Interior Race Theory: Using Interior Objects to Resist Harmful Racial Conditioning

Objects that memorialize racially oppressive practices, people, and events are not uncommon in homes. Racist flags such as confederate flags, busts, sculptures that celebrate colonial figures, and other oppressive objects have been used to commemorate white supremacist values. Some objects simply memorialize racist narratives. Take for example mammy jars, racist salt and pepper shakers, ashtrays, clocks and creamers, racist music sheets, racist postcards and posters, and Black caricature figurines. These objects, which are often kept in white people’s homes as antique collectibles, can explicitly or implicitly perpetuate demeaning thoughts, feelings, and behaviors about Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian communities (Jaffe, 2016).

While some may think that the act of white people or people with proximity to whiteness collecting antique objects is harmless, we must ask: Who gets to determine whether a racist object is harmless? Who is profiting off of these racist objects? In a society where racism still exists, do these objects really speak to a past time? When I visited Italy a few years ago, many of the boutique stores were selling Black caricature figurines. It did not help that the person who was selling the caricatures made a racist comment about me as I explored their store. I felt like I was being viewed as the caricatures on the shelves. We must reckon with the fact that when white people practice any form of nostalgia by keeping and displaying racist objects, it can create a racially hostile interior environment that normalizes oppression against communities of color and has the power to traumatize impacted communities.

Objects can exotify and objectify people of color. Trophy hunting is an example of this. Historically, after colonial conquests, white people filled their homes with looted artifacts from colonized countries as trophies to celebrate their domination. In “Colonialism in the Decor,” Ross (2019) highlights how white people would come home from invading countries in Africa with human skulls, wooden carvings, drums, furniture, arrows, paintings, lion and leopard skins, elephant feet, ivory ornaments, and more. These items were used as coat racks, bookends, wastepaper bins, and decor. Still today, some people have devoted “Africa rooms” in their homes.

Cultural appropriation is another form of racial exploitation. Some people fill their homes with objects that are appropriate elements of oppressed cultures without proper recognition. This does not mean that people cannot support local artisans from cultures that are not our own. However, there is something to be said about the ways in which people carelessly purchase objects from white-owned home decor and furnishing corporations who fail to credit the cultural aesthetic of the object to the rightful communities. Or about the ways in which people carelessly purchase objects on vacation in other countries without understanding the cultural significance of the object. African mud cloths, Indigenous teepees, Buddha statues, and other objects are often spread throughout the homes of people who fail to look deeper into the objects and their stories. As historian Baghoolizadeh (2018) expressed, “A lack of cultural competency reduces people of color to their objects, rejecting any meaningful interactions with people and their lived realities” (para. 14).

Objects in the form of toys and games can socialize children and adults to feed into racist thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors. Examples of this include racist board games such as Cowboy and Indian which depict Indigenous people as savages and depicts white colonizers as heroic, and Ghettopoly, which is a board game that criminalizes Black people and reinforces negative stereotypes about Black neighborhoods.

Examples also include racist dolls such as Golliwog dolls, which are dolls that depict Black people with exaggerated features. Even the Barbie doll has historically centered whiteness. The impact that these toys have is dangerous, as they condition children to perpetuate the “othering” of communities of color. From a young age, children are socialized through toys to believe that while white people are superior, normal, beautiful, trustworthy, and intelligent; Black, Indigenous, and people of color are inferior, exotic, ugly, threatening, and unintelligent.

Sometimes the racism in the objects is not blatant, it is symbolic. In the book, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination, Heneghan (2003) highlights how pure white-colored objects and goods such as ceramics, dishes, and tablecloths were once weaponized by white people in the United States to spread the narrative that they were cleaner, wealthier, and more sophisticated and ethical than others. These types of practices were simply another way to condition people to feel that whiteness is superior, and everything else that deviates is inferior.

Additionally, in the book Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body, Wilson (2021) illustrates how popular modernist furniture and small decorative objects were once advertised to white people in U.S. magazines as a way to maintain white racial exclusivity. These objects defined who belonged and who did not. Amplifying Babb’s (1998) work on the merchandising of whiteness, Dianne Harris states “Art, furniture, cooking—everything within the domestic sphere was intended to affirm a white American identity and to erase ethnic identities” in her book Little White Houses (Harris, 2013, p. 62).