THE Magazine
August, 2015
“There is no scientific or anthropological basis for race.”
–Maya Angelou
The is only one race: human. Being a bigot based on any
other concept of so-called “race” is similar to being a climate change denier.
Both are premised on what could be called belief-desires on the part of the
willfully ignorant, rather than on any sort of scientifically, empirically, or
reality based truth.
The Long Road: From Selma to Ferguson—an elegant
exhibition of fifty-five photographs documenting the faces and places of
America’s Civil Rights era alongside today’s rising BLACK LIVES MATTER movement
is a timely contribution to the local cultural scene by the Monroe Gallery. The
curation of the prints is thoughtful, and rich in response to the face-toface
with the ethnically biased police brutality that is confronting the nation.
Whitney Curtis’ image of a twenty-three-year-old African-American activist
backing away from three heavily armored St. Louis County cops with large
weapons drawn, makes an iconic, Leon Golublike, presentation of the point. A
1961 LIFE magazine image by Paul Schutzer of Freedom Riders on an interstate
bus escorted by National Guardsmen with rifles and bayonets carries the tension
of violent possibility held at bay, and echoes of the future found in the sign
of one protester on the 1965 Selma March preserved by legendary LIFE
photographer Steve Schapiro, that reads simply “Stop Police Killings.”
Relevant today, because the domestic terrorism of
African-Americans hasn’t ceased since they were forcibly enslaved and brought
in chains to this continent by Euro-American colonizers. A uniquely American
ethnic hate and systematized terrorism campaign has been carried out ever
since. For centuries now, law enforcement, judges, the Klu Klux Klan,
skinheads, and Nazi-wannabes have conducted a long brutal pogrom of slavery,
lynchings, scape-goating, church burnings, and institutionalized hatred against
African-Americans. This was tragically capped most recently by the nine murders
of Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney and eight parishioners at the African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by a
twenty-one-year-old white supremacist espousing the belief-desires of a “black
and white races” ideology of “racial hierarchy” woven into a hate and anger
fueled action based on nothing but differences in skin tones. Children, when
your ideology drives you to kill, the first thing to kill is your ideology.
The point of color in painting or people is visual
pleasure and UV protection. The late, satirical Klan paintings of Phillip
Guston are more relevant than ever today. Women of the Klan Bow Their Heads in
Prayer, taken in South Carolina by Charles Moore and Segregationists, (again by
Steve Schapiro) from a 1964 gathering in St. Augustine, Florida have a similar
sense of the bleak stupidity of bigots on the wrong side of history. The
exhibition does a great job of branching out to include images connecting the
Selma March with anti-war, gay rights, labor, and feminist actions, making it
clear that the crux of the matter is not the distraction of an erroneous race
concept, but rather the still unattained dream of a reality based upon the
self-evident and scientific truth that all people are created equally and are
endowed with certain inalienable human rights and liberties that they must not
be denied. Images of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and his courageous entourage
figure prominently. Pinckney joins him, now. Photographer Bill Eppridge’s
moving image of activist James Chaney’s mother and younger brother at Chaney’s
funeral is a study of dignity in grief that hits a universal human note far
beyond any individual ancestry.
As King knew, no people holds a monopoly on evil or good.
There are no fine hierarchical lines to be drawn between races because there is
no place to draw them. Our homeland is the planet. We are all relatives in one
species, and our major differences across ethnicities are simply cultural.
Ancient tribalism is real, for sure, in fanatics’ belief-desire systems, but is
based on nothing actual. Worldwide, it is supported most evilly by cultural
ideologues and used in contemporary times, along with poverty and terrorism by
a multi-ethnic cabal of nationalists and other politicians in collusion with
banksters and financiers to divide and conquer various populations, and to
enforce strict differences in access to wealth, resources, and territory. Economic
differences (and growing disparity) are what they’re trying to hide.
It’s as ugly a situation as the eight shots to the back
at short range that an unarmed Walter Scott took as he fled a now-indicted
police officer, or the scenes of the crazed cracker cop in McKinney, Texas
tackling an unarmed fourteen-year-old African-American girl to the ground at a
pool party, and pointing his gun at her unarmed friends. Or Mike Brown’s body
lying dead on the ground in the middle of the street for hours, or Freddie
Gray’s severed spine. Nina Berman’s chilling Will I Be Next glimpses a
black-haired boy looking out of the doorway next to the title text on a placard
placed at the site of the Eric Garner strangulation in 2014. It’s a good
question, unfortunately. —Jon Carver 
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