Re: Imani Perry, "Art Is a Powerful Tool to Fight Racial Injustice"

Imani Perry's "Art Is a Powerful Tool to Fight Racial Injustice" compels us to clarify our urge to "do something." That urge, for me, is heavily colored by expectations from problematic sources. Growing up, I dealt with the mediocre business & engineering types who sneered at anything they were told wasn't useful. Their opinions bothered me then, because I didn't want to be impractical. Their opinions bother me now, as many of them have power for no good reason. They are either indifferent to or actively endorsing the present horrors.

In either case, "do something" needs repair. The right thing often cannot be recognized by those deeply in the wrong. Standards based on what they think are dangerous, even if those standards oppose them.

So Perry's essay about art can have immediate effect. Whatever "do something" means, related to art, cannot be evaluated by the competitive market economy. It may not advance technology or find a mass audience. Rather, it must be about learning to listen and speak anew. A language of need stands directly in front of us, but we blot out the need by imagining everything already works. That imagining is most potent and destructive in the midst of collapse. Look at the government workers who were fired, adamant that their colleagues deserved the axe, not them. Many are cruel and absurd, but parts of their magical belief in efficiency linger generally. No one wants to be thought impractical.

It is the peculiar virtue of what we call art to invert practice. Not all artwork does this, of course. Some of it is crass propaganda, some just mediocre. Perry reflects on two paintings, quiet monuments to radical consciousness. One is Titus Kaphar's Father and Son. W.E.B. DuBois sits for a portrait, wearing a black suit and a vacant stare. His arms should hold a child – there's a swaddling cloth draped over him, his arms are in the proper position – but there is no child. Next to him are books on a table, an empty bookshelf, indistinct pictures in frames. Shades of brown define a room that isn't lacking; poverty is not the problem. Perry tells how generations of black parents have lost their children to white supremacy. DuBois' own son died as a diphtheria vaccine was not made available to African Americans. Perry: "Kaphar continued to paint portraits of parents without children in the second decade of this century as we saw the parade of sonless mothers who came to be known as “Mothers of the Movement,” a chilling redux of images of the 1960s."

This is incredible pain, everyday pain, and consciousness of it is radicalizing. This country may give you money, maybe even success and accolades, but it will steal your family from you. It will not let you reproduce. Racism isn't just second-class citizenship; it has genocidal intent behind its lazy assumptions. Racism means to take the most unhinged, ignorant person and elevate them over entire groups merely because of their race. The painting makes clear that this can be seen. If you want, you can observe hundreds of years of pain all around you.

Earlier today there was a discussion on social media about trusting politicians who can do regular things, e.g. set up tables for a party, home repair, garden, work on their car. In my experience, no amount of being practical or making contact with regular people can substitute for learning to address exclusion, maltreatment, or poverty. You have to want the requisite skills. You may not want them because you are a paragon of caring or empathy, but some part of you has to see this as important. Plenty of rich and powerful people deal with those in tough situations. Is that making anything better? Will it make anything better in the long run if they can fix a flat or organize sections of a garden? Intent matters: it doesn't have to be perfect, but elevating others has to be a calling in a way.

The other painting Perry discusses is Mario Moore's Henry Bibb and/or Mary Ann Shadd. You'll see it and gasp. In the evening, a woman has her back turned to us. She instead faces a river holding two boats with people in them. She wears an elaborate garment with highly stylized flowers and a bird. Pinks and purples shimmer in the late light. Her hair is no less elaborate. The river she faces, an electric blue, might be thought to flow from her or into her. It is distinct from the garment but the lines are suggestive. A modern city with all its lights is on the other side of that river. Perry says crossing that river to Canada was no less than freedom, once. I'll let Perry describe the history this painting references.

What I'm struck by is the iconography. So much of the river, the city, the sky relates to the central figure. The lines of the garment stand in symmetry with the waves; a bright bridge of the distant city gives a hint of angel's wings. The sky and the woman's hair are tinted with the same shade of blue.

Art presents a language of need and more. The hopefulness of Henry Bibb and/or Mary Ann Shadd comes from the story it hints at. But you don't need to know much of that history for the painting to work; openness matters more. The entire landscape–river, waves, boats, city, and sky–might be emanating from her. What the business and engineer types who spent decades trolling don't understand is what it means to own a part of this world. Ownership isn't ultimately about money or property. It's really about understanding one's past and seeing one's future. Art brings you there, to statements that are truly yours and no one else's. Statements that allow you to speak for a people because they want you to speak for them. Perry's essay talks about how when things got worse–when political and legal battles failed–art was there, alongside grief. The inversion of practice is perhaps the most necessary, most practical thing conceivable.