Twitter accounts that are not suspended.
As of March 16th, the poet’s account is suspended.
It is difficult to tell when Goldsmith is being genuine. That is the nature of his work, which he has suggested people don’t need to read to understand, and of his online presence. Goldsmith is about Goldsmith. Did he feel threatened by the tweet? That is unclear, though in the past Twitter has refused to take action at all unless the person threatened reports it. Despite published policies prohibiting death threats, Twitter has not always suspended accounts of those who make such threats. However, enough people were threatened by the tweet that the account in question was disabled by Twitter, despite its miserable track record of taking death and rape threats seriously at all. Goldsmith himself doesn’t seem to take many things seriously, either, but there are things he should take seriously. Death threats are one of those things.
People of color are threatened with death for being born people of color. Nothing like a real and not conceptual death threat every day of your life.
CONSIDER THIS: A Partial List of Unarmed People of Color Killed by Police 1999-2014 (a partial list because the United States does not keep accurate records of the shooting of unarmed people of color by police):
Rumain Brisbon—Tamir Rice—Akai Gurley—Kajieme Powell—Ezell Ford—Dante Parker—Michael Brown—John Crawford III—Tyree Woodson—Eric Garner—Victor White III—Yvette Smith—McKenzie Cochran—Jordan Baker—Andy Lopez—Miriam Carey—Jonathan Ferrell—Carlos Alcis—Larry Eugene Jackson, Jr.— Deion Fludd—Kimani Gray—Johnnie Kamahi Warren—Malissa Williams—Reynaldo Cuevas—Chavis Carter—Shantel Davis—Sharmel Edwards—Ervin Jefferson—Kendrec McDade—Rekia Boyd—Shereese Francis—Wendell Allen—Nehemiah Dillard—Dante Price—Raymond Allen—Sgt. Manuel Loggins—Ramarley Graham—Kenneth Chamberlain—Alonzo Ashley—Kenneth Harding—Raheim Brown—Reginald Doucet—Derrick Jones—Danroy Henry—AIYANA JONES AGE 7 AIYANA JONES AGE 7 AIYANA JONES AGE 7 AIYANA JONES AGE 7 AIYANA JONES AGE 7 AIYANA JONES AGE 7 AIYANA JONES AGE 7—Steven Eugene Washington—Aaron Campbell—Kiwane Carrington—Victor Steen—Shem Walker—Oscar Grant—Tarika Wilson—DeAunta Terrel Farrow—Sean Bell—Henry Glover—Ronald Madison—James Brisette—Timothy Stransbury—Alberta Spruill—Ousmane Zongo—Orlando Barlow—Timothy Thomas—Prince Jones—Ronald Beasley—Earl Murray—Patrick Dorismond—Malcolm Ferguson—Amadou Diallo—Darren Rainey—Darrien Hunt—Ramiro James Villegas—Richard Perez—David Raya—Derek Williams—Ma-hi-vist Goodblanket—Clinton Allen—John T. Williams—Barrington Williams—Kyam Livingston—Jersey Green—Noel Polanco—Clinton Allen—Rocendo Arias—Dillon Taylor—Levar Edward Jones—Tony Robinson, Jr.— Naeschylus Vinzant—Anthony Hill
I do not know how many names I have missed. I do not know how many more POC were beaten or shot and not killed. I do not know how many died in police custody. I do not know. I do not know. I do not know. There is no way for us to know but to speak to each other more, because the United States does not keep reliable, specific statistics on these issues.
I do know a disproportionate number of POC are incarcerated in the United States. I do know that Goldsmith’s performance caused many people pain, distress, frustration, sadness, and incredible anger.
