Your work is informed by a powerful sense that history lives in the present. How does the past bear on our current quest for racial justice?
You can’t understand many of the most destructive issues or policies in our country without understanding our history of racial inequality. And I actually think it begins with our interaction with native people, because we took land, we killed people, we disrupted a culture. We were brutal. And we justified and rationalized that land grab, that genocide, by characterizing native people as different. It was the first way in which this narrative of racial difference was employed to justify behaviors that would otherwise be unjustifiable. When you are allowed to demonize another community and call them savages, and treat them brutally and cruelly, it changes your psyche. We abused and mistreated the communities and cultures that existed on this land before Europeans arrived, and then that narrative of racial difference was used to develop slavery.
In what way? Can you elaborate?
I was in East Africa a few months ago. It was the first time I had been there. And it was startling to be in this land and see all of these black people and the beauty of that land. Despite the economic and political situation, there was something so affirming about a space like that. And then I thought about how painful it was that my people, my tribe, my foreparents were in that group of Africans who were kidnapped. Kidnapping is the worst kind of crime in many respects because it lasts for a really long time. Some people have been kidnapped for days and weeks, and that sense of trauma never goes away. And I thought about what it was like for those people to be kidnapped and then displaced, pulled from their land, and then brutalized and tortured and chained. And that’s before they were made to engage in forced labor.
I genuinely believe that, despite all of that victimization, the worst part of slavery was this narrative that we created about black people—this idea that black people aren’t fully human, that they are three-fifths human, that they are not capable, that they are not evolved. That ideology, which set up white supremacy in America, was the most poisonous and destructive consequence of two centuries of slavery. And I do believe that we never addressed it. I think the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. The racial-equality principle that is in our Constitution was never extended to formerly enslaved people, and that is why I say slavery didn’t end in 1865. It evolved.
Into what?
Decades of terrorism and lynching and this brutal regime where black people were burned alive and hanged and taunted and disenfranchised and threatened. Most people don’t think about the fact that we had Jim Crow laws. We had racial segregation. Black people wouldn’t have agreed with that. They would not have gone into the decrepit colored bathroom when the white bathroom was better. They wouldn’t drink out of the colored fountain—unless there was the threat of violence. So you cannot disconnect lynching and terror and violence from racial segregation and subordination.
And that history continued during the civil rights era, where the response to non-violence was violence. The response to ministers and activists begging for equality was bombs and billy clubs and dogs and fire hoses. And even there, I think we won the legal battle. But, again, we lost the narrative war. The people holding up those signs that said “Segregation Forever,” “Segregation or War,” were not required to act differently, to think differently. And that is the prelude to mass incarceration. That is why I don’t think you can understand the tremendous increase in the incarceration rates, the targeting of black people and menacing of communities of color and poor communities without understanding this history. We have to understand enslavement in a new way. I don’t think we’ve done a good job of educating people about what slavery did.
In your book Just Mercy, you cite a 2003 estimate that one out of three black babies will end up incarcerated, and note that this has everything to do with institutionalized racism, which itself is the product of a great deal of hidden racism in daily life. What does that racism look like?
Well, there is this burden in America that people of color bear. This presumption of dangerousness weighs on you. And when we don’t talk about it, when we don’t name it, the burden only gets heavier. People of color have to navigate around these presumptions, and it is exhausting.
And yet, so hard for so many white people to recognize, much less acknowledge.
But when somebody affirms that it exists, it can be really liberating. It can be really affirming to know that you are not crazy. As I get older, I am beginning to appreciate the weight of a lifetime lived navigating these presumptions. And so I want to affirm for young kids that the world will still do that to them, but they should know that the world is wrong, and that you have to not only endure, but you have to overcome. A lot of people of color applaud when I say this. They do so because they have never had anybody in a public space—in a mixed space—say it. And I think we have to say that, you know. But, yes, I do think that there’s an implicit bias that undermines how we interact with one another, and I do think that, in America, no one is free from the threat created by our history of racial inequality.
Whites included.
Yes. You can be very progressive, you can be very educated, and you can still be complicit in the kind of microaggression that takes place when you look at people through this lens of racial difference. So we all have a lot to learn. I don’t think that we should expect to make progress on these issues without bumping into one another, without making mistakes. We just have to have the humility and the patience and the courage to work through that. What I don’t think we should do is just retreat because we don’t know exactly where all the landmines are.
Black girls deserve to learn free from bias and stereotypes.
Most black girls experience this hatred at schools. And classmates are not the only problem, there is no support from teachers, too. That’s why they get so affected by their school experiences. Black kids deserve to be treated just like everybody else, they want to study, they want to learn something ,too. However due to prejudice they are 5 times more likely to be suspended than their white peers and it can ruin their lives forever.
National Women’s Law Center created this video to change the situation. Join the movement to help black girls feel normal and get the same opportunities everybody else has.
