6 reasons to critically question the anti-police art on display at ASU
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Art has a quality to prod and push us to see truths we otherwise avoid in our day-to-day lives.
It means to rouse us from the haze of the mundane, from our day-to-day sleepwalk through life’s little routines.
The playwright Edward Albee once challenged America to see itself in a liquored-up man and woman pushing through middle age to oblivion with fantasies they created to cope with their own dreary marriage.
Speaking to us through George and Martha (the same names as America’s first couple) Albee dares us to see ourselves for who we really are. When George asks Martha, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, she replies, “I am, George.”
Albee explained what George was really asking:
Are you “willing to live your life without false illusions?”
Art exhibit about race confronts illusions
One of America’s false illusions exposed by the heroic Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s was that for all its claims to leadership of the free world, America was a deeply racist country that denied freedom and opportunity to many people of color.
Today an exhibit at Arizona State University Art Museum through July 28 challenges us to confront our lingering illusions on race by bringing together some 500 of the hand-crafted signs, posters and art from the 2020 summer of protest.
Judging from the comments of the event organizers, the illusions are not merely those of white people.
“Twin Flames: The George Floyd Uprising from Minneapolis to Phoenix” challenges the metro Phoenix community to see the similarities between the May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd and another police killing that happened that same day in Phoenix.
The latter involved a state police trooper who shot and killed a 28-year-old Black man, Dion Johnson, who had been found sleeping in his car at Loop 101 and Tatum Boulevard in north Phoenix.
Johnson would later awaken and confront the trooper, who then shot him. After an investigation the Maricopa County attorney chose not to prosecute the lawman.
It shows how many Black people view police
Much of the ASU exhibit shows the perspective of the police through the eyes of Black people, who have a long history over centuries of suffering from police brutality.
The exhibit is meant to keep alive the sense of injustice provoked by the killing of George Floyd, said Jeanelle Austin, the executive director of the George Floyd Global Memorial in Minneapolis.
“This is how racism exists, by misremembering and dismembering the story,” Austin told The Arizona Republic’s Daniel Gonzalez. “Our work in preserving our own narrative and preserving this memorial and preserving the protests is to keep people from forgetting.
“The pendulum is swinging because that is what whiteness does — whiteness has ‘whitelash,’ ” Austin continued. “2020 was a huge year for exposing systemic injustices, not just racism but all kinds of -isms and inequities. And whitelash has been coming back and trying to close those doors.”
Organizer wants exhibit to start a discussion
Rashad Shabazz, a professor of African and African American studies at ASU who helped organize the exhibit, pointed to one of its recurring messages, and said, “We wanted to provide this table and chairs and give people an opportunity to sit and talk and for people to say, 'OK, you know, for me ...(Expletive) the police is really how I understand my lived experience.'”
He added, “My heartbeat races every time a cop is behind me.”
Thus, from beginning to end, the exhibit reflects the distrust of police officers who have a record of killing Black people over the years.
To get to the second floor of the art museum, you can take stairs which bear the names of 46 people killed by police in Maricopa County.
The last wall of the exhibit includes posters with signs that shout “FTP” and “F-12” or the same meaning fully spelled out: “F--- the police.”
You might have a different perspective of the police, Shabazz says.
“The point is, let’s sit down and have a conversation. This is what it means for me. This is what it means for you. And the real question is ... what does moving forward look like?”
6 frank questions to start the debate
I do appreciate ASU and the officials in Minneapolis bringing this exhibit to our city and inviting us to engage in conversation.
So, in that spirit, let me ask some frank questions:
There are numerous studies out there on police shootings. At least four conclude there is no racial bias in police shootings. The best known of these, conducted by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, an African American man, found that Black people were 23.5% less likely to be shot by police than white people. Why do you reject this data?
The most prominent policy to emerge from Black Lives Matter was “defund the police.” Even then presidential candidate Joe Biden seemed to toy with the idea for a time. Today Biden wouldn’t dare whisper the expression with an election approaching. Why do you think “defund” was so thoroughly rejected by the American people?
While African American trust in the police is about 13 points lower than the national average, distinct majorities of African Americans (56%) and Hispanics (64%) tell Gallup pollsters they have confidence in their local police force. Would you expect “f--- the police” to resonate with those majorities?
How concerned should Americans be that Black Lives Matter chapters celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel? “This wasn’t one fringe example,” Utah U.S. Rep. Burgess Owens, an African American man, said. “Twenty-six different BLM chapters throughout the country called the Hamas terrorist attack ‘a desperate act of self-defense.’ The BLM grassroots account called for the “entire apartheid system” (of Israel) to be ‘dismantled.’ ” Why has antisemitism found a home in BLM?
One of the strongest measures of racial attitudes in America is the Gallup poll on interracial marriage. In 1969, only 17% of white Americans said they approve of interracial intermarriage. By 2021, that had soared to 93%. Isn’t it time to acknowledge that America has made enormous progress on the issue of race?
Finally, how do you square the fact that no one ever proved that race was behind the murder of George Floyd? We know that from the lead prosecutor, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, an African American man. When “60 Minutes” asked him if Floyd’s death was a hate crime, Ellison said it was not. “I wouldn’t call it that because hate crimes are crimes where there’s an explicit motive, and of bias. We don’t have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd’s race as he did what he did.”
Thanks for starting this discussion. I anticipate a frank response that I promise I will honestly consider.
This is the beauty of art and a society that gives us the freedom to express ourselves. People of all different political and cultural perspectives can speak our minds, get feedback and learn from one another.
In America, this is how we confront and conquer our false illusions.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with the Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: ASU's George Floyd exhibit on race, police deserves some pushback
