Three of us went to a University of West Virginia art gallery in Morgantown for a gallery talk by an English professor. The exhibit was of William Kentridge’s linocuts on Britannica World Language Dictionary pages. He is a South African artist I had never heard of and the focus was on two large paintings of black trees and bushes with a backdrop of words and explanations that were only legible inches away.
We were early and I began talking to a man whose name was Michael I later learned. He was an English professor who published a book on Ralph Ellison last year. Because of my work on racial healing, I was immediately interested in sharing ideas about books we had read. He mentioned Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and I told him I had just started reading it but had read Kendi’s most recent book How To Be An Antiracist and highly recommended it. I also shared that I had recently also read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want To Talk About Race and both had given me a lot to think and feel about.
I learned that Michael grew up in Blacksburg, VA, home of Virginia Tech, where his father was a psychology professor. In fact, his father still lives in his childhood home there and only very recently retired from teaching at the age of 79. He remarked that his father has more energy than he does. Possibly having to do with the fact that he’s in his late 40’s with a four-year old daughter who has boundless energy. His wife recently received a prestigious award as a librarian and he was confused why people were congratulating him on his wife’s award. He had done nothing to earn it—perhaps a tongue-in-cheek way to highlight dubious social norms.
After the talk I liked the idea that Michael and I had spoken explicitly about racism and white privilege while Kentridge’s works repressed explicit references to South Africa’s history of apartheid and white supremacy.
