The Things White People Say
After the murder of George Floyd, artist George McCalman dissected the unwelcome responses from his white friends. Now he’s sending them right back where they came from.
George McCalman, photographed by Rachelle Derouin.
George McCalman's forthcoming book, ILLUSTRATED BLACK HISTORY: HONORING THE ICONIC AND THE UNSEEN, will be published by HarperCollins on Sept 27th and was co-written, illustrated, and designed by him. A telling of 400 years of American history through the eyes of 155 Black pioneers, with over 300 hand-made illustrated portraits. The stories of the mavericks of American history: the hidden figures, the overlooked titans of culture, science, business, literature, art, engineering, fashion, and technology. The shepherds who helped define our society.
Immediately after the murder of George Floyd, San Francisco artist and designer George McCalman's phone wouldn't stop dinging. His email box filled up. He was hit with a tsunami of words and emotions...from white people. He says all of a sudden "It was like waves crashing over the Black community. And we were all just reeling from it. There wasn't even space for us to have our own responses, because we were basically like using our Wonder Woman bracelets, knocking away all of the white tears and the white fragility."
“I got a lot of energy, a lot of words, a lot of emails. A lot. It was just way beyond anything I have personally ever experienced before,” says McCalman. “It felt disproportionate. It made me realize that this was something more than just people responding to a horrible situation, because that situation had happened a thousand times before.”
George McCalman, photographed by Rachelle Derouin.
As a Black, gay man who has lived his last two decades in one of the country's most liberal cities, McCalman's social circle was full of self-identified progressives. Yet, the onslaught of these "form letters" sparked an anger he couldn't shake, populated by phrases like "Here if you want to talk," "I'm just here to listen," and "I'm embarrassed I haven't been a good ally."
“There was just something about the language of it,” says McCalman. “I started actually seeing a repetition of how people were talking to me. That there was a lot of this sameness—it wasn't unique to them. It started just feeling like a pattern.”
"It was like waves crashing over the Black community. And we were all just reeling from it. There wasn't even space for us to have our own responses, because we were basically like using our Wonder woman bracelets, knocking away all of the white tears and the white fragility."
His response is "Tell Me Three Things That I Can Do/Return to Sender," a solo art show publicly opening this week at The Perish Trust in San Francisco. McCalman is many things—his talents range from painting, to sculpture, to graphic design, to writing—but he has also become known as a shrewd cultural critic, and this show is a satisfying marriage of his artistic talent and his signature brand of self-awareness. His monthly column “Observed” in the The San Francisco Chronicle is part illustrated portrait gallery, part city-wide psyche analysis. He has a way of extracting the perfect quote from his unsuspecting subjects, then elaborating on its meaning with details like a raised eyebrow, a telling posture, or an idiosyncratic sartorial choice.
George McCalman, photographed by Rachelle Derouin.
His fascination with others makes him less of a tortured artist than a curious one. “I really studied, like a scientist out in the bush. I was just like, studying human behavior. And I really did feel like Jane Goodall at times. Because in recreating words that I had an emotional response to, I was then recreating my emotional awareness of a moment...My emotions rule all of my creative work. Which means that I trust when I have a response to something. And it is usually a very visceral thing and I will know that’s something that I need to be doing,” says McCalman, who explains that while his own emotions may guide him, rarely are they the focus of his work. This time was different. “In this case, my anger was the pilot light for this. I don't think I've ever been this angry in my life, like collectively—I was in a rage from the time I woke up. I woke up angry about it, I went to sleep angry.”
He tried to release some of that anger by penning an op-ed for The Chronicle, entitled Bay Area’s Black Community Is Drowning In The Tears of White People, but according to McCalman, it had an unintended effect. “After the essay was published. I was like, I actually don't feel better about this. I was actually feeling worse, and I got angrier. And so I looked a layer deeper.”
He began to ask himself: “What is it that is triggering? At what stage of the conversation did I get angry? And it was always the same. It was the same kind of trigger.”
But even more than getting a handle on the exact words, it was his realization that he was still holding tight to the damage the words had inflicted on him. “It was like in a flash, like oh, I still have this. I literally have collected them, because that’s what we do. That’s what Black people do—we just collect white people’s cluelessness. And so I was like—shudder—I need to get this shit away from me. Like, this is the stuff that is under our skin, this is the stuff that warps us as a Black community, because we are just storing all of this stuff, all this toxicity. And it affects our physical health, It affects our emotional state, it affects our bodies. And the people who’ve given it to us don’t even know they have given it to us.”
So, he got to work on breaking it down and sending it back. “I really studied the words. I studied their meaning. I studied the understanding of what it was. And then I released it.”
But it was hardly that simple. The actual artististic process was both complex and painstaking. “I think I painted more for this series than I have for anything else I have ever done. I used maybe six different kinds of paper and I was really specific about the kinds of finishes. Many of the paintings have like 10 layers of paint. I used acrylic, I used gouache, and I used watercolor. And there were some that were kind of wash finishes. Even those decisions were very intuitive. There were some phrases that were delivered very, kind-of like casual and flippant, and so, those finishes are there. And there were some that came in hard and just knocked me back. And those letters are three dimensional. All the type is unique and distinct to that moment—I created letter forms that reminded me of how I felt when I received those phrases. So even all of the typography is personality based. Like there are no two pieces that are alike. I wanted people to feel the discordance. A lot of the letter forms are not legible—some of the letters are stacked, words and letters break—I wanted to repeat some of the disorientation that I felt.”
“In this case, my anger was the pilot light for this. I don't think I've ever been this angry in my life.”
