Fact & fiction
Office On the Road, July 2025, Dry Heat, Issue 6
Life is Delicious at Curve Line Space, April 2024, Couch in the Desert
Some Remarks for 24 VIEWS, February 2021
the sky used to be blue, November 2020, Nevada Humanities
Published by DRY HEAT, ISSUE 6
East of the Las Vegas Strip, across a stretch of sunbaked asphalt along Sahara Avenue basks a two-story retail center named New Orleans Square. Its airy structure flaunts curling French Quarter iron flourishes along its railings and archways, framing the doorways to a clutch of small businesses. In the spring of 2024, Clark County purchased New Orleans Square along with the neighboring Commercial Arts Building in hopes of redeveloping the Historic Commercial Center District. At the time of this writing, the exact fate of the building (and the land it sits on) remains unknown and it is uncertain where current tenants will go now that leases have expired in December. Dismayed and resigned to the false promises of politicians and bureaucratic machinations, tenants were forced to make tough decisions. Some tenants are seeking spaces across town while others will shutter completely. One, however, has a certain plan for the road ahead.
Jessica Oreck is an artist, filmmaker, and the mastermind behind the Office of Collecting and Design (acronym OCD), less an office and more a repository of touch and memory. OCD, which occupied Suite B-105 in New Orleans Square, is part museum, exhibition space, and Oreck’s active studio. An enigmatic cast of curios comprises the museum collection. Visitors are welcome to gently sift through jars of misplaced buttons, unplayable dice, lizard skins, stone fruit pits, pencil nubs, and tiny toys. Here, colorful tchotchkes lie in wait to be handled, suffused with an intimacy that is both felt and unknowable. Oreck’s curatorial approach possesses a librarian’s precision but a lover’s affectations. Almost every object fits in the palm of a hand, a glass strawberry, a diary lock, sewing scissors, a lavender quartz bird, a porcelain shot glass, each harboring an inscrutable story. Their stewardship grew out of Oreck’s stop motion animation practice; like a magpie, she amassed small props and wove them into moving images until they acquired a life of their own. Glimpses of their past are only discerned by direct contact with their worn material surface, a condition Oreck describes as “the residue of attention.” OCD brims with charm and aesthetic, ripe for photo opportunities, but the subtext of the entire experience is a serving of radical philosophy, a salve against the fast burns of contemporary digital life. Oreck presents an opportunity for tactile communion to rethink notions of utility. Past the velvet curtain, enshrined within wooden shelves and drawers are castaways whose value lies in the hand of the beholder.
OCD operated out of New Orleans Square since 2020 and will now embark on a new journey as a traveling museum. When I spoke with Oreck in September 2024 about her plans, she shared that she had ruminated on the idea two years prior. “Since I wasn’t able to renew my lease, I had to pursue alternatives and I already had a vision of taking this project beyond Las Vegas.”
The undertaking was to acquire a 40-foot trailer (a second hand Heartland Bighorn 3875FB to be precise), strip and gut its interior to build out a mobile version of the museum, then haul it across the continental US. Oreck is the quintessential artist, overflowing with restless energy and manic devotion to her vision. “I often do things through sheer force of will, sometimes with no institutional backing,” she said. In this case, her vision is an institution unto itself. The public has rallied behind her campaign to build a traveling museum via Kickstarter; she has raised $54,334 to fund the conversion. I asked about her experience fundraising. “It was a roller coaster with a lot of emotional highs and lows. I poured a lot of work into coordinating this thing. I’m very moved to see that the space has drawn this much support. I cried a lot,” she replied.
