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<div class="gmail-content-header__container gmail-content-header__container-theme-standard"><div class="gmail-content-header__row gmail-content-header__title-block"><h1 class="gmail-content-header__row gmail-content-header__hed"><span style="font-weight:normal"><font size="1"><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/seeing-police-brutality-then-and-now">https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/seeing-police-brutality-then-and-now</a></font></span></h1><h1 class="gmail-content-header__row gmail-content-header__hed">Seeing Police Brutality Then and Now</h1></div><div class="gmail-content-header__row gmail-content-header__accreditation gmail-content-header__row--with-bottom-border"><div class="gmail-content-header__row gmail-content-header__dek"><b>We still haven’t fully recognized the art made by twentieth-century black artists.</b></div><div class="gmail-content-header__row gmail-content-header__byline"><div class="gmail-content-header__byline__content"><div class="gmail-bylines gmail-content-header__bylines gmail-content-header__bylines--with-publish-date"><p class="gmail-byline gmail-bylines__byline gmail-byline--author"><span class="gmail-byline__preamble">By </span><span><span class="gmail-byline__name"><a class="gmail-byline__name-link" href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/nell-painter">Nell Painte<span class="gmail-link__last-letter-spacing">r</span></a></span></span> - June 18, 2020</p></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail-lead-asset gmail-lead-asset--landscape gmail-content-header__lead-asset gmail-lead-asset--width-smallrule"><div class="gmail-lead-asset__content__media gmail-lead-asset__content__photo"><span class="gmail-responsive-asset gmail-lead-asset__media"><span class="gmail-lead-asset__media gmail-responsive-image"><img alt="Cops depicted as pigs" class="gmail-responsive-image__image" src="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5eea7f60e4c2fbaa9b04d00e/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Painter-PromoOnly.jpg" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="454" height="283"></span></span></div><span class="gmail-caption__text">Images,
like Emory Douglas’s depictions of cops as pigs, were central to the
Black Panther Party’s self-fashioning and mark its place in history.</span><span class="gmail-caption__credit">Art work by Emory Douglas / ARS / Art Resource<br></span><br><b>We
can see by now that the anti-police-brutality protests of 2020 differ
profoundly from those of the nineteen-sixties. And I do mean <em>see</em>.
We’re seeing many protesters who are not black and marches in more
places: large, small, urban, rural. These are protests ignited by <em>seeing</em>, seeing horrific videos of criminal acts again and again and again.</b></div></div><div class="gmail-content-background gmail-content-padding-top-large"><div class="gmail-"><div class="gmail-article__chunks gmail-article__chunks--hr-style-thin"><div class="gmail-grid gmail-grid-margins gmail-grid-items-2 gmail-grid-layout--adrail gmail-narrow"><div class="gmail-grid--item gmail-body gmail-body__container gmail-article__body gmail-grid-layout__content"><p>The
very fact of the sameness of police brutality then and police brutality
now intensifies an anger that remains totally justified. In the
sixties, the Black Panther Party arose to confront police brutality, and
the Panthers created a visual archive of justified outrage. Today’s
protesters know that their actions and the images they create will enter
the political history of confronting injustice. This has not been the
case for anti-police-brutality imagery created a half century ago. We
still haven’t fully seen the art made by those twentieth-century angry
black artists.</p><p>Back then, in California’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/what-to-stream-james-baldwins-tour-of-black-san-francisco-in-take-this-hammer">Bay Area</a>,
where I grew up, police violence, including the killing of an unarmed
black teen-ager in San Francisco, prompted the organization, in October,
1966, of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The late Huey P.
