Over the past couple of years, Western liberal democracies have exposed their racist roots by moving from managing racism discursively to deploying it as open policy: the Trump administration has abolished DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs and defunded Black studies, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has carried out mass raids, and AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) rhetoric has been normalized in Germany.
I approached artist, writer, and editor Will Fredo Furtado after reading on Instagram about their request for support in finding publishers, funding, and references to develop a book proposal that names, historicizes, and connects deaths and harms sharing a common root: institutional violence against racialized people. The following conversation opens up that framework, with the intention of making visible and denouncing the racist structures of cultural institutions in Germany and the West at large, and with the hope of raising interest in publishing the book.
Your research connects deaths that appear unrelated on the surface under the frame of "institutional violence," all of them affecting racialized people. Can you explain the thread that ties these cases together?
Having navigated institutions as an artist, student, lecturer, and journalist, I have had experiences and witnessed behaviors showing that the white, cis, heterosexual, wealthy, able-bodied Christian male remains the basis of whiteness and the ideal in institutions. This structure is still held by the Enlightenment, which both gave rise to the idea of universal rights and gave racism its modern "scientific" form. Thinkers from Bernier and Buffon to Hume, Kant, and Voltaire classified humanity into ranked races, lending intellectual authority to slavery and empire. The gap between professed equality and practiced hierarchy is the inheritance of today's institutions. These ideals translate into institutional violence when institutions falsely present themselves as neutral. Institutional violence occurs first when institutions make no provisions, such as DEI practices, to prevent discrimination, and second through resistance, negligence, and sabotage toward people who complain about discrimination when it occurs.
Western institutions (academies, museums, and cultural centers) are not always organizations that aim to practice and produce democracy, as they often claim. Rather, they are primarily places of capital creation and accumulation, or they are entrusted with keeping the status quo. In Germany, for example, the Free Palestine movement in particular has made clear that institutions are severely shaped and restricted by governments' political and financial interests. Institutions are also dependent on donations from private founders and patrons, whose political and financial interests influence how they function in an even more obscure manner. My research looks at how this kind of compulsory whiteness shows up in the way marginalized people, especially Black people, are mistreated by design, from application to exit.
As you point out, institutions built on histories of extraction continue to carry colonial logics into their present-day structures, even where formal reforms have been enacted. How is this violent inheritance visible, and what does it produce at the epistemic and cultural level?
Interestingly, some contested evidence points out that the museum and the university are Asian and African inventions, respectively, so even the concept of the Western institution was stolen from non-white peoples. It is no surprise, then, that Western institutions were built on a basis of extraction akin to the plantation, or that Zionists are big art patrons. This violent inheritance is visible in the numbers. In the UK, for instance, 65% of postgraduates in art and design are women, but 68% of the artists represented at top London commercial galleries are men. In the same country, only 8% of creative workers are working class. Artists in 18 major US museums are 85% white and 87% male, while work by Black American women accounts for 0.5% of acquisitions in 31 US museums, despite Black women making up 6.6% of the population.
In art production, marginalized people tend to receive more institutional support when they create work perceived as typical of their social group. You will notice, for example, that Western institutions tend to show more figurative than abstract art by Black artists. On an epistemic level, racialized artists are often expected to make art about their racial oppression, which reasserts their subjection and can harm the mental health of the artists and the communities they aim to represent. This is so prevalent in the Global Majority that it is known as "NGO art."
Last August, within days of each other, Cambridge professor Jason Arday died by suicide following a sustained media assault, and EOTO (Each One Teach One), a Berlin-based BIPOC-led collective, was forced by an organized racist campaign to cancel a Black children's event at the Volksbühne summer pool. In both instances, the institution declined to take accountability, laying bare how "inclusion" without an actual anti-racist politics is mere managed exposure to harm. These are extreme and legible cases. Can you speak to the far more numerous, less visible ways institutional harm operates: the slow violence of the everyday alongside the complicity of the headline?
The problem starts with people in institutions thinking and behaving as if racism were an interpersonal issue rather than a structural one that dictates how every aspect of life functions and how some people prosper while others barely survive. This ignorance benefits those who profit from whiteness and the hierarchies it imposes, so acknowledging it is discouraged.