Local Black Lives Matter activist Muhiyidin d'Baha was shot and killed in New Orleans Monday morning, according to a GoFundMe page set up by his niece. The New Orleans Police Department have not returned requests for the full police report.
Camille Weaver wrote that d'Baha was shot at around 1 a.m. Monday morning and died of excessive blood loss at around 9:30 a.m.
“We don’t have many details, but will update as soon as we do,” she wrote. “His body is currently in New Orleans, LA and we are raising money to bring him home to Charleston and then have a memorial service/funeral for his family and friends. This is all so unexpected, so any contribution will help.”
Never forget that…
On #MLKDay we remember, “a white liberal progressive movement disconnected from the south, where 61% of people of color live, is vulnerable to replicating white supremacy.” @RubyNSales@judsonchurchnyc
Don’t ever command me to, or demand of me to, forget about slavery. Don’t tell me it happened years ago and those people are dead now. Don’t tell me to get over it! This centuries old grudge that they have had against the nation of my People… My mother tried to explain this to me decades ago and I wasn’t sure what to think because of my US of A schooling.
They (Europe) could not get over the fact that these slaves freed themselves. Their revolution inspired enslaved people in other nations to revolt. Haiti opened its ports to freed people seeking asylum… White supremacist European leaders hated Haiti for this… America didn’t even recognized Haiti as a free nation until Lincoln (over 60 years later). The so called protector of the Western hemisphere [America], turned its back while France continued to threaten Haiti with invasion and enslavement. America and Europe would not trade with Haiti. They allowed France to extort ~22 billion dollars from this tiny nation.
People want us to forget slavery and yet these countries’ couldn’t let go of this grudge;
Let this country be free…. They had everyone believe that our religion, that is older than Christianity, was something evil…. That we were a backwards nation of people (black) that should be feared…. They had everyone believe, for a good amount time, that HIV/AIDS came from Haiti… They punished Haiti and continue to punish Haiti for truly being a land of the free and a home of the brave.
Let my people go!
Today, I have never been more proud to be the child of Haitian parents.
“On March 9, 2015, at the University of Cape Town, the student and activist Chumani Maxwele walked over to a bronze statue of the nineteenth-century British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes and flung a bucket of human excrement at the monument. It was the first in a series of rebellious acts that became known as the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which would later inspire the student-led protest movement Fees Must Fall on campuses all across South Africa. The incidents helped trigger a nationwide debate about the glorification of white supremacy and the legacy of apartheid, and about the country’s need for fuller, more authentic representations of black life.
The controversy around these protests has had lasting effects not only among educators and students but also among artists. One of them is the photographer Mohau Modisakeng. This year, Modisakeng is representing South Africa, along with the artist Candice Breitz, at the fifty-seventh edition of the Venice Biennale. The thirty-year-old Modisakeng, who graduated from University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, in 2009, uses haunting and meditative self-portraiture to create striking images of a country that is in the midst of reëvaluating itself. Born in 1986, Modisakeng grew up in an informal settlement in Soweto, in a makeshift home without electricity. His mother was Zulu and his father was Motswana, and they were part of the influx of migrant workers that, in the early nineteen-eighties, flowed into Johannesburg’s sprawling southwestern townships, where most of the city’s black population was forced to live during apartheid. “In my art, the significance of growing up in Soweto is dealt with from a biographical standpoint. I am referring to memories from my childhood that somehow highlight what was happening in South Africa,” Modisakeng told me recently.
Modisakeng’s Soweto childhood has fuelled a research-based photography practice in which he creates layered scenes, littered with iconic symbols that explore the nation’s history by “trying to understand how it affects the black body,” he said. His photography and video work also follows the character-driven overtures of African self-portraitists such as Samuel Fosso and Iké Udé. In the photograph “Frame XV,” we see Modisakeng pictured holding a long sjambok whip, a visceral symbol of state-sanctioned violence that he remembers the police using to maintain order during the final years of apartheid. In the series “Lefa,” which is a Setswana word for “inheritance,” he captures himself, from above, lying in a bed of coal. The image evokes the industrialization of his home town of Johannesburg. The performative series “Metamorphosis” features images of Modisakeng in closeup and against a black backdrop, wearing his signature black-brimmed trilby hat, shaking white powder from his face and chest. It appears as if his body were physically changing form, in a state of transformation that alludes to South Africa’s long democratic struggle to define itself.
At Venice, in the South African Pavilion, Modisakeng has mounted “Passages,” a three-channel video projection that, like his photography, reveals the beauty and trauma of black bodies in motion. The nearly eighteen-minute work follows the individual journeys of three South African voyagers, each carrying a single possession, wading through waters, trying to get ashore. In Setswana, Modisakeng says, life is referred to as botshelo, or a passage, and human beings are called bafeti, or voyagers. It’s a view of existence that suggests that all experiences are transient.”