Newton and Bobby Seale, students at Merritt College, in Oakland, bonded
in reaction to an exclusionary version of California history that was
being taught at the school. Then, as now, lily-white history was a part
of the ideology supporting white-supremacist police.</p><p>I
belong to Newton and Seale’s generation, and I supported the B.P.P.’s
denunciation of brutal police. But I never joined up, for reasons
geographical (I lived in Temescal, in North Oakland, next to Berkeley,
where Kamala Harris grew up) and gendered (the B.P.P.’s gun-toting,
masculinist self-fashioning). When the Panthers moved into community
service and focussed on programs such as free breakfasts for children
and public health, women like Ericka Huggins came to the fore. Today’s
anti-racist activism, led by women, is beautifully feminist and eschews
macho posturing.</p><p>The B.P.P. announced a Ten-Point Program of goals
for social and economic justice, which surely inspired Black Lives
Matter’s six-point platform of demands half a century later, and, as it
matured, adopted an anti-colonial, internationalist stance. Nonetheless,
armed opposition to police brutality remained the Panthers’ heart and
soul, the mission that attracted thousands into their ranks. Social and
economic justice and the Panthers’ (legally carried) guns sounded like
communism to J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I., which soon designated the B.P.P. a
threat to national security. F.B.I. surveillance and infiltration,
together with killings at the hands of the local police, helped destroy
the organization by the early nineteen-eighties.</p><div class="gmail-callout gmail-callout--feature-small gmail-callout--has-top-border gmail-callout--feature-small-wide gmail-callout--content-type--asset-embed gmail-callout--content-type--image"><div class="gmail-asset-embed__asset-container"><span class="gmail-responsive-asset gmail-asset-embed__responsive-asset"><span class="gmail-asset-embed__responsive-asset gmail-responsive-image"><img alt="Two men in black berets and leather jackets with long guns and bullet bandoliers standing outside the Black Panther..." class="gmail-responsive-image__image" src="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5ee7abde4d1bb39b5ed211db/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/Painter-PoliceBrutalityArt01.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="306" height="454"></span></span></div><span class="gmail-caption__text">Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton at the Black Panther Party headquarters, in Oakland.</span><span class="gmail-caption__credit">Photograph from Alamy</span></div><p>Images
were central to the Black Panther Party’s self-fashioning and mark its
place in history. One of the best known is a photograph of Seale and
Newton in black berets and leather jackets, carrying guns, standing
outside the Black Panther Party storefront headquarters in Oakland. A
group of Panthers had been photographed carrying guns into the
California state capitol building, in Sacramento, to protest gun-control
measures attempting to curb their then existing right to carry arms
openly. It is likely that Howard L. Bingham took this photo, which
served as a recruiting poster, because he took many other photographs of
the Black Panthers. (In 2009, he published a collection of these photos
titled “Howard L. Bingham’s Black Panthers 1968.” Bingham died in
2016.) The image of black men enacting armed self-defense now resonates
as a counterweight to heavily armed white nationalists around the U.S.A.
demanding an end to public-health regulations meant to contain the
coronavirus pandemic.</p><p>Bingham’s
photographs capture Panther activities in a documentary spirit. More
intriguing to me now is the agitprop artwork of Emory Douglas, the
B.P.P. Minister of Culture, which was published in the <em>The</em> <em>Black Panther</em>
newspaper and plastered around the Bay Area as posters. Week after
week, Douglas’s searing wit visualized the urgency for action, such as
this image of children carrying photographs, one that shows police
victimizing a child:</p><div class="gmail-callout gmail-callout--feature-small gmail-callout--has-top-border gmail-callout--feature-small-wide gmail-callout--content-type--asset-embed gmail-callout--content-type--image"><div class="gmail-asset-embed__asset-container"><span class="gmail-responsive-asset gmail-asset-embed__responsive-asset"><span class="gmail-asset-embed__responsive-asset gmail-responsive-image"><img alt="Two children holding up newspapers that show police brutality" class="gmail-responsive-image__image" src="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5ee7abe7e0eb978773147608/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/Painter-PoliceBrutalityArt02.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="336" height="454"></span></span></div><span class="gmail-caption__text">A drawing by Emory Douglas, the Black Panthers’ Minister of Culture, shows children demanding an end to police brutality.</span><span class="gmail-caption__credit">Art work by Emory Douglas</span></div><p>Armed
women and mothers appeared frequently in Douglas’s work, protecting
their children and wearing natural hair. In this drawing, the police are
shown as agents of an unjust system of property owning:</p><div class="gmail-callout gmail-callout--feature-small gmail-callout--has-top-border gmail-callout--feature-small-wide gmail-callout--content-type--asset-embed gmail-callout--content-type--image"><div class="gmail-asset-embed__asset-container"><span class="gmail-responsive-asset gmail-asset-embed__responsive-asset"><span class="gmail-asset-embed__responsive-asset gmail-responsive-image"><img alt="A woman holding a child with a gun in her hand" class="gmail-responsive-image__image" src="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5ee7abd829f124f39ec6b292/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/Painter-PoliceBrutalityArt03.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="303" height="454"></span></span></div><span class="gmail-caption__text">An Emory Douglas poster shows a mother holding her child, and a gun.</span><span class="gmail-caption__credit">Art work by Emory Douglas</span></div><p>Inspired
by graphic design, woodcuts in particular, Douglas used bold black
lines and often just one color. He combined patterns like Ben-Day dots
and parallel lines, and added shading and layers to flattened images.</p><div class="gmail-cne-interlude-embed"><div class="gmail-cne-interlude-header">Video From The New Yorker</div><a class="gmail-cne-interlude-title-link" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" href="https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/george-floyds-death-sets-off-a-wave-of-protests"><div class="gmail-cne-interlude-title">George Floyd’s Death Sets Off a Wave of Protests</div></a></div><p>Douglas