A museum on wheels conjures up images of traveling circuses of yore, painted freight containers housing animals and acrobats. Oreck envisioned something similar, though less entertainment driven. Instead, her goal was to preserve the original space’s ethos of quiet discovery and contemplation. While the physical location in Las Vegas will no longer exist, Oreck will provide the same creative offerings on the road, including scavenger hunts, treasure club subscriptions, and the flatlay experience in which visitors arrange a set of objects to be photographed from above, reminiscent of specimen documentation. “There will be no basecamp because the museum does not scale,” she said. “It will only exist in this mobile iteration, so it has to be the size that it is. There’s a lot of unsexy work ahead of me, like figuring out how to insure this thing and registering it with the Department of Transportation. For the interior, I’m building more walls, bookcases, and drawers since there’s less existing wall space.” Transforming an RV was preferable to building out a blank slate shipping container with no insulation, electricity, HVAC, or plumbing. Oreck and her husband began the renovation process by removing scores of screws, cigarette smoke infused carpets, and kitchen appliances. The construction process came with some unusual technical challenges. The tiny, delicate objects had to withstand the rigors of travel, from potholes to inclement weather. Removable putties, tapes, and glues were employed to stabilize wall displays and many parts of the collection were reorganized into drawers. Regular shakedown tests were conducted by driving 50 miles at a time to anticipate what will stand and what will fall. The exact route is undetermined, but likely to be based on seasons, closed for winter then traveling west to east as winter thaws. “We will most likely start off by touring the west coast in April before attempting the cross-country tour. Everything is still up in the air, but ideally breaking it up into seasons will give me time to work on other projects,” she said, referring to her filmmaking pursuits.
Oreck’s film oeuvre predominantly focuses on the ways habits and rituals become endemic to communities. Her documentaries and stop motion films build up textural experiences through quiet conversations with subjects and extreme attention to details – the more mundane the better. She shares, “I’m obsessed with these repetitive behaviors, for instance, the way my dad would tie his tie, my mom would put on her lipstick. Over time, people develop a very specific way they conduct their personal routines. I find there is something colossally universal in that shared experience.” Oreck’s films have been featured on the Criterion Channel and screened at Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca Film Festival. While OCD and Oreck’s film career may feel disparate on first take, they in fact operate within the same modality – they both attempt to capture time and attend to the overlooked. When asked about her process, Oreck replied, “It’s completely intuitive and not recognizable to most people. It’s an aesthetic I’ve developed over the years. When researching a specific topic, I must talk to people directly. When acquiring objects, I refuse to shop online. I have to touch and hold it in my hand. I am drawn to materials that are fragile or fallible – wood, glass, paper, textures – things that wear down over time.”
Therein lies the dark beauty of OCD and its tangible understanding of mortality; things fall apart, things decay, but life is better off making oneself vulnerable to being broken. Here, touch is spiritual alchemy, a means of reactivating an inanimate object’s inherent memory and savoring its company. While in conversation with Oreck, I was reminded of the children's book The Velveteen Rabbit, subtitled How Toys Become Real. Written by Margery Williams and first published in 1922, it tells the story of how a stuffed rabbit becomes real through his owner’s love and attention. In one of the opening scenes in the nursery, the Rabbit asks the Skin Horse what it means to be real. The Skin Horse says, “Real isn’t how you are made. When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt. It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. Once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
OCD officially closed the doors to Suite B-105 in New Orleans Square one fine December day. A few neighboring tenants hosted closing parties to celebrate their accomplishments as purveyors of arts and culture. The mood was cheerful and bright. I asked Oreck what she would miss about New Orleans Square. She let out a wistful sigh. “I loved the community aspect,” she responded. “The museum became a third place for people from all walks of life – a place to read, write, sketch, play music, or hang out. I’ll miss that consistency.” Oreck and her museum will depart the city of Las Vegas not quite unscathed by the turmoil surrounding New Orleans Square, but certainly not overlooked.
– December 2024
On a brisk, sunny day in April, I drove over the channel and through the bridge in search of whimsy and wonder in the unlikely neighborhood of San Pedro. San Pedro, a working-class neighborhood within the city of Los Angeles, bears the hallmarks of a port town; the brilliant green Vincent Thomas Bridge spills out among shipping containers stacked like high rises where the exhaust of industry hangs heavy. It is an unlikely backdrop for what I remember about the Office of Collecting and Design, but I remind myself that Jessica Oreck specializes in transporting people through time and space. The current news is absurd, the mood is bleak, but I still believe in supporting artists, especially those who understand the political nuance of history and the unreliable nature of memory. Since Oreck and I concluded our last interview in December 2024, OCD is fully on the road and has since wrapped up their first west coast tour, bringing the memory machine to the wider public.