“I am requesting that Brown University not make public the recording of my performance of ‘The Body of Michael Brown.’ There’s been too much pain for many people around this and I do not wish to cause any more.” –Kenneth Goldsmith, Facebook, March 16, 2015
How generous. How generous. How generous. Whose pain is he responding to? Whose pain? Whose pain is he responding to? If he’s done the thing, why would he hide it to save more suffering for “many people around this?” He justified the thing as art online after he did the thing. He performed this thing in a public space, to a human audience. He retweeted people urging others to reserve judgment until they got to see the thing. He tweeted and posted on Facebook instances of people defending him, his work, his intent, his genius. He defended himself and the thing, and now he wants to hide the thing. Should Brown keep the thing hidden? I don’t want to see the thing. I don’t need context. There is no context that could make appropriate a white man looking to provoke by having taken Michael Brown’s autopsy out of context, reordered to end with a description of his penis. But what if others want to see the thing that Goldsmith suggested via retweets should not be judged without having been seen?
Meanwhile, if you want to but cannot see this thing Goldsmith no longer wants you to see, this thing he claimed to have received a death threat over, perhaps pass the time by turning your eyes to the number of people of color who receive death threats, abuse, and harassment not only on the street but online, on the daily. (In order to do this you may have to know some of these people, because threats against them go largely unreported.) These are usually anonymous but highly specific death threats including names of parents, addresses, phone numbers. The are threats of rape, death, and assault against members of people’s families that come after things like essays criticizing a publication, criticizing any man anywhere ever, criticizing a video game, criticizing a poem at the Paris Review, posting a selfie while fat, posting a selfie while Black, blogging while Black, reporting while Black, posting recipes on the Internet while Black. Or while of any other ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender besides White Cisgender Male. Equally disturbing is how little attention the women of color who get these threats receive. Major search engine results produce top hits mentioning primarily white feminists. (Of course. Of course. Of course.)
The majority of the search results pointed to Anita Sarkeesian. Roxane Gay was a notable exception to the whiteness of the top results. The rest were more or less about Lindy West and a handful of other white women. To learn more, I contacted several women of color to ask how frequently they receive harassment of violence threats of violence and death online. The answers: ALL THE TIME. ONCE A DAY. TWICE A WEEK. ANY TIME I OPEN MY MOUTH. ALL THE TIME. DAILY. WEEKLY. DAILY. ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME. What were the nature of the threats? Racism. Slurs. Threats against their bodies, especially in the cases of trans women and gay women. Threats against their lives, their websites, their jobs, their pets, their families, their cars. Specific threats. Vile, horrid, and underreported threats. Threats so common that some women, like blogger and poet Shannon Barber, are hardly even shaken at this point. But poor, poor Kenny G. So many decrying his terrible death threat.
WAIT. NO. THIS IS NOT ABOUT HIM, THOUGH HE WANTS TO MAKE IT SO. NO. NO. NO. I urge readers to go to THE MONGREL COALITION AGAINST GRINGPO and read “The Mongrel Coalition Killed Conceptualism.” Here’s a screenshot of part of it.
Just as the art, creative writing, and reporting of people of color is marginalized, so are the very real and constant threats of death and violence faced every single day. While Goldsmith has his defenders, and has the right to live free of the threat of death for his work, his engagement at Brown University showed utter complicity with white supremacy. The offending tweet seemed to be shocking to many of Goldsmith’s followers, almost as though they did not know these things could happen, or as if they were shocked that they happened to a man upholding white supremacy. White supremacy, the ultimate death threat. White supremacy, a threat so real that Rumpus contributor and journalist Olivia Olivia, who writes about race, class, feminism, and abuse, writes under a pseudonym in an attempt to protect herself from the threats of violence she faces daily. She lives on an upper floor of a building with security. In fact, an entire Reddit forum exists to tear apart her blog and hurl abuse at her.
She writes anyway. She says NO. So many write, perform, create, and simply walk down the street anyway. They say NO. It should not be the sole responsibility of POC like Olivia Olivia—and so many more—to take these risks, and say NO alone.
If you do not say no to white supremacy, you are saying yes. I say NO. I say NO. And now, I will listen.
14 responses
Thank you for writing about this Dena.
This is a thought-provoking, passionate piece that suffers, at times, from hyperbolic outrage, absurd reasoning, and an unfortunate lack of self-criticality.