also popularized “pigs” as the epithet for policemen, and he would show
“pigs” singularly or in twos or threes, to represent not only local
police but also the economic and political forces of war, Nixon,
capitalism, and colonialism. The big-bellied “pig” character was often
drunken and banged up, an emblem of the abuse of power; one image
defined him as “a low natured beast that has no regard for law, justice,
or the rights of people . . . a foul, depraved traducer, usually found
masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack.”</p><p>Right now, we
are angry because police brutality and racism are so old, and they keep
on happening. Art history needs to help us remember that our anger is
not new, that half a century ago an organization and its artist
confronted racial injustice resolutely.</p><p>Douglas’s work belongs to
American political history, but it should also figure in the history of
twentieth-century American art. His body of work is one of several
oeuvres needlessly missing from the art-history canon. Among the
missing, Charles White comes to mind immediately. My own narrative
history, “<a class="external-link" href="https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Black-Americans-African-American-Meanings/dp/0195137566?ots=1&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present</a>,”
is not an art history but contains a great deal of black art. Looking
there, I find other vital works by Elizabeth Catlett, Jeff Donaldson,
and Pat Ward Williams. The work of Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and
Howardena Pindell, artists now in their deep maturity, who are also in
“Creating Black Americans,” is only now becoming widely visible.</p><p>Here
is the art history for the moment that we are in, work that addresses
themes of anti-black violence and armed self-defense. Once this moment
passes, we will need an accessible art history of righteous anger, as
opposed to one that exiles these images to the margins. Why aren’t these
works part of the art-history canon? Some of the answer lies in the
definitions of fine art that prevailed during the twentieth century,
when this art was made. A pertinent example is the cranky, conservative,
influential <em>Times</em> art critic Hilton Kramer, who called black
art merely “social history” lacking “stringent esthetic criteria.” When I
was a student in art school, in the early two-thousands, I still
encountered such judgments. Art was supposed to be “autonomous,”
speaking only to itself; engaged, activist art was dismissed as mere
illustration.</p><p>Right now, the art-history canon presents the
nineteen-sixties as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, in images that
depict an America without racial conflict and that celebrate consumer
capitalism. Angry art inhabits a peculiar category of the art of
protest, one peripheral to the history of American art. Let us
recuperate the art that testifies to a long-standing, uncompromising
opposition to police brutality. This furious art belongs not only to
anti-racist heritage but also in the center of American art.</p><p>The
nineteen-sixties art world, like American society at large, was so
segregated that the absence of black artists in galleries and museums
was business as usual. That color bar gave rise to anti-racist art
organizations like Spiral, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, and
the Studio Museum in Harlem, in New York, and the National Center of
Afro-American Artists, in Boston, all intended to lower racial barriers.
The hard work of these institutions has weakened art-world exclusion
and discredited the outmoded distinction between art and social
criticism. Today, the work of younger black and engaged artists has been
widely appreciated as art history. But the twentieth-century
anti-racist art by Emory Douglas and others inspired by the Black
Panther Party and Black Power has hardly been rediscovered. It has not
made its way into the art-historical canon, which conveys both monetary
and cultural value. Douglas’s work is more easily found on tote bags
being sold on behalf of Black Lives Matter than in the high-priced
galleries and auctions that still decree which art matters.</p></div></div><div class="gmail-grid gmail-grid-margins gmail-grid-items-2 gmail-grid-layout--adrail gmail-narrow"><div class="gmail-grid--item gmail-body gmail-body__container gmail-article__body gmail-grid-layout__content"><p>In
the half century between these two eras of rebellion, between the
sixties and 2020, the color bar and sexism in American society weakened,
as we see in the diverse nature of the present uprisings. Today, women
are at the forefront, and many non-black people are in the streets. But
more work remains to be done, specifically in the realm of images. If
today’s anti-racist awakening is to resonate culturally and
art-historically, the art world still has a big job left to do: to
dismantle the color bar against twentieth-century black artists. Let us
recuperate the art that testifies to a long-standing, uncompromising
opposition to police brutality. This furious art belongs not only to the
anti-racist heritage but also in the center of American art.</p><p>Why,
you may ask, am I talking about cultural history in a moment of soaring
passion? Isn’t art history a matter for later on, for museums and
universities, when what we need now is action? True, art history is a
cultural matter, but it is a keeper of popular memory, a version of how
we see our past. American art history needs to acknowledge the art made
by angry black artists—as art. As American art.</p></div></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail-content-footer"><div class="gmail-row"><div class="gmail-grid gmail-grid-margins gmail-grid-items-2 gmail-grid-layout--adrail gmail-narrow"><div class="gmail-contributors gmail-contributors--no-bottom-line gmail-grid--item gmail-grid-layout__content"><div class="gmail-contributor-bio gmail-contributor-bio--align-left gmail-contributors__contributor-bio"><div class="gmail-contributor-bio__content"><div class="gmail-contributor-bio__bio"><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/nell-painter">Nell Painter</a> is an artist and the author of “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Old-Art-School-Memoir-Starting/dp/1640090614?ots=1&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50">Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over</a>” and “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/History-White-People-Irvin-Painter/dp/0393339742?ots=1&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50">The History of White People</a>” and other books of history.</div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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