Lynching in American Art | Indigenous knowledge in the classroom | Symbols of Conquest | Reflections of Monday Night Football and Las Vegas

The Legacy of Lynching is a collaboration between the museum and the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, presenting racial histories we’ve long been asleep to.

A video interview with Anthony Ray Hinton, a man wrongfully convicted of murder after being framed by a racist detective, makes the link between lynching and the death penalty.

Kara Walker, “Burning African Village Play Set with Big House and Lynching” (2006) installation view, with performance stills by Dread Scott in the background

Dora Dee Johnson, a woman whose grandfather was lynched in South Carolina in 1916, displays family photos of her grandparents.

“Our silence is creating a burden,” said civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson at the launch of The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America at the Brooklyn Museum. “We’ve got to do something to get closer to freedom, and that means talking about some things we haven’t talked about.” The exhibit, which runs through October 8, is a collaboration between the museum and Stevenson’s nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and it reckons with racial histories we’ve long been asleep to.

It’s striking to find no explicit photographs — no horror images, for instance, of police handcuffs on lynching victims’ wrists — at The Legacy of Lynching, a choice the curators made to approach the topic respectfully, according to the Brooklyn Museum website. It’s a haunting absence, one that resists the spectacle that has historically conferred lynching with such power. Yet The Legacy of Lynching comes at a time when subtlety barely perks the ears of those who most need to hear and understand. Today, resurgent white nationalists are rehearsing their own unsubtle symbols, from the casually placed noose to the tightly clutched torch. One wonders whether we need stronger historical images as a counterpoint.

“They took off the white robe and put on the black robe,” says Hinton. With EJI’s legal assistance, he was exonerated after 30 years in prison.

The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America continues at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Pkwy, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn) through October 8. 

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“What have we failed to know and at what cost?” An education professor draws upon Indigenous literature to support a personal journey into classroom decolonization. (Top Photo)

READ: How I am learning to include Indigenous knowledge in the classroom

 

 

 

 

Last night on Monday Night Football, one team came out of the tunnel with a racist mascot on their jerseys and helmets, and the other team’s fans were mimicking throwing tomahawks and singing some sort of pathetic war whoop. Both of the teams’ owners seemed fine with it. No one in the broadcast booth said anything. There were no tweets from President Trump about it. And all of the sponsors and advertisers like GMC, Geico, several beer companies and many other mainstream corporations (both foreign and domestic) gladly hawked their wares throughout the entire event.

This all happened less than 24 hours after a white guy shot his fully automatic weapon into a crowd of people, killing at least 59 people and injuring 527 in a horribly evil and incredibly tragic event in Las Vegas. But throughout the day most news organizations referred to this shooting as the deadliest mass shooting in the history of America.

Apparently, the media forgot about the massacre at Wounded Knee, which left 350 dead, or the massacre at Sand Creek which killed nearly 200 men, women, and children from the Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes. Or perhaps they only meant massacres for which the U.S. Congress DIDN’T award Congressional Medals of Honor.

GOOD READ: Reflections of Monday Night Football and Las Vegas – Native News Online

Gun violence kills about 90 people every day in the United States, a toll measured in wasted and ruined lives and with an annual economic price tag exceeding $200 billion. For many years, scholars have explored the possible ties between mental illness and violence. They have found that most people with a serious mental illness are not violent, that mental illness is not a strong risk factor for homicide. READ MORE

Tom Petty wished he hadn’t used Confederate flag on 1985 tour (click)Late rock icon Tom Petty once admitted he wished he hadn’t featured a Confederate flag at past concerts — 30 years after he prominently displayed the controversial Southern symbol throughout his 1985 tour.

The Gainesville, Fla., native — who died Monday at 66, a day after going into cardiac arrest — told Rolling Stone in 2015 that he regretted using the flag during shows on his “Southern Accents” tour, contending he was “ignorant” about its true meaning.

Some look at the flag, which was flown by the South during the Civil War, as a symbol of racism.

“The Confederate flag was the wallpaper of the South when I was a kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida. I always knew it had to do with the Civil War, but the South had adopted it as its logo,” he told the music outlet shortly after South Carolina officials opted to remove the flag from their statehouse.

Tom Petty’s death draws attention to dangers of cardiac arrest

So much news, so much tragedy, so much history… Be well my friends. Hug your children.  Rest in Peace Harry and Tom. Lara/Trace