"Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators”: An Interview with Jennifer Rittner
Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is taken from Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators: Conversations on Design and Race edited by Kelly Walters and is reprinted with permission from the Princeton Architectural Press. *Available for purchase on March 30.
In Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators, Kelly Walters collects twelve deeply personal interviews with graphic design educators of color who teach at colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. The book centers the unique narratives of Black, Brown, and Latinx design educators, from their childhood experiences to their navigation of undergraduate and graduate studies and their career paths in academia and practice. The interviewees represent a cross-section of ethnic and multiracial backgrounds—African American, Jamaican, Indian, Pakistani, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, and Brazilian. Their impactful stories offer invaluable perspectives for students and emerging designers of color, creating an entry point to address the complexities of race in design and bring to light the challenges of teaching graphic design at different types of public and private institutions. Interwoven throughout the book are images that maintain cultural significance, from family heirlooms to design works that highlight aspects of their cultural identities. Readers will gain insight into the multitude of experiences of Black, Brown, and Latinx design educators who teach and work in the field today.
Kelly Walters (KY): I’m just going to jump right in. What does “Brown” mean? Brown could also mean Latinx, or it could be Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian. I’m curious as to how you’ve unpacked what these terms mean.
Jennifer Rittner (JR): I’ve got a lot of thoughts on this. There is language relevant to all people of color or marginalized groups, but I think that there are very specific forms of marginalization that hit specific communities. There’s a responsibility to encapsulate the larger question of race, color, and ethnicity-based discrimination, as well as to hold up a very specific form of racism in the United States that affects African Americans differently than it does people who are considered Latinx. The larger umbrella of discrimination is meaningful, but so is drilling down the specific language.
There’s this thing that’s happening in my class that has made me start to think about this framing a lot. This year, of my eighteen students, eleven are from China, three are from the United States, and one is African American. Then we have two from India, one from South Africa, a Black South African. These are all different identities, and the largest group is the Chinese students. The argument was made to me early in the semester that maybe I could shift the focus of my class to incorporate the Chinese experience in terms of the social issues that are relevant in China, and that we could use that framing to talk about privilege, power, marginalization, and so on. I considered it and thought I could maybe do something around that, but I realized that I don’t have enough knowledge around Chinese history or politics to really do it well. My point is not that all forms of marginalization are the same, but that the marginalization of African Americans in this country is very specific. I want to center that and hold it up.
My mother is Brazilian. She came to the United States in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was happening, and was unfamiliar with Blackness in the specifically US context. She had her own experience with being Black and marginalized in her country, so because of how and where I grew up, that conversation was very much a part of my life. I recognize the ways in which I live on the margins of the conversation as well. I’m biracial. My mother is Afro-Brazilian, not African American, but I grew up in a neighborhood that was marginalized and artificially redlined as a Black neighborhood. The conversation around Blackness and marginalization as an African American story is what I grew up with, and so I felt that it needed to be centered in the design space.
Jennifer Rittner.
For me to say, “Let’s just transfer that idea into a Chinese context, or into a global context,” is to once again say that the African American experience doesn’t matter. That anything can stand in its place. That is just not the case. The reality is that if you look at forms of African American culture as we understand it, it is appropriated, it is stolen from, it is referenced, it is built on, and it is central to how we understand ourselves as Americans. We can’t just push that aside and say, “Let’s tell a different story.” There’s a lot of value in people bringing in their perspectives. I think that making those connections globally is the responsibility of the students. That’s not necessarily what we’re doing as educators. As educators, we’re saying that this particular story is one that matters and should be told in a very particular way.
The design history class I teach in Design Research, Writing, and Criticism, which is a one-year MA program, is a small cohort of only eight students. Before the semester started, when I was rewriting the design history curriculum, I thought, “Well, what does it really mean to decolonize design history?” For me, it means taking away all forms of text and centering the object. It means using the object as a catalyst for having conversations around what is made, what it is made for, who uses it, what it is used for, and how it is used. Also, how does it represent cultures? That means looking at the context of an object from a culture other than White, European historical culture. Use the object as a way to open up the possibilities of how we tell counterpublic stories. I thought about where I could take students to have them engage with that story in other spaces, and one of them is the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I took my class up there before I knew what the students’ thesis topics would be. I knew I wanted to take them to the Schomburg, because again the issue is not how to make sure that I’m relating to what their thesis is; it’s how to make them understand that their thesis will tie back to African American culture in some way. It all ties back, even if you have to think laterally. We went uptown to the Schomburg 82 / 83 to have the conversation about these artifacts of African American history that tie to all of the students’ subjects in some way; part of their responsibility is to find connections. The problem is that most people only study this material culture if they feel that it has a direct correlation. I want them to see that everything has a connection to it. A big misconception is this notion that Black culture should live in this bubble of Blackness, that that’s all there is and that we can’t penetrate it. That’s the reason that people are like, “I don’t go into that neighborhood,” but really it’s an intellectual, cultural space that they should be eager to engage with.
KW: How do you think we could get more Black, Brown, and Latinx designers in the field? Should they even be here? Are there more supportive institutions?
Kelly Walters.
JR: Everybody should be here. I think we should be reaching out to tribal colleges and HBCUs in more intentional ways. Students who have a strong core of critical thinking will thrive in graduate design programs, learning how to translate complex ideas into material reality—through object design, system design, and experience design. They will already have a strong foundation of humanities, liberal arts, and in some cases business, and the thing that design school can do is to be a transdisciplinary bridge to all of those other fields. Graduates from HBCUs and tribal colleges should attend graduate programs in art and design school because there’s a value in the particular perspectives those students bring around how to mechanize change in the way product design, community design, design research, and design writing make possible. In short, we need them, and I hope some of those students agree that they would gain something from the experiences our programs offer. How the hell do you bring people in? I feel like part of it is representation, right? Some of it is shitty and tokenizes those of us who are here to reach people, and you’re like, “Look, we’re here trying to make change; come and be a part of the change with us.” We need to recognize that part of what we can do is be a conduit. Part of it is just more intentionally going into tribal colleges, community colleges, and HBCUs where there isn’t currently much recruitment effort, and telling those audiences that design is a possibility. The design world can be so insular that students in liberal arts programs simply don’t know that we exist and that we can offer them something of value.
KW: What advice would you give to emerging Black, Brown, and Latinx designers who are either thinking about going into design as a student or going into academia as an educator?
JR: It’s different for everyone. It’s a hard question because I feel like the onus is always on us to be their voice and be a mentor. It’s not that they need the advice as much as they need the support. They should know that they have support, and that we all collectively need to empower anyone who’s in these spaces who is truly marginalized historically. For those of us who are
working on this, teaching and trying to make change on this level, my advice is to keep finding each other. I guess if that’s the advice for us, that is the advice for students as well. Keep finding each other. It’s not always going to happen in your own institution, but building community is the thing that we can do for each other.
Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators: Conversations on Design and Race
Edited by Kelly Walters
176 pgs. Princeton Architectural Press. $24.95
Jennifer Rittner is a writer, educator, and communications strategist who teaches courses in design history, design for social value, and thesis writing in the graduate programs at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). She has been published in the New York Times, DMI: Journal, Core77, AIGA Eye on Design, and Against the Grain. She frequently writes and lectures about design and social justice.
Kelly Walters is an artist, designer, researcher and founder of the multidisciplinary design studio Bright Polka Dot. Her practice includes teaching, writing, and experimental publishing, with a particular focus on race and representation in design. Her ongoing design research interrogates the complexities of identity formation, systems of value, and the shared vernacular in and around Black visual culture. She is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the BFA Communication Design Program at Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York.