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Since You have to tell them I’m not a racist — Divya Mehra’s exhibition at La Maison des artistes — opened, I’ve been troubled by certain recurring phrases and fragments of dialogue. The show consists exclusively of such phrases, cut from white vinyl and adhered directly to the white gallery walls, but these are different.
   
Most are things I’ve told my students —advice about the handling of ‘delicate’ topics and the qualities of ‘successful’ artwork.
   
"Let your audience reach its own conclusions: nobody likes to be told what to think," or "Be careful how you treat that subject (usually some political or religious conviction or personal trauma — anything ‘prickly’). It can be difficult to talk about."
   
"‘Successful’ pieces (to say ‘good’ would belie the fiction of ‘objective’ assessment) open up avenues for dialogue" and "You don’t want to shut down conversation."
   
Or do you?
   
The laziness becomes clear to me as I write these out: I genuinely don’t want the critique process (to say nothing of marking) to be perceived as — or actually become — a referendum on anybody’s beliefs or identity. The easiest solution is to change the subject.
   
Another disquieting phrase: "playing the race card." In practise, this amounts to a spurious accusation that someone else has made a spurious accusation, one of racism, in order to shut down conversation and win some argument. It suggests cynical manipulation. It suggests cheating and, in practise, it serves precisely to suppress any discussion of race or racism, to trivialize concerns, to win arguments.
   
Sound familiar. See why I might be troubled?
   
To experience the work, as a self-styled ‘progressive’ cracker, anyway, is to suspect that one is being played, fucked with, engaging in a game of Mehra’s design whose only hard-and-fast rule is that she has already won. She alternately goads and withholds with destabilizing authority. She tells a racist joke (literally, in white vinyl), daring us to laugh. Her mute proclamations shut down conversation. She "plays the race card," but she does so in a way that lingers, that troubles.
   
On reflection, the work is precisely about the conversations that we don’t allow.
   
We strain to read the words — "People of color," "Whites have wonderful weekends," the aforementioned joke, a teenage screed about Aeropostale — written in English, French, and Romanized Hindi, white-on-white and harshly lit. They seem flippant; they lack context and don’t seem to add up. Is Mehra even the speaker? One suspects not necessarily. I can’t read Hindi and my French is abysmal, but some things seem off. Do the "translations" in fact say something different?
   
Is it something bad? Is it about me? Not knowing highlights the imbalances of knowledge, of access, that drive the work. Anglophone anxieties. A guilty conscience.
   
The structure of systemic racism itself resembles a game, with white people writing its only rule — that they (uh, we) will always win. Like Mehra’s texts, its terms are hard to perceive and harder to parse. She reproduces its chilling effects in a way that I imagine would be variously familiar, alarming or infuriating, depending on one’s lived experience of racism or lack thereof.
   
In short, she’s not about to tell anybody that you’re "not a racist."

DIVYA MEHRA: YOU HAVE TO TELL THEM I’M NOT A RACIST
Until March 8, La Maison des artistes visuels francophones