Jean Fisher's "The Syncretic Turn"

I had to read this for a class and it concerns Western art critique elitism over black and non-European art. Here is part of my summary:

Andrew Ballstaedt (Mormon artist)

Fisher argues that European art criticism is not leaving room for non-European artists because the European critics are assuming much about non-European art from the sole perspective of Western art critique. The elitism of art criticism today only leaves room for a Black artist to make art about being black. Even the non-commodifiable nature of art is discussed as though it were, naturally, leaving no room for non-European art in the West. Galleries and museums have responded to this by exhibiting more non-European art, “although on a selective and respresentative basis, provided that they demonstrate appropriate signs of cultural difference. This is to exoticize” and only maintains the inequality of non-European to European art by “reduc[ing] them to a spectacle of essentialist racial or ethnic typology and to ignore their individual insights and human values”. Part of this problem is institutional; that Western critical and curatorial practices assume their criteria is universal. Until this is changed, all perspectives cannot hope to have equal value. Unfortunately, to survive artistically and economically, “non-European artists have had to acquiesce to promotion through the commodified signs of ethnicity, which renders them complicit with the Western desire for the exotic other, against which it can measure its own superiority”. In the early 1980’s, a generation of young black artists spoke out, but lead to their work “incorporated exclusively into identity politics…to become a sub-category of sociology or anthropology, diminishing its aesthetic or critical efficacy”. 
To be honest, this is a heady thing for me to wrap my head around. I have a hard time knowing where to fit myself into this issue. Although I have not gone to grad school, I have heard a lot of stories from professors and other returning alumni from BYU about the intolerance of religion at many art schools. Stories of accepting discussion and legitimacy of race and gender, but rejecting the individual insights of religion. Stories of classroom critiques only willing to prode and discuss religious and spiritual exploration from Mormon artists. Are Mormon artists in the same boat as women and non-European artists?