BUILT ON OUR BACKS
Look carefully at the image below. I've no doubt it wouldn't sell for millions in Sotheby's as a work of fine art, however I put it to you that as an expression of Black History, there are messages, if you like, that can be drawn from the text in context. The closer I study this image, the more I see. Even to the pale, fading background of what looks like a pallid outline of a map of Africa in the far background.
I found this picture on the internet. It's called "Built upon Our Backs" and it has had a profound effect on me.
The bloody, raw, inhumane but nonetheless vitally important reminder of the extreme cruelty and abuse endured by black people in slavery is set 'front and centre' (an irony in itself, contextually) against images of a particular statue, the further irony of which did not pass me by. More to the point, whose Liberty is the statue representing? The fields, the crops, the pockets of slave-owners filled with the dollars produced from the work of black slaves, at the cost of inhumane, yet accepted systems that kept black people oppressed and brutalised for centuries. Is the image created with dripping lines from the blood on the man's back and the red stripes on the flag to represent something?
The bloody, raw, inhumane but nonetheless vitally important reminder of the extreme cruelty and abuse endured by black people in slavery is set 'front and centre' (an irony in itself, contextually) against images of a particular statue, the further irony of which did not pass me by. More to the point, whose Liberty is the statue representing? The fields, the crops, the pockets of slave-owners filled with the dollars produced from the work of black slaves, at the cost of inhumane, yet accepted systems that kept black people oppressed and brutalised for centuries. Is the image created with dripping lines from the blood on the man's back and the red stripes on the flag to represent something?