Thing vs. Object [Lusk]

Okay. So... what exactly is Bernstein saying.
That is a very good question.
It seems to me that she is requesting a more broad way of investigating artifacts from the past. She begins her article by cueing of Robyn Wiegman in the notion to no longer ask 'Why' to 'How' in reagards to race and how it is performed and how we define our race.
Her argument is best illustrated with the 'Watermelon' picture, and how the young woman is performing her race by mocking a race that she is not. She is saying 'I'm not black, so isn't it funny that I'm interacting with this character?'
She then goes on and declares a vocabulary for the rest of the article on the difference of a 'Thing' and an 'Object.' (She also says some stuff about knives that confused me)

What I THINK she is trying to say is an object is an inanimate representation of something. So... you're walking home from school and you see a rock. It's just a rock. No big deal. That rock is an object.
But... say you're walking home from school and you see a rock that was carved into the shape of a chair. That then becomes a thing because it is requesting participation.
As she says in her article, it can be both, "An object becomes a thing when it invites a person to dance." And then she later says, "Thing hail."
Such as the book she was citing. A book is a thing because it's function requires participation. For a novel to be used properly, and the way it was intended, you must open it, and turn the pages to progress  the information given.

She then goes on to discuss a thing's script. So, the Tarzan and Jane cut out piece, has a script of a heterosexual couple performing their gender properly. The interesting thing is that we can challenge that script. And we can have two men performing with this object. They then are performing gender transgression, which, in the context was not the purpose of the thing.
The script "captures the moment when dramatic narrative and movement through space are in the act of becoming each other." So when we fight the 'correct' script of the Tarzan and Jane cut out, we create our own script that relies on the original script. We cannot have gender transgression without the established 'normal' gender roles.

This article raised a question for me, as in... does historic context ever come into play?
Looking back on these images of African American caricatures, yes they are horrendous and would never (hopefully) be allowed today... but back then, they were allowed, and they were widely accepted.  Just as all of the Life magazine ads directed towards women assumed they were all at home cleaning the house and making dinner. Is it of any value to us to view these performances without the lens of our modern morals? Is there another facet that we are missing in these images? Just a thought, I'm not sure.