Institutions tend to remedy racism with tokenistic representation and, adding insult to injury, the people who benefit from whiteness are usually the ones who define what constitutes racism. This has been exacerbated by highly funded white supremacists who promote racism in universities and museums. The examples you mention received more press because of the institutions' renown, but they show the basis of the racism that affects racialized people in institutions, starting with the double standard. Jason Arday was held to a higher standard than other professors: every aspect of his life was scrutinized, and the moment several white people doubted his credentials, he lost the institution's support despite zero evidence of misconduct. Meanwhile, other white male professors get away with plagiarizing their own students' papers. Working in these industries while Black means you will more often be ignored, discredited, and denied the benefit of the doubt; be easily demonized; and receive less support, kindness, solidarity, and grace, and the list goes on.
The testimonials I have been gathering for years show that, day to day, racialized people in institutions are held to a much higher standard and must work overtime to keep up. They are given fewer resources and opportunities and are limited to topics deemed more fitting for racialized people. On top of that, and perhaps more taxing, are the constant racist microaggressions from staff, colleagues, and superiors. In addition, capitalist ideals such as meritocracy, individualism, overwork, competition, tokenism, and capital accumulation contribute to the detriment of marginalized people's health.
For example, I investigated a student protest at a German university where students collectively complained about the racism they endured. Over three days, they collected more than 50 reports from students who had experienced racist discrimination at the university. These were put on posters plastered across the campus and shown on a screen at the entrance. In their open letter, the students made specific demands to push the institution to address its racism problem. These included establishing an intersectional anti-discrimination office staffed by full-time professionals with expertise and lived experience of the respective forms of discrimination, in line with § 13 of Germany's General Equal Treatment Act (AGG); accessibility for all disabled people in all departments; and a critical examination of course content and teaching methods on racism and all other forms of discrimination before the start of each semester. The university ignored all 19 demands and faced no consequences. This shows that discrimination takes place because the university willfully allows it, despite legislation, while knowing exactly what to do to end it.
In this regard, your book proposal traces how racialized bodies are debilitated by institutional racism, linking questions of health directly to the politics of inclusion and exclusion. What emerges is something like a logic of social Darwinism internal to the institution itself, where survival is reserved for those most willing, or most able, to assimilate. Can you talk about how this plays out concretely, in the bodies and health of the people you write about?
An important part of my research consists of scientific findings showing how racism deteriorates mental and physical health. These findings help explain how, when marginalized people work themselves to exhaustion or self-medicate to live up to the double standard or to survive racism, the consequences can include injuries, slipped discs, exhaustion, substance abuse, depression, cancer, and suicide. In her book Complaint! (2021), Sara Ahmed explains that the simple act of making a complaint at an institution can result in back pain or irregular menstrual periods, owing to the institution's resistance and negligence. Many of the artists I interviewed revealed that the stress they work under has resulted in depression, anxiety, burnout, and addiction. This is unfortunately standard across the arts, but for racialized or marginalized people it can have fatal consequences. While racism may be the primary marker of exclusion, it is always connected to other social parameters, so the further you are from the "Enlightenment ideal," the more exposed you are to institutional harm. Many of the racialized people I interview or study, for example, are also working class.
To give one example of many, I interviewed a female artist, a working-class migrant who is the first artist in her family and has worked in the European art industry for 20 years. She explained that the conditions she has had to work under were appalling: galleries that claimed to support emerging artists expected her to pay for transport, production, and technical materials. As a marginalized artist, she constantly had to advocate for herself just to have basic equipment for her exhibitions, even at larger institutions, and was called a "bitch" or "difficult" for doing so. Her privileged white male colleagues did not go through the same ordeal. She has had to work herself to exhaustion to sustain her career, which has resulted in two burnouts. The stress of her workload made her depressed, led to her hospitalization, broke up her long-term relationship, and left her with chronic pain.
How do you articulate the relationship between public shaming and the structural forms of institutional violence (administrative neglect, silent exclusion, bureaucratic attrition) that rarely make the news?
There are two important dimensions at play here: the public and the institution. The public can call out injustice and demand change, which can be very galvanizing. Yet many people stay silent in the face of injustice for fear of reprisal or of losing any amount of privilege. The responsibility, though, lies with the institution, which must not stay in the realm of "thoughts and prayers" and instead must examine its own racist structures and undo them. In the case of the Volksbühne, it was very painful and disappointing to witness its reaction to the racism EOTO received. Putting up a banner saying "fickt euch" ("fuck you") was irresponsible and immature, and it showed a lack of care and consideration for the Black community in Germany and an unawareness of the dimensions of racism. But even when racial discrimination is exposed in the news, there are no consequences whatsoever, and that is exactly the problem.
