Mourning
Hank Willis Thomas. I am a Man, 2013. Liquitex on canvas, 72 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Kadist Art Foundation.
No. 2 | (2020)
Laudia Rankine’s “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” is a meditation on the reality of violence repeated in systems of institutionalized racism. She explains that the experience of being black is also the experience of walking through life knowing you can be killed at any moment…just for being black. That you are always in danger.
White liberals mourn the loss of black bodies, we demonstrate (sometimes), we post on social media…and then we forget. That’s not ok. Rankine insists that real change depends on our willingness to go further; to entirely shift how we see ourselves. We must move beyond naming ourselves liberals or progressives. And we must ask ourselves how to embody the spirit of an “American radical.”*
It’s not an easy question. And to ask in earnest is to confront our own culpability, to be ashamed, to live our values, to understand white privilege, and crack open white fragility. To risk our identities and maybe even our lives. Rankine’s American Radical does not look at individual acts of police violence and ask “how can people be so horrible?” Instead, she recognizes those acts within the context of serial murders perpetrated against her fellow Americans, not against “an other.”
This idea stops me cold. I think about the moment I explained to my son that being a woman meant being with the fear of rape…in garages, on streets at night, in an empty house, on the hiking trail, in public restrooms, in the car. That conversation is my best entry point into becoming what Claudia Rankine is talking about; a human being existing with other human beings whose lives I understand as no less valuable than my own. That understanding is a whole different kind of wisdom, people.
The original Latin meaning of the word Radical is “to form the root” (a verb!). The chemical definition is a noun, meaning a group of atoms behaving as a unit. These two meanings, both the action and the thing, could lay the groundwork for white people to work more skillfully with and undo white privilege. Hit me up with thoughts.
Claudia Rankine on her Book, Citizen: An American Lyric
Picture of the Day
Ernest Withers. With Hank Willis Thomas. I am a Man, 2013. Liquitex on canvas, 72 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Kadist Art Foundation.
Note to Reader: Bear with me here. This is kind of heady, but worth the effort.
Henry Louis Gates Jr’s seminal book, The Signifying Monkey explores the relation of the black vernacular tradition — double-voiced, double-edged, intricately, intimately relating African languages with European languages in a fashion that transforms both and records a culture coming into being— to the African American literary tradition.
Signifyin' (sometimes written "signifyin(g)"), is a wordplay; a practice in African-American culture involving a verbal strategy of indirection that exploits the gap between the denotative and figurative meanings of words. It replicates and also transforms the meaning of something. Toni Morrison does this when she evokes sweet scents to signal death (an African folk belief popularized by Wole Soyinka). But Morrison uses sweetness to foreshadow the bitter, acidic, and unrelenting murder of black women.
Hank Willis Thomas references Ernest Withers’ striking photograph to subvert established definitions and positions with regard to personal identity and the narrative of race. These images form the basis from which he shows us the fallacies that history claims as truth. His work reminds me that history is represented and consumed in ways that reinforce the life-threatening and false impression that black lives are not human lives at all. He exposes and revises that history. And I’m grateful for the opportunity to bear witness.
*Kadist has a really apt analysis/explanation of the historical relevance of the term “I am a Man.” (Hint: It’s much more sinister and involved than you might know).
Bye for Now
SO. MUCH. LOVE.
Cara