The line referring to Goldsmith’s “desecration of the body of Michael Brown” is one such example, where both common sense, and a careful attention to the power and politics of words, seems to left the building. On a literal level, of course, Goldsmith did no such thing, and it is editorially dishonest, and ethically slightly shady, to even allow for the possibility of this meaning to be extrapolated. Is this irony then, a metaphor? Beware the trivialization, the distancing, that seeps from such rhetorical devices. Certainly, an essay on the desecration of Brown’s body, as well as the corporeality of the politics that normalizes such brutality, should perhaps take more care not to make a similar error. Why the appeal to social media spectacle, such inflated outrage? Why the turning away from the murdered body itself, from the context itself, to metaphoric comparison, mere representation? Why steer blame to the strawest of men?
The line, “[Goldsmith’s] engagement at Brown University showed utter complicity with white supremacy” rings with similar, frothing kind of tone that renders the complex, real issue of our shared complicity into something overblown, exaggerated beyond truthfulness, and moral seriousness.
A cursory acknowledgement of Goldstein’s project–an outdated, historically irrelevant and politically bankrupt project, sure–might have helped clarify what is at stake, and where outrage should be directed. At the very least, the author should acknowledge that the poetics of found texts, objet trouvé, is based on rooting language to its subjects, to “embody” its meaning, find the flesh in the word. Then the author’s seeminly fine points about the failure of this thinking would become clear.
I am no fan of Kenny G. To waste time and ink on this self promoting egoist is one thing–it’s the author’s prerogative, certainly, to give credence to his cheap aesthetics of protest if she wants–but it’s another thing to engage in the politics of avoidance, to displace real struggle into second order spectacle.
S. Morgan,
For many people, “desecration” seems to be a very appropriate descriptor in this case, regarding the impacts of KG’s act. I must also question nearly any response that skews toward labeling “real struggle” versus implied false or lesser struggle; do we define struggles in this way? Can we state what is struggle to another?
But you seem to have a roadmap here for the kind of piece you’d like to see — why not write it?
S Morgan, why is the author’s outrage “hyperbolic.” You use a lot of words: “dishonest,” “slightly shady,” “absurd reasoning,” “trivializing,” “overblown” etc, but give very little (anything?) to bolster those assertions. That people’s response to Kenny G’s piece is one of outrage, pain, and anger is a plain fact. Your response may differ, I guess, but your critique of the author’s argument is too empty to register meaningfully.
To deny a black person humanity, and make no mistake that is exactly what this so called artist has done, is an act that upholds white supremacy. Full stop.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve been challenged on a few points, so I’ll see if I can clarify or rebut adequately.
Alisha K: I am not one of those people who think “desecration” (particularly of the body, which was proffered by the author, not me) is even close to accurate. Sorry. This is not even the desecration of Brown’s memory–however weak or problematic, Goldsmith’s work was an attempt at memorialization I would argue. Also, I never made any comparisons between kinds of struggle. I did decry the transposition of struggle into a kind of social media hysterics, from which, at times, this piece seems to suffer.
Laurence D:
–“Desecration” is hyperbolic.
— “…a quick Internet search showed no results of Goldsmith’s support for #blacklivesmatter” is absurd: support or otherwise of hashtag politics is evidence of nothing. This is terrible logic: proof by absence. Also, as I argued in my first response, this appeal to cheap hashtag spectacle is part of the problem I have with this piece.
— Sorry my response seems “empty”…the above was a response to an article, not an article. However, are you really saying I didn’t give “anything”? I will reiterate: I think it is editorially sloppy to use words that resort to connotative appeal over their denotative import: there was NO body that Goldsmith did anything to. Issues of violence, I believe, need to discussed carefully and clearly. If there is a violence to Goldsmith’s performance, which I think could be argued, a representational violence, it is the author’s duty to be clear…there was no physical violence. To resort to figurative language therefore, as the author then must be doing, is shady and trivializing. A metaphor, by nature, is a comparison to ‘something else’… I question the morality of this strategy: it certainly isn’t the one that the antagonist Goldsmith uses, which is why I raised the issue of clarifying his poetics and arguing against them, as well as the notion of self-criticality. If Goldsmith’s politics of representation are under scrutiny, as they should be, I would have hoped for a bit more of the same by the author.