Oreck has achieved the seemingly impossible in less than a year. After gutting and remodeling the RV through sweat, tears, confoundment, and joy, the OCD trailer transfusion is complete. Glimpses of her buildout process are shown in bite-sized episodes on her YouTube channel where Oreck can be seen sawing, painting, drilling, and cementing her vision in place with the help of friends and family. “I trusted myself a lot more this time around,” Oreck shared during a follow-up, post-tour interview in July. “Even if it didn’t make sense to other people, I went forward with it anyway because I was confident in my vision. I’m really proud of it, in some ways I like it better than the original museum.” Taking influences from Romani wagons, Victorian train cars, and traveling circus spectacles, the interior of the trailer is shrouded in handsome fabrics, dark wood facades, glimmering ornaments, and warm lighting. Two armchairs flank a triple towered birdcage; hand painted beaded drapes from Lithuania hang over the windows, casting an ochre tint over the space. An array of cabinets tetris across the walls, each housing small wares organized via Oreck’s internal, abstruse system. The knobs and handles of library card catalog and flat file drawers gleam from their past life in Las Vegas and prior.
Many of OCD’s wares were deaccessioned or reorganized to fit neatly into its new, 400 square foot home. Wall displays, furniture, lamps, tiny treasures, and assorted ephemera were sold during a moving sale in late March. “Since we went from 1000 square feet to 400, I had to make a rule with myself, that nothing would go into storage. I would either have to sell or gift it so that collection could exist as a whole on the road,” Oreck said. As such, the newest iteration of OCD is far more compact and subdued than its first form in New Orleans Square. Objects are sequestered into drawers and boxes, requiring greater curiosity, attention, and care from visitors. Oreck said, “One of the most amazing things about this project is that it’s become a magnet for people I am drawn to. I met many incredible people and am grateful for new friendships. A lot of people had already been following my work online and it was so rewarding to finally meet them in person.”
When I arrived at the Port of Los Angeles, visitors were already trickling into the museum. The trailer exterior was unrecognizable from its previous white and grey decaled surface. Its new surface boasted flourishes in deep blue, ochre, forest green, and purples, courtesy of Bob Dewhurst of Sign Language in Goldfield, Nevada. Inside, I recognized a few objects from my past visits, but continued to encounter new things – a collection of tiny top hats, rubylith letters,lead type. As I arranged letters into ransom love notes for my friends, nostalgia cast its shadow over my mind. A third place was lost in Las Vegas. OCD on the road has no grounded homebase; it is suspended and decentralized, like so many other things in this world. “I often miss the community I had in Las Vegas,” Oreck shared. “I loved being able to host workshops, poetry readings, and events at a moment’s notice. I miss the regulars who would come in every week.” Though OCD’s departure represents a cultural loss for Las Vegas, the net positive is the opportunity to reach a wider audience along the open road.
From April to June, OCD toured through San Diego, San Pedro, San Luis Obispo, Fremont, and Port Costa, passing into the Pacific Northwest for stops in Portland, Tacoma, and Seattle. The future tour is currently in progress, with stops in Boise, Salt Lake City, and Boulder scheduled for September and October. “I didn’t realize how complicated it is to plan a tour,” Oreck admitted. “I spend many hours every day trying to plan – the logistics of parking, trucking, cold calling people, producing social media content, and coordinating with host organizations. All the small businesses I’ve partnered with so far have been incredibly generous, and I’m hoping the planning process will become more effortless in the future.” OCD is currently a two-person operation, powered by Oreck and her assistant Emily. The plan is to operate only three months out of the year to make room for other creative projects. As such, an East Coast tour is not feasible until 2029. “After we reach the East Coast, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll abandon the rig and move the collection onto a boat and sail out to the British Isles.” And so, the little office of objects suffused with memory may continue to float out into the world, physically contained yet boundless in its story. – July 2025
For updates on Office of Collecting Design's tour dates and the buildout process, go to officeofcollecting.com or @office.of.collecting on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
MARCH 26 – MAY 11, 2024
Curated by Alana-lynn Berglund
Featuring Anny Ayala Ortega, Devin Balara, Madison East, M Jiang, Kelci McIntosh, Summer Orr, Dom Rabalais, D Stevens, Tummy
Published on Couch in the Desert, April 2024
What might a few punks and well-meaning grifters bring to a dinner party? Perhaps a few glass shards of cheese to whet your teeth before biting into a bludgeon-sized turkey leg, a cluster of neon grape-grenades, or gravel-coated stone fruit. Such are the offerings at Life is Delicious, a group exhibition curated by Alana-lynn Berglund, currently on view at Curve Line Space in Los Angeles through May 11th, 2024. Sparsely installed and thrumming with verve, the show brings together nine artists from across the continental US, most of whom have connections to underground music and performance. Much of this is attributed to Berglund’s role as Associate Director of the Holland Project, a radical, community driven arts and music space in Reno, NV that has hosted thousands of events since opening in 2007. The result is a fun-loving show that brings a DIY sensibility to the table, transforming alternative materials, trash, and recyclables into cacophonous objects of contemplation.