When McCalman is working on his fine art, he has a very distinct way of knowing when, as he says “that I've hit the mark for myself.” “When I am recreating something that flashes back to that moment and I'm looking at it in two dimensional form, I will start cackling with joy.” McCalman works out of an art studio in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood—the building has the classic silhouette of a San Francisco Edwardian residence, except its facade is clad completely in sea-mist-battered plywood. The interior has the same minimalist, long-abandoned construction site feel—the redwood framing visible throughout, the un-insulated walls powerless against the chill the fog brings with it each afternoon. McCalman shares the top floor studio with the ceramicist Georgia Hodges—one of the few people privy to McCalman’s signature cackle. “She saw all the process and progress. And every time she heard me cackling she’d say ‘That therapy’s hitting hard right?’ I’d reply, ‘‘Yes it is! Girl it is! I feel lighter.”
George McCalman, photographed by Rachelle Derouin.
And just as the honest, uncomfortable, and sometimes painful process of realizing "Tell Me Three Things That I Can Do/Return to Sender” ended up being effective therapy for McCalman, he prescribes the same for a country “warped by the specter of slavery and racism.”
“Part of the dysmorphia of talking about race is that we don't talk about it honestly. This country was founded on the business of trafficking human beings. And it has poisoned everything, like the country is just poisoned. That is not honored in everyday conversation. It must be the starting point of any conversation we're going to have about how we get along. I think about it in the same way as when someone has hurt someone else. We watch it all the time: People come together, make amends, apologize, take accountability. You know, honest emotions. Allow people to move through their experiences and come out on the other side. If you don't have that, it doesn't happen.”
“Part of the dysmorphia of talking about race is that we don't talk about it honestly. This country was founded on the business of trafficking human beings. And it has poisoned everything, like the country is just poisoned. That is not honored in everyday conversation. It must be the starting point of any conversation we're going to have about how we get along.”
This played out on a more intimate scale for McCalman over the past few months. He recalls that he never shied away from honesty when responding to the friends and colleagues whose words eventually made it into his art. “My conversation was immediate in all cases. And in some cases, it led to us no longer being friends. I've lost quite a few friends, very happily, about this. That was part of my anger: Oh I’m actually still facilitating this, and that's my problem. That's not theirs. And I’m like, I’m over it, completely. That's how clear I was about it, that I was not going to be facilitating this kind of blindness moving through the world around me. I have no control over what anybody does, but I was not going to be on the receiving end of this nonsense.”
George McCalman, photographed by Rachelle Derouin.
And so while discontent seems endless and unsolvable within the world at large, McCalman was able to find clarity within his own relationships. “It has solved a lot. It has reframed a lot of my friendships. Because one of the things I realized after George Floyd was murdered—that a lot of us a lot of Black people realize—that we have two ways of talking. We have one kind of conversation with each other. And we have another kind of conversation with white people. And that's the code that we move through. Like we know that as a community—we walk around knowing that white people don’t understand us, and that they are not interested in trying to understand, really anyone else,” says McCalman. “What was solved is that I don't have two sets of conversations anymore. I just sliced it off. So any person that I have to have those different types of conversations with is no longer in my life. And that was a really simple way of looking at it. If I have to create another way of talking to you. I just rather not talk to you. That's how strongly I feel about it. In my world, it has changed my life.”
“It has reframed a lot of my friendships. Because one of the things I realized after George Floyd was murdered—that a lot of us a lot of black people realize—that we have two ways of talking. We have one kind of conversation with each other. And we have another kind of conversation with white people. And that's the code that we move through.”
“It's just been liberating. And it's basically it's the freedom that white people have to just kind of say whatever they want, and now white people are realizing that they have to be more thoughtful. And I am realizing that I just have to say more. And so it's this kind of like recalibration of, kind of, the restrictions around one community and the openness of another. I've just reset it for myself. So, I'm like, no, I'm gonna be breezy about a lot of things, too.”
But despite McCalman’s personal conversion to unbridled honesty, he knows it’s not always about the person delivering the message, but the perception of the person receiving it. “I know there are a lot of people that are going to see this show and not see themselves. I experienced that on a daily basis. The person who inspired the show, we got into this argument because he asked me to tell him three things he could do, after reading the (SF Chronicle) article and sharing it with other people. He did not see himself in that at all. And he's a really smart guy. And so I find that fascinating. I've also seen that before. I watch it on Facebook all the time—people sharing articles about those people. And they are one of those people.”
George McCalman, photographed by Rachelle Derouin.
This is the very reason McCalman refused to attach names to the pieces—although several of his white friends suggested that he should. “I thought that it would undercut the idea completely. If it was attached to a name, then it would be about the person. And it lets every other white person off the hook, which is perpetuating the problem.”
“I know there are a lot of people that are going to see this show and not see themselves. I experienced that on a daily basis.”
There are 15 pieces in the show, 14 of them phrases white people have spoken or written to MCCalman. The 15th is titled Return to Sender. It was the final piece McCalman created, but it is the first piece you see when you walk into the gallery. “It was just a note to myself. That I had reclaimed my time.” Which is not saying he regrets the time he gave over to this examination. It was simply something that he couldn’t look away from.
George McCalman, photographed by Rachelle Derouin.
“As a phenomenon, I just had to stare at it. Because if I didn’t investigate it, it was just gonna seep back into my system. I knew that my anger was a pilot light, but it wasn't the flame. Like I knew there was a point it was gonna die down again and I was gonna kind of go back, and I was like, no, pay attention to this right now. This is important. It's an important emotion to listen to, to honor, to really try to understand. What is this about? I just don't want to receive this language, from anyone, not just white people. I don't want to receive it from anybody. And so, my anger was basically saying, protect yourself. Get rid of this energy. Return it to its sender.”