Ava DuVernay talks with Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the “Vision and Justice” symposium at Harvard. By Sebastian Smee Sebastian Smee Art critic Email Bio Follow May 3 at 4:15 PM CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — In 1926, Sarah Lewis’s grandfather, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, was expelled from a Brooklyn public high school for asking why black people were not in his history textbook. His teacher told him African Americans had done nothing worthy of being included.
“Frederick Douglass knew it long ago,” Lewis wrote recently: “Being seen accurately by the camera was a key to representational justice. He became the most photographed American man in the 19th century as a way to create a corrective image about race and American life.” Shahidi, who credits her cousin, a rap artist, with introducing her to Baldwin’s writing, quoted part of Baldwin’s statement, from a famous debate with William F. Buckley, about the great shock, for an African American child, of discovering “that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.”
The son of a Ghanaian diplomat, Adjaye was born in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and lived in Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon before moving to Britain at age 9. Where was the architecture, he wondered, that expressed today’s realities of hyper-migration and the kind of explosion of hybridity seen in literature, art and other art forms? Why was contemporary architecture so inclined to “navel-gazing”?
Art, of course, is about more than just seeing images of yourself, or people like you, and finding cause for pride in what you see. It is also about seeing others, and about confronting unpleasant, and even horrific realities. The effort to confront the baleful truth of mass incarceration is likewise a struggle for visibility. What does mass incarceration look like? The rate of incarceration for blacks in this country is more than five times that of whites. Despite the extreme levels of surveillance prison inmates live with, most of us are blind to the reality of their lives. The atmosphere of fear around prisons only magnifies the effect.
Isn't it wonderful that we've made that kind of progress?! It's such a shame that some are trying so hard to destroy it, and they claim to be progressives!
Amen.
NAACP_LDF Why is she teaching at Harvard for the money? STOP people, FOCUS
Really
Not only blacks or other race a women clean 78 hours a week just to be a college graduate no student loan and so on eviction which she has overcome since 1985. I will died and all of us some day. The black spot at the universe. The answer.....?
My grandfather was forced into child farm labor because he was the out of wedlock son of a Canadian prime minister
Let's please shame white culture more. I haven't really had enough.
Is that supposed to be impressive? Didn't Harvard accept a kid recently with a 1270 SAT score?
Big deal!
Good for her. Just goes to show how forward our nation is. If you work hard it doesnt matter what you look like, you can succeed
Rrriiiiiiight. Asked why text had no blacks, get's expelled. Complete and utter balderdash.
The bar for hiring, in the name of PC, is low at Harvard.
WaPo!!!
Today someone can ask why they have to pay so much to get an education when it's close to free in other western countries around the globe. ( yes globe )
Wow. In 50 years, when you doing puff pieces on Palestinians, we'll be sure to remind you that you supported the repression against them - like you do all around the world, as well as at home in the US - militantly. Obsessively. Uniformly. You literally get zero points for this.
.... out of textbooks that still have no black people.
She must be especially pissed when she’s confronted with the spectacle of textbooks like the kind they have in Texas (which perpetuate southern civil war myths and referred to forcibly imported African slaves as “immigrants”)
Today someone can ask why they have to pay so much to get an aducation when it's close to free in other western countries around the globe. ( yes globe )