The space opens with a party – Dom Rabalais’ sky-high painting renders hedonistic intimacies in day-glo paints; human figures and animals tangle together amid quivering candle flames. D Stevens’ humorous corn-cob turned bomber plane looms overhead. Devin Balara presents a picture perfect cheese board composed of eight wedges fabricated from glass, creating a reverse trompe l’oeil as cubist cheese rises into the third dimension. Cheeky callbacks to punk zine aesthetics are played up in the collage work of Anny Ayala Ortega and Madison East, who cuts-and-pastes fragments of old classifieds to create concrete poetry. For the exhibit’s feast themed occasion, one of East’s collages is digitally printed on a tablecloth with wavy red trim.
Additional textural delights can be found in M Jiang’s sculptural wall piece that presents sand encrusted grenade-plums held together by a soldered branch on a silver platter. Explosive weaponry is also referenced in Kelci McIntosh’s Bomb Ass Grapes suspended overhead. The grape clusters here are made out of foraged trash from New Orleans’ Tropical Isle bar, famed for their Hand Grenade cocktail served in trademarked novelty yard cups. For dessert, Summer Orr serves up iridescent chunks of jello around a ceramic fish atop a cake stand. All this is set to a soundtrack by the (now defunct) band Tummy+ whose scratchy tunes, dubbed onto a yellow cassette tape, are the exhibition’s namesake: Life is delicious, shoutout to god.
One leaves the show feeling a little lighter – something about the gummy keys of the tape player, crumbling jello, the decidedly non-archival, fugitive nature of materials makes one romantic for the simpler times of fleeting youth, grateful for long standing friendships and community. Berglund’s arts advocacy and influence as a cultural worker resounds through the show. Despite waking up sticky on the couch, losing your glasses in the pit, working through financial precarity, and manic-depressive spirals, Life is Delicious pronounces you’re doing more than ok, now gather round and eat.
originally published in Nevada Humanities, November 2020
Edith leaves work promptly at five and heads to the Flamingo Hotel. I’m going to miss this place, she thinks, adjusting her hair as she boards the BART train. The citywide demolition is scheduled for next week. After months of widely publicized deliberation, debate, and futile protest, the Governor officially announced the evacuation order. Las Vegas, one of the last cities of the Old World, will be no more.
The train screeches forward and Edith looks out through the dust-covered window, westward toward the Pacific. It’s high tide today. She hasn’t the heart to leave; she is Mojave through and through. She counts herself lucky. Her parents made the decision early on to relocate from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and invested in property there, sparing them the financial fallout of the Fifth Exodus. Edith was born and raised in Vegas, even received her major in Applied Mathematics and Engineering at the local university. Except for a brief stint on the East Coast in St. Louis, she had lived in Las Vegas her whole life. She knew the Sixth would come, but not so soon.
The crackle of the operator’s announcement breaks her reverie.
Now approaching The Strip, Las Vegas Boulevard. All passengers heading toward New San Francisco, please exit and cross the platform to board the Northbound train. The Northbound train will be arriving in five minutes.
Edith fusses with her hair one last time. Although she showers twice daily at the OxyGen corporate campus where she works as an Airware Engineer and Technician, the ash still clings to her hair and scalp. Hopefully they won’t notice… She is attending a farewell party for Naomi and Lottie, who are evacuating to Minneapolis tomorrow. She knows they will beg her to join.
As Edith descends the station escalator and fumbles for her phone, she nearly flips over at the turnstile blockades.
INSUFFICIENT FUNDS the screen reads, scanning her retina.
Crap, she mutters, turning back toward the fare machine.
“Excuse me, miss,” drifts a voice on her left. A disheveled gentleman, skin worn by a hard life spent outdoors, extends an open palm. “Can you spare any change?”
The man looks like her father, who passed last year. Despite their strained relationship and his devolving alcoholism, she still thinks of him tenderly. She hesitates for a moment before reaching into her bag to retrieve a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill, and gingerly places it into the man’s hand.
