Megen Porter

America has always been based on inequality, a duality of humanness where one skin tone was always valued more than others. We live in a society where whiteness is the default gaze; our systems are built around white wealth, our government bodies based in centuries old racism and laws that favor white people. So, what does it mean to be white in America today and how does self-awareness equate to accountability in terms of social inheritance?

The Inheritance Project is a long-term project that started with a research dive into my family history. My ancestors, who were from the Appalachian Mountains, were also enslavers of black people. This discovery started me down the path to questioning my inherent whiteness, and the inherited racism that I hadn’t acknowledged until I unraveled the past. This body of work has three sections so far; My Admitted Whiteness, Ever-Present Whiteness, and third, a series of photographs is still in progress and is unnamed.

In Inheritance: My Admitted Whiteness, I pair up image and text on textiles as well as use found quilts from antique stores in Appalachia to convey this burden associated with my history. For me, the textiles represent the internal house of a person, the part that people don’t see because there are walls, exteriors that we white people build up, so that we don’t have to acknowledge the truth of our own heritage. Those walls equate to the inheritance of racism, the actions, and thoughts of my ancestors (the enslavers), my parents (who actively fly a confederate flag), and myself (who took a black family to a plantation for family portraits). I question if the heaviness that I feel, the burden of this history, and the way I involuntarily think of things, are appropriate for a white person. Am I allowed to feel this way, and if not, where do I put these feelings? I recognize, that for me, this isn’t traumatic, yet it is problematic. If I don’t acknowledge this part of me, then how will I ever become aware? How do I become open and honest so I can change? Does awareness equal accountability when it comes to the history of whiteness in the US? These things are what I think about when I am working on this section of Inheritance.

For Inheritance: Ever-Present Whiteness, I am trying to find a way to visually represent what whiteness would look like if it was tangible beyond my skin. In this work I cover the landscape in the left-over fabric from My Admitted Whiteness. This fabric is connected to a dress that I wear and is attached to a white cinderblock (the ancestors). Using Georgia forests, I wrap my whiteness around the trees, creating a web of tangles and layers that represent my ancestors taking of native lands, a claiming of all that is seen. It speaks of generational whiteness, of me handing down this inherited whiteness to both of my children as soon as they were born, and of me pushing my whiteness onto those who don’t look like me. As I unwind the fabric from the trees, thoughts of self-awareness and openness signify a change in the way I think, the way I act. Yet, at the end I’m still connected to the whiteness, I’ll never be free from it.