Yes, I know the meme, the maxim, the critique of the neighborhood that has more Black Lives Matter signs in it than it has black residents. Our area is - as prosperous neighborhoods go - more complexly diverse than some, because it's LA; because of the number of entertainment/music people in the district. But the question is there: how best, at the moment, to show, publicly, one's support? I can't help but feel that putting up a sign is a little self-congratulatory; an illusion of doing something (though, of course, I feel solidarity with whoever those neighbors might be). Yet it does offer visibility - even as contributing to bail funds, or the ACLU, is almost certainly of more use. The concept of utility, though, seems not quite right, or adequate: "much more effective"?
Similarly, what can I usefully write - and yet to stay silent is not to bear witness, or at least is to take the privileged (if unacknowledged) position of stepping back, to appear to be choosing not to see - even as I spend whole chunks of the day seething with various kinds of anger; as CNN, in the background, shows people being arrested and zip-tied in Hollywood (and no, during a pandemic, I am not going out to demonstrate: I know I'm more use alive than dead when it comes to working for social justice). At least, as a result of Unforeseen Circumstances, I get to teach a timely course on Representing Democracy in US art 1750-1893 next semester - that will certainly involve some very interesting choices and emphases to be made, as I have fun constructing a syllabus that may actually, obliquely, count as some kind of contribution ...
(... the above written to the sound of large numbers of sirens, and helicopters, outside ...heading to Glendale??)
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