— I never said anything about anyone’s “pain and anger” or anyone’s right to feel whatever they want, and resent the implication that I even implied differently.
Ashley: please explain how Goldsmith denied anyone his humanity, and then, I’m curious, if I grant you this assertion, how denying this humanity necessitates racial “supremacy”. Your statement is fatuous.
To conclude: An outmoded, self-serving “avant-gardist” like Goldsmith is hardly the enemy you make him out to be. His performance is despicable because it trades in tragic spectacle–much in the same way that some companies use, say, 9/11 to sell t-shirts. It’s vulgar. But to go ballistic into a shaming tone, into implications of actual violence, desecration, or to input that his project of one of white “supremacy”, seems like simple alarmism akin to the outrage we can see on CNN or Fox. While this piece is clearly more thought-provoking than that, as I mentioned, I decry that AT TIMES it falls victim to such distracting bluster.
Thank you.
“If I grant you this assertion…”
I see.
So, where does the inherent racism of Goldsmith and his poetics reside?
In his love of the archive, I think, and the necrophilic, zombified inscription of white hegemony that occurs when things put in their tombs. After the cops, after the context of militaristic culture and indentured poverty, after the morgue, Goldsmith files Michael Brown, and to living reality of being racially marked, indeed that very real threat as the author to this article correctly points out, in its box, on its shelf. Our anger over his “piece” may be that living racism isn’t a problem to filed away in the archive of ubu poetics. Our anger is that Goldsmith doesn’t see the grotesque irony of his own performance: another white man using the death of a young black man to justify his “creation”: “Look at what I have found, what I have made from it.” Nauseating, yes. So, if by “desecration” the author means exploitation and expropriation, then I do wish that is what she had said. It’s Goldsmith’s entitlement, his self-proclaimed right to speak for (or in this case from) others and the erasure of that. It’s Goldsmith’s “avant garde” colonial ethos posing as enlightened political engagement that, for me, offends.
Dena, yes, I too thank you for your article. It has made me think about things a lot.
I sense a tone of irony to your quotation of mine, and if I am mistaken, I apologize.
Yes, I write “if” in full knowledge that Ashley and I would likely be able to find some common ground “if” she/he had taken some care in her/his response. Is Goldsmith’s piece a denial of humanity? If so, how? Saying something doesn’t make it so. Extrapolating from Ashley’s logic, as I must do since the author hasn’t explained him/herself, denying a white person’s humanity equals black power. As a person of color myself, although I am not sure why I need to say this, I can’t take this comment seriously. Words matter. Full stop.
“Objet trouvé.”
Jesus.
It’s really disgusting S. Morgan can say all this blatantly racist shit and stay anonymous. At least stand by your “hysterics.”
S Morgan, I appreciate your time, and your enthusiasm for this piece. I chose my words carefully in writing it. Now, I am listening.
Dear Olivia,
Thanks for that! Maybe you would be keen to “out” me at your first chance, I am not sure. You are quoted in the original piece of someone who lives under threat of violence or bullying…I would have thought you might understand why I must keep my “racist shit” cloaked with a hidden first initial. I certainly wouldn’t want you to send your vitriol my way: to my door or inbox.
I tried to express myself with care. I have devoted over an hour to “my hysterics.” If I have failed, I am sorry. I am a reader with a voice, a racially marked body and my own humanity. I too will follow Dena’s lead now, and listen.
For those who may not have seen this piece, it makes an interesting addition to the discussion: something that points to the ingrained racial bias of our culture industries, literary communities and art-historical canons, beyond the clown that is Kenneth Goldsmith.
http://www.apogeejournal.org/goldsmith-conceptualism-the-half-baked-rationalization-of-white-idiocy/
Thank heavens we have S. Morgan here to explain how this article should have been written or else however would we be able to just read it? I resent beyond resentment this idea that we should ignore bullshit white male supremacy because not doing so gives more attention to white male supremacists. These are fucking grievances, and it’s our right to express them. Dena, you are a righteous force. Keep going.
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