In the typed card that underpins the work, Piper outlines the arc of previous misadventures in self-disclosure: forestalling racist remarks by Whites beside her at dinner who wrongly assume they are speaking entre eux, informing them she is Black before the fact. She writes of their rebuttals, their insults, their disbelief. Piper then drily acquiesces to their demand for the benefit of the doubt, sliding the disclosure moment from a peremptory to amendatory position, sliding a card across a table. In my own life, I’ve named the inevitable dinner party wobbles amongst sophisticates the “Big Black Bouncer Moment”: when a White guest spices up a personal story by pointedly referring to a character’s Blackness. Blackness as evidence of a perceived threat level; Blackness as melodramatic device, preceding the safe denouement. Rarely does the animated storyteller notemy own freshly stiffened pose, a body alert to threats it, too, perceives. They named them micro aggressions, huh? An absence of sticks and stones? Oh just Fawn already, laugh it off. Freeze, and sit in silence. Take Flight, exit quietly. But please, dear friend, don’t Fight.⁷ You’re Black but you don’t have to make a thing about it, do you? *Adrian Piper, My Calling (Card) #1 (for Dinners and Cocktail Parties), 1986- present. Performance utensil: brown business card with printed text on cardboard. 2" x 3.5" (5.1 cm x 9 cm). Various private and public collections. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.
