Over a series of email exchanges and a quick face-to-face meeting in a crowded Bushwick Country Club, I had the opportunity to discuss White Power Milk, race and art with Nate Hill.

Over a series of email exchanges and a quick face-to-face meeting in a crowded Bushwick Country Club, I had the opportunity to discuss White Power Milk, race and art with Nate Hill.

STREET CARNAGE: The last time we spoke about your work, I asked you how race informed it and you said, “I’ve intentionally stayed away from commenting on race.” Yet your “milk gargling project” that became White Power Milk seemed to suddenly dive deep into race, class and sex. How did you get to there?

NATE HILL: Last we spoke, I was in a dogmatic place claiming to be “the people’s artist.” I was caught up in performing four characters that were all about accessibility to regular people (not only art people), and art that extended itself to anyone who texted me, and doing it for free. I was espousing a belief system. Characters like Death Bear and Punch Me Panda were designed to help people. That kind of thinking — reaching out to people with lovingly creepy mascot characters — was ingrained in me, so I believed I needed to preach it. Sorry! I could have framed it about accessibility in more political and racial terms since half the time the characters visited less “art friendly” neighborhoods, like Harlem and East New York, but instead it was just about people, not race.

Then I looked around and saw that race is arguably the most contentious issue in America and thought I better think of something to say on it. I didn’t think I had issues with race until I stopped giving myself a pass. For example, I routinely tease my girlfriend (who is also a bi-racial mix of black and white) about her “nigga nose” or her “nappy nigga hair.” I don’t think I’m a racist, but why are those things hilarious to me? Probably because her and I are half black and half white, and we are removed from racism in a way, yet we’re still kinda black. Like with White Power Milk, my own white mother said, “If I didn’t know you made this, I would have thought it was made by a racist white person.” That’s the perspective that I think I can bring right now to art. I’d like to masquerade as a “racist white person” and make racism look silly.

From my experience, I was both removed from racism and never fully accepted by either group. I think people like you and I — as Mullatoes — can discuss race fairly clearly because we can’t be so quickly be accused of being “racist.” Growing up, I was always white to blacks and generally black to whites. Now… I’m sort of a third thing, but that’s mostly because I created this third thing. This is something I believe you understand as well. And I’ll throw the fabled N-word out anytime. As a black man I feel entitled to use the word. As a white man I just feel entitled, nigga.

Now that you’ve fully embraced that the only thing that truly fuels America is race (along with the energy expended pretending that it doesn’t matter), can you summarize White Power Milk?

Oh yes, I understand becoming a third thing. You put it well. But, I don’t want to come off like I think I’m better at satirizing racism than any other person of any other color. But I agree, as you implied, being mixed often means racist white people sometimes forget that we’re half black and they show their true colors. Awkward campfires!

White Power Milk is a website where you can purchase milk that has been gargled and purified by young, rich, beautiful white women. It’s then mailed to you by UPS Next Day Air if you live outside NYC, or delivered by a third-party messenger service if you live within. We also offer, by popular demand, personalized gargling videos.

The site was inspired by the desire for white women by black men. Apparently, Malcolm X believed this is a black man’s way of getting back at white supremacist culture. Obviously, it’s complicated. I don’t exactly know why some believe that a white woman has properties that other women do not. What magic do they have? Are they more loyal, more obedient or more compliant in bed? If so, can they even make milk taste better?

Part of me wants to say that white women are like a nice car to some men. They are a status symbol or a trophy that announces to other men that they’re doing well in the world. So as a comment on class, White Power Milk was also meant to be an upward mobility drink to give people from lower classes the opportunity to taste “riches.” I once tweeted that, “White Power Milk is the closest thing many of you are ever going to get to a rich, white woman’s mouth.”

Going into White Power Milk, you must have hypothesized a spectrum of reaction. Having completed the site and having had some opportunity to deal with the public and “art world” reactions, what have you learned?

Hold up, you’re speaking so eloquently that, since this is going on Street Carnage, I am now going to walk into the future and slap a few of the commenters with my dick because I know they like to talk shit. So ya’ll can eat a dick.

It could be that I made an error on the side of not being explicit enough with the anti-racist message of WPM because I got a lot of hate mail, but then again the website was seen by thousands of people, so it’s only natural that this is going to happen. Here’s a couple of the nasty ones:

Dear WPM,

I was shown your website by one of my friends and I just want to say that you are the most disgusting freaks I have ever encountered. Your logic makes no sense: How does a woman gargling milk purify it? I should report this website to the authorities, you sick bastards. The women you are using are probably some poor women who are desperate and will do anything for money. People like you are not human and therefore should not have the same rights as human beings. What you do deserve is an eternity of torture for actually putting up a website like this. I hope you get shut down, arrested and put in jail.

Burn in hell!
E.G.
June 1, 2011

Dear WPM,

Before I read further into your website, I gladly would’ve asked you many questions about the process of creating White Power Milk. However, I have read further and have discovered I only have one question: Who the fuck do you think you are?! Racist bitch.

I wish you all the worst,
N.E.
June 8th, 2011

Carnage commenters can say anything they want, I rarely read that stuff.

Anyway, White Power Milk received racist hate mail because people assumed the proprietor was a white racist. But, hypothetically, what if you did a massive relaunch with a new branded logo: your milkman image? Would people get the message? Would they categorize it in the Uncle Ben’s, Aunt Jemima and Rastas category?

I have been dressing up like a milkman in New York for years, and sometimes for months at a time. I didn’t want to include that on WPM because it can be goofy and may have distracted from the point. Or it could have reeked of self-promotion, which I have been accused of before. I’ve been wanting to take myself out of the art and start producing and directing team projects, which is what WPM was. You ask some cool questions about how it would have been interpreted differently if other decisions were made, and I’ll leave those to the readers to ponder.

Based on your Twitter feed, I understand you’re working on a video game that is also related to how races interact. What’s the game all about?

After seeing the Cory Arcangel show at the Whitney and learning about “gamification” and how games can be used by artists as a medium to convey ideas, I wanted to use it as a tool to combat racism. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but like the school teacher says, “If you can affect one person positively, then it’s worth it.” We’ve hacked an old Nintendo game to make 16 different racial fighting scenarios basically pitting one race against another in a simulated race war. The game is done, but now the work is to figure out how to contextualize it to give it an anti-racism message while not making it too corny. We’re trying to be sly because nothing is worse then a message that is too heavy handed.

I am familiar with Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds”. Good open source-y stuff in the name of accessible fine arts. But your race war game is something completely different. I’m curious why it needs to be contextualized with anti-racism message at all.

You’re wondering why I desire to contextualize a racist video game that I produced and will slap my name on. It’s because I consider it the responsible thing to do and because I have a point of view of being anti-racism that I want to push. I’m not interested in giving people a toy that they can do whatever they want with. I want to put clues in the game as to how I want them to think. I want to send a message.

The game will soon be released to bloggers I know, and if I’m lucky, they will write about it. Also, I can email the gaming and hacking community. From there, it will spread by word of mouth and hopefully go viral. Since the game will have an implied message, but will not be straightforwardly stated, it then becomes a numbers game on how many people I can get to play it. The more people who play it, the more people who will “get it,” as I wrote about in my essay “Art, Spectacle, and the Media.” Hopefully, it will affect some change. I don’t know exactly how to do it, but I want to attract racist people to the game and try to change their thinking when they play. It’s worth a try.
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-JULIUS T. LEISURE
@JuliusTLeisure

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