I think that seeing the white supremacy that has always been here in this country is a little like learning to see as a beginning painter.
“See this is how it starts,” says my spouse Janyce. She is standing at the end of the bed pointing her finger in my direction.
“How what starts?” I say.
She looks over at her pillow to my right and points her finger at my cellphone that I tossed on top of it.
“There’s your phone on my pillow. Yesterday it was your toast plate,” she says.
“No, that’s not true,” I say.
“I found crumbs under my pillow last night,” she says.
“You didn’t,” I say.
“I did,” she says.
It’s Saturday morning and I’m drinking coffee in bed and staring at a mostly blank computer screen. I didn’t get much writing done this week and I didn’t get much work done either. Like everyone else, I spent too many hours tuning in to broadcast news, scrolling through one news article after another, reading texts and posts on social media, and feeling every bit as sad, outraged, and self-righteous as all of my friends. This is not the America I know. I didn’t vote for this incompetent, hateful president. This has nothing to do with me.
But just like it did back in June, when every insulated white person like myself stared in disbelief at the video images of a white cop with his knee on the neck of a black man on the ground, I now watched in rapt horror as a group of mostly white men strong-armed their way past the Capitol Police, the same police who basically let them go by and then helped many of them to leave. I stared at my screen contrasting this image, with the image that is circulating all over social media, of the national guard several rows deep on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the peaceful protesting of the Black Lives Matter marchers. I look at this and think, “What is going on? How can this be happening here?
I have an artist friend who is a landscape painter. Lately, he has been painting sky-scapes, mostly clouds. There is a lot I like about these paintings. They are mesmerizing. They are majestic. They are symbolic of grand notions and grand gestures, reminiscent of the sublime, and evocative of great power. They are also just clouds.
We know clouds, right? We see them all the time. Big white puffy clouds in the sky. We grew up with them. We have been immersed in an entire mythology of clouds all of our lives and we think we see them when we see them. Except—and here’s the great thing about these paintings— maybe we don’t. Not really.
Two details from Suspension (rising), 2020 Oil on Panel by Peter Roux
When I first learned to paint with oils, I took private lessons with a painting teacher. I was instructed to paint a white tablecloth on a wood table laid out with a bowl of apples. I was simply copying a flat picture reproduction of another painting. I would reach for the tube of white paint and the instructor who was standing behind me watching would say, “Put down the white and look again.”
“But I don’t know what you mean, the table cloth is white. How am I going to paint a white tablecloth without white paint?” I said.
“Look again,” she said.
It was a fine way to start. It was the first step to help me to understand how to use a brush, how to make a stroke, how to feel the properties of paint on canvas. It was also the very first layer in teaching me how to see. Painting something that is white is the most difficult thing to do until you “get it,” until you learn to look at what is really there and not what you have in your mind about what you think you know. It is the first layer of the many layers to come in learning to see like an artist.
It’s easy to be outraged and incredulous about what transpired on Capitol Hill this week, but it’s much more difficult to face my own complicity. The writer Lyz Lenz says, “forgetting and ignoring the violence right in front of us was how we got here in the first place. Republicans and Democrats were too easy to dismiss Trump’s words as simple rhetoric, even as violence by white supremacists increased.”
I think that seeing the white supremacy that has always been here in this country is a little like learning to see as a beginning painter.
My friend Peter’s cloud paintings may be about many things, but they are also about paint. When he takes a brush filled with a mustard color paint and smears it onto the left side of the canvas, essentially creating another layer on top of his painted rendition and representation of a cloud, he might be saying: This isn’t a cloud. This is a painting. Look again. Question what you think you know.
What has Congress learned this week? I was just sent this.
"I don't feel sorry for congress at all. Oh, I'm sorry, did you have to hide under your desk because of guns? Wah wah wah. I've only had to do that six times since kindergarten. School is terrifying. Maybe now they'll pass gun reform." - one of my 9th grade students, today
@AlisaValdesRod1
See the adults cowering this week: https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/tiktok-use-trump-capitol-riots-gun-control
Those politicians never passed gun control when it was children who were cowering.
As far as I can tell people don't learn until they experience a thing themselves.