When you are Black, the racism starts before you even enter the institution. At the entrance, for instance, you are racially profiled by security, which has happened to other Black and brown colleagues and to me on multiple occasions. This racism follows you throughout your career, all the way to the top, precisely because even when there are measures against racism, they are not enforced. Sara Ahmed calls these "non-performatives." Shortly before he died of cancer at age 55, the internationally revered Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor described the racism he endured while leading a major German museum, to absolutely no avail: "I observe very well how I am devalued culturally. In the way people talk about me, the way communication from official places targets me, it also finds an echo in the newspapers. There I read that the next director has to speak German. On the other hand, I am reproached for not mastering the German language. This is frighteningly overemphasized. Some people do not even bother to pronounce my name correctly, but they demand that I speak German."
How do well-intentioned actors, and sometimes artists themselves, end up as instruments of institutional violence without recognizing themselves as such? And in your view, what is the minimal intervention, the smallest structural change, that could begin to interrupt that reproduction?
Hegemony and capitalism have turned artists into very compliant people. Speaking up for justice can cost you work opportunities in an already precarious industry, so most artists don't speak up. As Sara Ahmed says, when you point out a problem, you become the problem, and that can affect your career. But as Timothy Snyder and Audre Lorde have respectively noted, anticipatory compliance and silence will not save you. Even the best of us who claim to be neutral or against institutional violence can perpetuate it if we don't move through the world aware of how racism works. This happens because we are not encouraged to question the institutions we have inherited: the moment we do, we realize we have to change almost everything about them, including the architecture of the buildings, which is too often ableist because, from the point of view of whiteness, heritage is more important than accessibility and objects are more important than people. Practitioners working with and in institutions become instruments of violence when they don't know how racism affects everyone differently or are unwilling to act on it.
Ending racism in institutions requires awareness, accountability, difficult conversations, acting on guilt, and making plans for change and executing them in tandem with, and with feedback from, racialized people. It is hard work, but at some point we have to decide whether we want to put in the work or prefer to see marginalized people suffer and die at alarming rates. Institutions, especially in Europe, tend not to have any DEI practices or policies beyond representation, so the smallest structural change could start there.
I'm interested in your own position within institutions that bear significant responsibility for reproducing colonial and racial structures. Where do you locate yourself inside these systems, and what has occupying that position cost you personally?
As a poor, Black, queer, and neurodivergent practitioner, I resonate with many of the harrowing stories of burnout and injury that I feature in the book. However, I have been able to avoid sacrificing myself to the point of no recovery. When it comes to standing up to institutions, within my capacities, I have always been very vocal: a "Backtalker" in Kimberlé Crenshaw's words and a "Feminist Killjoy" in Sara Ahmed's. But it has been crucial to enter the fight for justice with like-minded people. Raising awareness of racism and whiteness, especially when unrequested and in a style not deemed "professional," has cost me work relationships and opportunities. At the same time, it has shown me which of my colleagues are serious about working toward an equitable world, and that has saved me precious energy that I can channel into justice work.
Your proposal gestures toward building spaces (collectives, community organizations, informal networks) outside the reach of institutional pressure. But what would accountability from within an institution actually look like, as distinct from simply constructing parallel spaces to withdraw into?
My proposal centers on marginalized people who enter institutions under the false impression that they are neutral places. The aim of my book is to equip those most vulnerable to institutional violence. It is not aimed at institutions, because they have the means and the responsibility to ensure that marginalized people are also cared for and to make the appropriate changes. Nonetheless, if institutions are truly interested in accountability, they can follow examples such as the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), which investigated its role in slavery. Instead of making exhibitions about it, as the MMK did, they could do what the Guardian has promised: invest £10m in a program of restorative justice, with millions dedicated specifically to descendant communities affected by the newspaper's founders' role in transatlantic slavery.
Choosing exit over transformation is a very personal decision; not everyone has the ability or the means to leave this unfair system. Those who make it out alive may have fewer resources but much more health and peace of mind, as well as the freedom to start something different, often with and for other people.
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Will Fredo Furtado is looking for support to further this research and a publisher for this book. They have never published a book, nor has anyone in their family or immediate social circle, so they are asking their wider network for support. If you work in or near publishing, or have something to contribute to the research, here is how you can help:
>Suggest agents or publishers who might be interested in the proposal.
>Recommend the proposal directly to a person or organization in publishing.
>Offer feedback on the proposal and, later, the manuscript.
>Email your own or others' experiences of negligence inside institutions.
>Email your own or others' alternative actions outside institutions.
>Support financially on GoFundMe.
How to reach them:
Email: contact@willfredo.cc / Instagram: @willwalidfredo / Medium: will247.medium.com / Website: willfredo.cc