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Charlotte Amalie
Friday, March 29, 2024
HomeNewsArchivesTHE WALL: COMMUNICATION OR CONFRONTATION?

THE WALL: COMMUNICATION OR CONFRONTATION?

The warring camps in the battle for artistic control of the wall around Tillett Gardens on St. Thomas will be hard put to find a meeting ground. The comments made by painters’ posse muralist Austin Petersen at the site, the views expressed by arts entrepreneur Rhoda Tillett inside the complex, and the arguments advanced by callers in four and a half hours of back-to-back talk shows on WVWI Monday morning convey the impression that the combatants and their champions all believe they are operating on the basis of a moral imperative.
In other words, we are right, you are wrong; end of story.
Partisans have staked out their claims in two separate, though some would say overlapping, arguments:
* Whether Petersen or Tillett, if either, has a right to control what is painted on the wall.
* Whether Petersen’s imagery depicted and messages conveyed on the wall are desirable, or even acceptable, to the community.
Interestingly, toward the end of the morning, several callers to Topp Talk — perhaps in jest, perhaps dead serious — advanced possible avenues of accommodation. They (whoever they are) should down tear the wall and put up a fence, one stated. On the private property atop the wall, another said, Tillett and her tenants could put up disclaimer signs ("The views expressed on the mural below do not represent those of the management and staff…").
Far better would be a meeting of the minds. But that is probably impossible, given the climate of mutual distrust and emotionalism.
This is because the real issue is neither aesthetics nor property rights. The real issue, although most of the combatants will deny it to the media, and perhaps even to themselves, is rooted in racial and cultural differences between the black community and the white community, regardless of where the partisans were born or how long they have lived in the Virgin Islands.
No matter where they are "coming from," people go to great lengths locally to avoid discussing race as a divisive issue. For public consumption, the territory has long been touted as a beauteous bouquet of many colors, cultures and creeds, far removed from the "melting pot" of immigrant America; as a peaceful place of tolerance, understanding, acceptance and respect. The present dialogue paints a different picture.
Rhoda Tillett says a sign in 4-foot letters at the public entrance to her home and place of business that reads "Some people are racist…" conveys a wrong impression. She says people passing by will assume that the statement relates to the people in Tillett Gardens. And she says that it is personally offensive to her.
Cornel Esprit, who put the words back up on Saturday after an artist commissioned by Tillett had painted "Keep the arts alive" in their place, says he doesn’t know where the phrase — emblazoned there seven years earlier by Petersen’s posse — came from. But if someone painted those words outside his home or workplace, he says, he would "definitely not, definitely not" think the message was talking about him, and he would not take offense.
Words represent ideas, and a picture, as we all know, is worth a thousand words. To most of the members of the local black community who have spoken out, the words and pictures on Petersen’s wall art mean one thing. To most of the members of the local white community who have commented publicly, they mean something quite different.
(Note the italics: In mass communications, the views of those who choose to remain silent become increasingly irrelevant. The term "spiral of silence" refers to a phenomenon that occurs within a society when people are bombarded through the news media with a certain perspective on an issue. The more widely this prevailing viewpoint is reported, even where there is freedom of the press, the less likely those who differ, fearing ostracism or retribution, are willing to speak out — thus enabling the views of those with whom they differ to gain ever more credence within the media and, thereby, within the society.)
But who is to have the final say on what an expression, in words or pictures, means? If the sender of the message says it means one thing and the receiver of the message says it means something entirely different, each may accuse the other of being wrong, but neither can truly claim to be right. There is simply no avenue of communication to arrive at consensus, for they are not talking about the same thing.
In South Carolina, the state government has continued to fly the Confederate flag atop the capitol building, 135 years after the South lost the Civil War. Those whites supporting the practice to this day argue that the flag does not glorify slavery or discrimination against blacks; it honors the proud cultural heritage and history of the South. Blacks and a large proportion of whites have been saying for years get real. It’s racist, it’s offensive and it’s got to go.
In the South Carolina case, the roles are reversed racially from those concerning the Tillett Gardens wall, and yet the core of their concerns is the same: The message senders are saying their message is not offensive. The message receivers are saying they take offense.
Where there are two options and the choice will affect two parties, if one party says "it doesn’t make any difference" and the other party says "it makes a difference to me," in the interest of harmony, the person who does not have a preference will defer the decision making to the person who does. It could be which show to watch on television, what color to paint the office, when to put up the Christmas decorations, whether to pre-sweeten the iced tea. While such deference makes sense on the surface, however, there can be other dynamics at work. If the "neutral" party sees yielding preference to the "partisan" party as surrendering power as well, the matter becomes much more complex.
On Monday, CBS Radio newscasts cited the findings of a recent nationwide study the network commissioned of Americans’ opinions about racial relations. The statistics reinforce those of other studies done in the last decade. To quote from the CBS News website summation: "Black and white Americans do not share the same views about the current state of race relations in this country. The perceptions of whites are more positive than those of blacks, and have become increasingly so in the past five years. Perceptions of race relations among blacks, on the other hand, have changed little. Blacks are less optimistic than whites in their assessment of race relations in the U.S., the amount of progress that has been made in the past 30 years, and whether it is possible to end prejudice."
Whites for the most part just want to get along. Blacks by and large say yeah, right, with you in charge.
These are generalities, and generalizing mainland America, where people of African descent account for about 15 percent of the population and those of non-Hispanic European ancestry, perhaps 70 percent. In the Virgin Islands, the proportions are closer to the opposite, and yet the perception on the part of many blacks remains that, in a continuing extension of colonialism, the whites are the haves and blacks are the have-nots. And, therefore, life is a power struggle.
"Some people are racist…" Can the community come to agreement on what the words mean on the Tillett Gardens wall? Unless and until it does, there’s no way to resolve the question of whether the medium is appropriate for the message. Unless, of course, the government, which as owner of the wall has authority to be the power broker, chooses to intervene.
Editor’s note: Jean Etsinger is a freelance journalist and a contributing editor of the Source.

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