STORIES OF BLACKNESS

Did you get it?

Though the drop is red, it relates to the notion of blackness. And that drop is not just a drop, it's a punctuation mark, a period, the definitive end to a statement.

It refers us back also to the history of concrete poetry, too; words as material things exemplifying the very concepts they express. A period, as you say, is a stopping point. How does this drop function then as a period? The period, made by letterpress type, is very carefully inked and then embossed into the paper. It is literally a period, yet disconnected from the letterforms on the opposite page.

A period signifies the end of something, a boundary. But if we think about codes of blackness, is there a definitive stopping point or boundary? Each panel, regarded in isolation, is a stopping point; but together they are moments within a spectrum. When you move from black to red, you establish the range of browns in between. This is a subtle reference to skin color: In that scale of black and red you establish, white comes in — or doesn't come in — as a third element.

It's excluded, in a way. Yes, visually as we move along the spectrum, black becomes brown, brown becomes red, and metaphorically red becomes blood — a measure of one's whiteness.

So there is no white in the panels, but it's implied, unspoken, floats like a ghost at the edges of the piece. What's visible and invisible?

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• Mexico and the United States; a study of subjects affecting their political, commercial, and social relations, made with a view to their promotion.
• Dimensions of Pain: Humanities and Social Science Perspectives (Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Health and Illness).
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• Do Ato Infracional à Luz dos Direitos Humanos (Portuguese Edition);

What's spoken and unspoken? Two human-scaled portraits of young black men. If you look at the faces directly, they're simply portraits. But look at them from an angle, askew, and text becomes visible. These Presence of Absence portraits address invisibility, being at once here and not here, physically present but not perceived — like Ellison's Invisible Man. To view the text, you must step to the side. Sidestepping is a particularly human gesture we make when we're assessing a situation, especially one perceived as dangerous.

These text-portraits implicate you, the viewer, obliging you to reflect on your own predispositions and automatic assumptions. So blackness, as you've been addressing it, is a kind of code, or a set of codes. There are codes of behavior, codes of thought, codes of appearance, gesture, even codes of sound, which are enacted and are readable.

There are cultural codes, understandings expressed in gesture, speech patterns, rhythms. Almost any black person can say it, except a black cop. It never should be spoken in mixed company. Certain brown people can say it but others can't. As black people, we use codes to regulate and measure ourselves, to define people, to regard our racialized selves. Two sides of the same coin. I remember the first time I was made aware of my blackness, as a young child. It was at a swimming pool.

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I was so happy. The water was blue, and I climbed up onto the diving board and leaped off. You know, the pure joy that only a kid can have in a pool on a hot summer's day. That was the first time I became aware of an outside perception of my blackness. Nobody ever talks about those times. Nobody ever talks about the first time you realized that you were white or the first time you realized you were a girl and not a boy. Those are profound psychological experiences.

Pool expresses my first realization that others see me differently than who I am. But how do we not reckon with it? And then, how do we? Looking back, I realize that, apart from my black armband episode, my survival strategy was to make myself as non-threatening as possible. I became so well-practiced in the art of not offending racist white people that I ceased to become outraged by them, at least when they affected me directly.

I knew how to enter a store, to make eye contact with someone who worked there, to smile and say hello as if to say: While shopping, I still assume that I am suspect. There was a moment in my adulthood when I decided that the present order is intolerable and a new world is both possible and necessary. In the grand scheme of things, my experiences of everyday racism are not that important. I am neither the most privileged nor most oppressed. I know that there are people of all stripes who are trying to survive on this planet with fewer resources than I have.

I am consistently inspired by the words of the early 20th-century socialist Eugene V Debs a white guy! I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. I am also inspired by the words of Malcolm X, who summarized the goals of the black movement as: Respect as human beings! The black masses want to not be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden.

They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettoes, like animals.

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5. Les Sarments dHippocrate : Prix du quai des orfèvres 2004 (Romanesque) (French Edition).
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They want to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men and women! Eugene Debs and Malcolm X are very different men from very different social contexts, and yet in my mind they are congruent. That message, to paraphrase activist Alicia Garza, is that the kind of equality black people need to be free is the kind of equality that will make everyone else free.

I write this as a black person who also knows the white American world. Not drunken Indians, not lazy blacks, not all of those negativities that I knew my children were going to hear. Not any of that. The closer that you look to white, the better it is. In , when segregation laws and the Ku Klux Klan were terrorising the southern United States, a group of African-American homesteaders travelled north to Alberta to find freedom and opportunity. The order was repealed, but the message was clear: Canada was not as friendly as they had thought.

Black immigration from the US almost ceased. With a horse team, axe, bucksaw, an axe and grubhole and clear out a bunch of land.

You can just picture it, eh? Mud, water and frogs. Then the kids come and try and poke fun. Because most everybody was black during that time. Shiloh Baptist Church, one of the oldest black Canadian churches in Canada, was established in Edmonton in During the Great Depression and World War II, more black families from rural communities like Amber Valley and Wildwood moved to the city of Edmonton for greater economic opportunity and found refuge within the church community.

Today, Shiloh still plays an important role for the descendants of those early settlers and new waves of immigrants from the Caribbean, East Africa and other parts of the world. When colour became an issue was when our cousins came up from the States. What about our culture? Over the years, civil and political unrest in some parts of Africa have sparked new waves of migration to Canada. Although the cities of Toronto and Montreal are still the first place of entry for most immigrants, many are choosing to move out west to Edmonton in search of better opportunities and better lives.

I was told by my counsellor that I would never make it to university. And she wanted me to go into a different route in life. There are some people who will always see her as an outsider. So I think she needs to know that and she needs to be able to defend that. So being black is one of the aspects that I can give to the country, that I can express myself in. And Canada allows you to do that, with multiculturalism.