“That’s it? Oh, couldn’t you spare a little more miss, the cheapest evacuation ticket is $10,000.”
“That’s all I can afford, sir. I’m choosing to stay so I have to save as much as possible. I’m sorry,” she murmurs, avoiding his gaze.
“I see… God help you, child. Good luck.”
Edith settles out her fare at the vending machine, flustered by his pity. She doesn’t personally know anyone who is staying, just a few mom-and-pop grocers and gun shops. She can’t imagine living anywhere else. Most of the casinos and resorts already extracted their wares – the machines, tables, and glittering wheels of fortune – shipping them further inland, forecasting the Seventh Exodus in 60 years, giving management time to strategize an international move.
As she exits the station, she catches her reflection in a window display for Alien Anne’s, the pretzel chain specializing in extraterrestrial baked goods, cheese-flavored plasma, and an out-of-this-world lemon-drink. The neon green display showcases their latest specials, then quickly flashes to text, a scrolling marquee that reads,
“SEE YOU IN EL PASO!!! 👽”
~
The Flamingo, Las Vegas Boulevard, the entire city, wasn’t always so decrepit and sad. Textbooks and period piece films remind the world’s remaining citizens that Las Vegas used to be the entertainment capital of the world with enough lights, liquor, and vices to even beguile the Pope. The brightly colored formica exteriors have long faded but the glitched-out light displays remain, preservation efforts stewarded by the local Neon Museum. The Flamingo’s lights fan out before Edith in swooping arcs and flourishes. Edith identifies the form as a flower, not that she’s ever seen one in person before.
Edith enters the Flamingo and finds Naomi and Lottie seated at a booth in the Bird Bar. The bar smells of sweat, mangoes, and cigarette smoke, the humidifiers competing with the HVAC system to facilitate their tropical experience. Cages stocked with molting taxidermied birds sway gently from the ceiling. Two roaches crawl across a bar stool. The place is a dump.
“Edith! How are you?” Lottie leaps up from her seat and wraps Edith in an embrace, her unusual habit of greeting that has long since fallen out of favor in the New World. Naomi raises a hand and ekes out a smile. “Hi, Edith.”
“Hey Lottie, hey Naomi…” Edith says, awkwardly patting Lottie’s shoulder. “What are y’all having? My treat.”
“Oh, we already ordered. We got one for you too!” Lottie points toward a pink elixir in a highball glass topped with a skewer of assorted fruits. Edith only recognizes the durian.
“You shouldn’t have.” Edith has never had a sweet tooth; she hopes the durian will offset the artificial syrup and synthetic fruit. Durian reminds her of her mother, who grew up in the tropics. She would hack a durian open every weekend with a machete, singing in Neue-Creole while its wondrous stench filled their house.
They settle into the booth and exchange a few ritual niceties.
“How’s your love life?” Lottie asks.
“I’ve given up on that.”
“Why? There are so many shrimp in the sea,” Lottie squeals.
“Everyone here is… for lack of a better word, an idiot.”
“Aren’t you being a bit harsh?” Naomi asks, sipping from her glass.
“Hey, remember when Edith called Job an imbecile?” Lottie enjoys reminding Edith of the failed double date in which they tried to set her up with Naomi’s brother.
“Lottie… he thought the sky used to be blue. What kind of idiot believes that?”
Naomi’s eyes widen. “Edith, it really was blue.”
Edith dislikes arguing about conspiracy theories and changes the topic of conversation. “Well, it’s not really an ideal time to be dating, during an Exodus and all.”
The table falls quiet. They had been avoiding the topic all evening, trying to maintain a veneer of normalcy. Edith recalled long-ago childhood weekends spent with Lottie – they attended the Seventh-day Adventist Church housed at the Luxor, a casino turned House of Worship further down the Strip. They would spend Sundays sneaking out of Bible Study and climb up the historical monuments, reciting names from the Old World.
“NEW YORK, NEW YORK!”
“VENEZIA!”
“LONDON!”
“ROMA!”
“PARIS!”
“It’s pronounced Peh-ree.”
“What? No way, you’re stupid!”
They’d run up and down the Luxor escalators, then pretend to gamble on the historical coin slot machines on display, marveling at the Old World’s heavy metal currency. Edith remembers pocketing a silver coin with a man’s profile on one side. She was enamored with the image on the flip side, a bramble of tangled lines in relief, like veins in a body reaching upward in sublimation. It was labeled “THE CHARTER OAK” and “CONNECTICUT,” a name she vaguely recalls from Old World History in high school. She keeps the coin in the drawer of her night stand.
