Emma Shakarshy

Queer communities have a long way to go to be the inclusive places that we would like them to be, especially when it comes to racism.

Orange is The New Black’s “Big Boo”, Lea Delaria, recently viewed Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety”, an exhibit in Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory that highlights the legacies of white supremacy, capitalism, anti-blackness, slavery, and patriarchy that have shaped the past 500 years.  Walker’s piece is a 40 foot-tall sphinx created out of sugar, with the head of the black “mammy” stereotype, representing the racist iconography of the black female domestic servant at the hands of white families. The sphinx’s body is that of the oversexualized black woman, often seen as props in music videos (think Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”) and TV and film.

Many white viewers of Walker’s piece have made the news by taking racist, misogynistic selfies with the piece, cupping, licking, and generally abusing the work. In his piece, “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit,” Nicholas Powers writes that the pornographic jokes are recreations of the very racism that the art is meant to critique.

Lea Delaria, queer comedienne and celeb with an Instagram following of 95,000 users, unfortunately offered no exception. DeLaria posed with the piece, positioned between the sphinx’s breasts, with the head of the work cut off, and the caption “Sugar Tits.” Her next photo is of her looking smugly from beneath the buttocks and vulva of the ...