"I don't want to die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument. I want to leave a world that is liberated from trash, pollution, racism, nation-states, nation-state wars and armies, from pomp, bigotry, parochialism, a thousand different brands of untruth and licentious, usurious economics," George Jackson, Soledad Brother
Protests have escalated in many US cities, but also in the rest of the world, after the death of a man of colour, George Floyd, in police custody. Floyd, 46, died on Monday in Minneapolis after a white officer handcuffed him, then kneeled on his neck for around nine minutes, cutting off his oxygen and killing him.
Many protests were peaceful; others, sparked by rage, developed into violence and looting. In the meantime, US President Donald Trump kept on posting on Twitter incendiary messages that fuelled anger, and protesters in Washington D.C. were cleared with teargas and rubber bullets so that the President could walk across the street to St. John's Church and have a photo op posing with a Bible in his hand.
A collective action to bring awareness to police brutality and racial injustice was organised for today by music executives Brianna Agyemang, Platoon's senior artist campaign manager, and Jamila Thomas, Senior Director of Marketing at Atlantic Records. Accompanied by the hashtag #TheShowMustBePaused, the protest focuses on abstaining from releasing music and other business operations.
So for today we press pause as well to think and invite you to find your own way to protest, for example you could read (or re-read) Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson or Blood in My Eye by George Jackson, field marshal of the Black Panther Party, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver or Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis (just to mention a few books).
If you like fashion and textile design, you can check past posts on Irenebrination and look at how fashion designers - from Patrick Kelly to Thebe Magugu - addressed in the past or are addressing now the issue of racism; you can learn more about the tragic history of slavery in textiles and discover pioneering textile designers like Anna Russell Jones who were met with prejudice in their lives but worked hard to excell in their careers or check out exhibitions of textile art exploring issues such as discrimination, freedom and civil rights.
Art is an accessible way to look at complex issues like colonisation and identity, but there are posts dedicated to artists who have been working in a variety of exciting media to comment on modern society, consumerism and consumption such as El Anatsui and Serge Attukwei Clottey. There are more themes to discover behind Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald's portraits, Bisa Butler's fabric compositions or Ibrahim Mahama's monumental fabric installations.
Mary Sibande explores instead in her work race, gender, trauma and identity in post-apartheid South Africa and let's not forget architectural projects such as "Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line)" by visual artist and architect Amanda Williams and artist, designer, and educator Andres L. Hernandez in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist and hairstylist Shani Crowe that, displayed at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, looked at black women and at how they navigated and shaped space to advance their position in American society.
"The task of a revolutionary is to make revolution," Jackson wrote in Blood in My Eye, but to make a difference, and be truly revolutionary let's educate ourselves during this #BlackOutTuesday, otherwise we will just be like that sad man standing in front of a church, clumsily and blasphemously clutching a sacred book that he has probably never opened to read.
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