Lottie grabs Edith’s hand. “There’s enough room in our van. Please come with us.”
“I really appreciate it, but no. My entire life is here - ”
“But there won’t be any here here by next week!”
Lottie’s outburst echoes through the bar. The bartender behind the counter stirs and glances in their direction.
“Edith, remember what happened to Death Valley? Every compound destroyed by wind and fire, nothing salvageable. Three million dead and they couldn’t even claim the bodies after the tsunami. Did anyone even survive? Come to Minneapolis, engineers are needed everywhere, it won’t be hard for you to find a job – ”
“The answer is no. Whether I live or die, it will be here in Las Vegas.”
Lottie begins to cry. The room falls silent again, save for the lilting voice of the blind seer St. Andrea coming from the speakers overhead –
Con te partirò
su navi per mari
Che, io lo so
No, no, non esistono più…
~
Edith gets home around nine. She lives in a yellow-paneled single story three bedroom, two bathroom home nestled in a cul-de-sac off of Tropicana. A bright red X colors her doorway; the city must have stopped by earlier since she submitted her stand-your-ground papers last week. The house will be spared with her inside it. Edith scrawls a quick reminder to herself to stock up on shelf-stable food, water, oxygen, and ammunition.
As the alcohol wears off, she notices her stomach growling. Her refrigerator houses a lonely, moldering onion and a few Completo-Meal Shakes. She digs around her cabinet and finds a Cup Noodle and puts the kettle on to boil. She removes the cardboard packaging and shrink wrap, peels it open halfway and waits.
The kettle whistles and she pours water into the cup, hot droplets splattering on the counter. Edith grabs a pair of chopsticks, her styrofoamed meal, and makes her way to the enclosed porch. She waits the suggested three minutes, eyes the peas, carrots, and corn kernels bobbing at the surface, then looks out toward the street, taking in the view - the Stratosphere Monument punctuating the skyline, foregrounded by low-slung houses and aridity-adapted palms.
The crickets are quiet this evening, Edith thinks to herself, and she realizes she is unafraid.
I’d like to start a discussion around racial classification’s eventual collapse.
This sounds trite in a hyperconnected landscape where we are plugged into a seemingly endless discourse on American racism, but as with all matters of political reality, we can never fully disengage from history and its consequences.
Discussions on race are never easy because for most of American history, not everyone was given a seat at the table. Now, it appears we are sitting a little closer, but the chasm between us remains vast. The colonial project – the white man’s burden to civilize us from our latent barbarism – was never fully laid to rest. It has in fact metastasized beyond comprehension in quieter ways. 18th century ideology predicated on “biological determinants” of superiority set into motion cascades of violence, exploitation, and cultural erasure that is still felt acutely in our most vulnerable communities across the world. In the United States, our shame is laid naked and bare across our cities; look only to the events of summer 2020 that moved people to protest in defense of Black life – the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and unfortunately many others – victims of police violence supported by systemic racism calcified into the foundation of American life. In sharp comparison, look to the events of January 6th and the blithe treatment of white insurrectionists storming the Capitol Building by force. Generations of race-based violence, segregation, and economic divestment make it clear that “the problem of the color line,” as described by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903, is alive and well.
The issue of the color line is first and foremost a question of language. Language attempts to but never fully captures the magnitude of racialized existence. Writers and theorists – from Frederick Douglass to James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates – have combined urgent social critique with visceral, personal experience to expose the damning evidence of reparations unmet and humanity denied across all sectors of American life. However, language, with its infinite combinations of subject-predicate-object, can do little to bring the dead back to life. Yet I continue to believe in language’s ability to influence our understanding of the world. We shape our language, and our language shapes us. Through reciprocity, language leads to our remand and emancipation. Is it possible to alter the entire discourse on race through a linguistic shift in racial categories alone? Would this lead to greater equity or simply a new form of segregation? Would it lend credence to platitudes on “color blindness” and the erasure of past atrocities? And what then of democracy’s lifeblood, when practical policy change is defined by demographic data and racial disparities?
The issue is as much sociopolitical as it is ontological. To live in America as a person of color is to have an intuitive understanding of one’s proximity to, or occupation of, whiteness. In other words, it is an awareness of one’s distance from power.
