Exploring Human Injustices Through Art

Slavery in the United States was central to the colonizer mentality that believed in consumption and accumulation as a divine right. Consumption and accumulation was about controlling land and its people, to have the world available to serve the white man. The belief that Europeans could go to a “New World” and start fresh was about conquering what already existed and claiming to be the founders. When I was a classroom teacher, my students would ask how come more enslaved people didn’t rebel. I did not know that there were constant rebellions: organized, spontaneous, large, and individual. Enslaved people ran, fought, outwitted, and organized against these colonial belief systems from the 1620s until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

One of the biggest forces that emerged from slavery in the United States is the police. The artists capture the impact of colonialism on policing in unique ways that highlight the accumulation of bodies killed by police and the ongoing ways in which police degrade and humiliate the people they capture. Policing was born out of a need to control the rapidly increasing number of enslaved Africans to suppress any act of rebellion. The law was and is used to enforce difference: one side of it being good and the other bad. Shoot first, ask questions later. We see this playing out time and again with no accountability for police violence.