Racial Justice and Anti-racism Resources

Artist and art historian Michael Harris investigates the role of visual representation in the construction of black identities, both real and imagined, in the United States. He focuses particularly on how African American artists have responded to--and even used--stereotypical images in their own works. Harris shows how, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, racial stereotypes became the dominant mode through which African Americans were represented. These characterizations of blacks formed a substantial part of the foundation of white identity and social power. They also, Harris argues, seeped into African Americans' self-images and undermined their self-esteem.

Sight Unseen explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through a nimble analysis of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, Martin A. Berger illustrates how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly guides what European Americans see, what they accept as true, and, ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact.

This dynamic collection of Black voices works like an incantation of origin, healing, and imagination. Born from a series of conceptual art exhibitions, the perspectives gathered here are no where near monochromatic. "Craving nuance over stereotype, we sought out black children, black youth, LGBTQ+ black folks, unsheltered black folks, incarcerated black folks, neurodivergent black folks, as well as differently-abled black folks." Each insists on their own variance and challenges every reader to witness for themselves that Black Lives (and Imaginations) Matter.

In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.

Shawn Smith sets out to examine works of contemporary art, only to find that many of the works refer back to the past, to photography's many intersections with the history of racial justice in the U.S. Smith focuses on flashpoints in that history -- spanning from the abolitionist movement, to the Civil War, lynching, and mass incarceration-- to mark the roles that photography has played in documenting the exigencies of Black life, and as a tool for resisting those racial regimes. For each of these moments, Smith shows how contemporary photographers utilize their medium as a way to recall, revise, or amplify the relationship between racial politics in the past and in the present. She argues that the tendency of African-American photographers and other artists to return to the archive of early photography does not simply point to the usefulness of early photography as document of the past, but to the recursive nature of photography itself. This study expands our theories of photography and memory by arguing that the recursive temporality of photography is central to its role in recording and remembering history. It also asserts that photography is an invaluable tool for critical practice of racial justice