From Carl Linnaeus’ and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s 18th century theories on racial taxonomy to current race and ethnicity standards adopted by US Office of Management and Budget’s Directive 15, which now form the basis for categories used across federal data collection systems, the language around race remains fraught because the categories themselves are born from a colonial economic project fueled by white supremacy. Look only to the original US Constitution drafted in 1787, where the decennial census is first established in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
The three-fifths compromise. In other words, how to codify racism by leveraging disenfranchised slaves and indigenous peoples for economic gain while denying their humanity. Such blatant manipulation of numbers to support the status quo persisted well into the 19th and 20th centuries – for instance, the racialization of nationality leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the abuse of Census data in 1940 to locate and incarcerate Japanese-Americans during WWII. In 1978, the Census Bureau established a 72-year moratorium on the release of any personally identifiable data. Despite this, distrust of government bodies persists among “hard-to-count” populations given the appalling historical abuses against communities of color. Prior to the deployment of the 2020 Census count, the administration proposed including a citizenship question (removed in 1950) which was largely perceived as a targeted attack against undocumented peoples by Trump’s nationalist and anti-immigration agenda. Any compromise in the count has the potential to alter redistricting and by consequence, apportionment in the House and the distribution of federal funds at the state, county, and city level. Loss of Congressional seats translates to loss of funds to support federal programs, including Medicare, SNAP, WIC, Pell Grants, public housing, infrastructure, and other assistance-based programs.
If the goal of the Census Bureau is to achieve an accurate headcount of all residents, why account for race at all? The argument is that ‘neutral’ data will lead to advancements in civil rights and the guarantee of equal opportunity. However, what happens when the categories themselves no longer feel relevant to their constituencies? Since 1970, the Census has counted the Latinx population under a separate question on ethnicity, which asks “Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish Origin?” This leads to a rather awkward semantic quandary around language and Latin America’s colonial past, questions too complex to capture in a ten-point survey. Between 2000 and 2010, the Census noticed a drastic shift in how Latinx-identified individuals responded. After completing the ethnicity question, Latinx respondents now select “Some other race” and write in their country of heritage instead of selecting White. This tendency is also reflected among some Near and Middle Eastern respondents’ wishes to distance themselves from whiteness, as they feel it does not accurately represent their experience. And what of multiracial populations, who were only given the option to select more than one race in 2000? Does this not belie the accuracy of previous counts, given our country’s historical infatuation with the one-drop rule?
The year is 2021 and we have made progress in representation and in advocating for more accurate language to describe ourselves. But what happens to said language if Census projections hold true, that by 2040 America will be a majority-minority country, in which more than half of Americans will belong to a minority group? What of multiracial respondents, whose population is expected to double to 11.3% by 2060? And what is implied when multiracial individuals are broadly categorized as minority or non-white Hispanic? How can any categorical language encapsulate our experience and the granularity of our lived experiences?
When I first started working on 24 VIEWS in summer 2019 during a month-long residency at Wassaic Project, my point of investigation was not so complicated. Over the course of a year, as I started my new position as a Visiting Assistant Professor at UNLV while entering the worldwide lockdown, I had more time to reflect on the scope of my project. In March 2020, I had the opportunity to test out a related educational workshop at a local high school before everything shut down. I took the opportunity to consider new platforms for viewers to diffuse their ideas on the future uses of racial classifications.
While I believe the curriculum was solid, it was still an experiment and a work in progress. I had rushed in, eager to talk to people, without reflecting more on the theoretical underpinnings and ramifications of this project. As the world transitions back into some semblance of normalcy, I am taking the opportunity to open up a nationwide conversation.
I invite you – dear reader, fellow dreamer, compatriot, or contrarian – to speculate with me. Send me your most radical inquiries. Push back against me. What will be the future of our racial classification system? Will a new system replace it that captures more nuance, with an emphasis on socioeconomics? Will it serve us well, or will it recreate the same inequity? Will it become obsolete as we become increasingly multiracial? Are ‘colorblind’ politics possible or even responsible given our country’s origins in racist practice? Is the human brain capable of destabilizing heuristic views on race based purely on phenotype?
Like most things, I’m not sure what will come of this exercise. But at the very least, allow it to be a gathering of ideas to reimagine the names we call ourselves in the long game of America’s story.
In hopeful earnest and solidarity.
T
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