“Racism requires ignorance”: How art and culture can help in final racial discrimination

“Ignorance enables racism, but racism requires ignorance. It requires not to know the facts,” says Sarah Lewis, an associate professor of African and African American studies and justice there, which connects the research, art and culture to promote capital and justice.

Mrs Lewis was at the UN headquarters for an event marking Last week’s international day to remove racial discrimination.

In an interview with UN newsAna Carmo, discussed the key intersection of art, culture and global actions for resolving racial discrimination in facing current challenges.

The interview is arranged in length and clarity.

UN News: How can art contribute and raise awareness of racial discrimination and inspiring the action according to its elimination?

Sarah Lewis: Someone I grew up from the United Nations, only ten blocks. As a young girl, I became interested in narratives that define who counts and who belongs. Narratives that conditions our behavior, narratives that enable the implementation of laws and norms.

And what I learned is the work of narratives over the centuries through the power of culture. We are here to celebrate a large part of the political work done through different countries, but none of that work is binding and lasting without messages sent through the entire built environment, sent through the power of monuments.

One of the Thinkers in the United States who first focused on that idea was a disturbed leader of the Abolitionist Leaders Frederick Douglass and his speech Images in progressSupplied in 1861. At the beginning of the American Civil War, it offers a draft of how we must think about the function of the culture for justice.

He did not fix at the work of any artist. He was focused on perception changes that happen in each of us, when we are faced with a picture that clearly clearly the injustices we didn’t know if they do.

UN news: This year also signifies 60. Anniversary International Convention on Removing All Forms of Racial Discrimination. How do you think societies can really deal with these historical struggles for racial justice, especially in the context where racial discrimination is still deeply rooted?

Sarah Lewis: We speak at the moment in which we changed the norms around what we teach, which is in our curriculum in countries around the world. We are at the time where there is a feeling that it can be learned by slavery, for example, as useful, for skills that (IT) offered enslaved.

When you ask what nations can, We need to focus on the role of education. Ignorance allows racism but racism requires ignorance. This requires not to know the facts. When you come see how slavery, for example, was abolished, but converted into different forms of systemic and lasting inequality, realize that you have to act.

Without the work of education, we cannot join, protect and implement norms and new policies and contracts we advocate here today.

UN news: Talk about the power of education and this idea that we need to change narratives. How can we provide as societies that narratives and boasts really change?

Sarah Lewis: That education is important, the question is related, how best to educate? And not just educate only the work of faculty and universities and curricula of all kinds, We educate yourself through narrative messages in the world all around us.

What can we do on a personal, daily basis, leader, or not, is to ask questions: what we see and why we see it? Which narratives are transmitted in society that define who counts and who belongs? And what can we do about it if it needs to change?

We all have this particular, precise role to play in securing only the only world in which we know that we can all create.

UN news: When you were undergraduate studies at Harvard, you mentioned that you noticed exactly that, that something was missing and that you had questions about what you didn’t teach you. How important is it to include the subject of visual representation in schools, especially in the United States?

Sarah Lewis: Silence and deletion cannot be submitted in states working to ensure justice around the world. I’m happy to go to extraordinary schools, but I found that so much left out of what I was taught, not through any design or any individual culprits, but decided and decided that were more common than others.

I really found out about it through art, right through understanding and thinking through what society approaches us is that we should focus on the meaning of pictures and artists who are important.

I wrote a book ten years ago – effective – effective – failure, in our failure in resolving these narratives that are omitted. And in many ways you can see, the idea of ​​justice as society is calculated with failure.

Justice requires the humility of all of us to admit how wrong we were. And that humility is that educator, that the student has it and it is a holding that we all need to adopt as citizens to recognize what we need to point out today.

UN news: Speak in your book about the role of ‘almost failure’ as near victory in your own life. How can we all see that somewhat progress is achieved, achieving the elimination of racial discrimination in societies, and do not feel won by failure?

Sarah Lewis: How many movements for social justice began when we recognized failure? When we admitted that we were not wrong? I would argue that everyone was born of that realization. We can’t be defeated. There are examples of men and women who enjoy how we do it.

I’ll tell you a quick story about one. His name was Charles Black Jr, and we are here today, partly because of his work in the United States. In the 1930s he went to the dance party and found himself so that he fixed the power of this trumpet.

It was Louis Armstrong, and he never heard of him, but He knew at that time that because of the genius coming out of this black man, that racial segregation in America must be wrong – that he is wrong.

He then began to walk towards justice, became one of the Brown’s Committee on the Education Committee, which helped in the United States and forced to nude Columbia and Yale.

We need to find ways to allow ourselves not to allow that feeling of failure to win us, but to continue. There are countless examples I could offer in that vein, but the story of Charles Black Jr. is the one that shows the catalytic force of that recognition and the internal dynamics that is smaller, the most private encounter and experience that often leads to public forms of justice today.

Listen to the full interview at SoundCloud: