In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space, by Irvin Weathersby Jr. Part travel memoir, part political and historical art criticism, and part soul-baring about white supremacy, this debut book by a Black author trying to grasp how to deal with public art and racial trauma. He starts with the easy-to-grasp: Confederate monuments in New Orleans coming down in the wake of the George Floyd protests. But he moves from there through his own life and Black American history to the presentation of history in plantations to the different presentations of Black history and stories in modern Black art.
The sections of the book about the Confederacy were deeply personal to me, a white woman with Confederate slaveholder ancestors who attended a school with a Johnny Reb mascot. Weathersby’s unpacking of the effects of white-centered Confederate and slavery-related public history on Black Americans recontextualized discussions around the mascot change at my school. But the discussion of Wounded Knee, Mount Rushmore, and New York also led me to stories I lacked context for and needed the foundation Weathersby offered.
Weathersby also discussed white myth-making in public art and history with various interested parties of all backgrounds in places he visited. Black, white, and Native Americans all offer insights on white supremacist myths around their sites of interest. Weathersby’s questions elicit thoughtful answers from them that in turn elicit reconsideration of the old civil history of the United States. At the same time, Weathersby’s interviews and commentary demonstrate that there’s no single answer to how to approach America’s racist history. What some minoritized Americans find helpful will harm others.
As with other books I’ve read since January, I find it hard not to reconsider the effect of the second Trump administration on the subjects of interest to Weathersby. Confederate naming is back for military bases; DEI is out and restoring so-called truth to American history is in; white supremacy is federal policy. The lessons of In Open Contempt will show the thoughtful reader the ways art and popular history could support both the Trumpist view of America and the alternatives offered by politicians and commentators with other goals and viewpoints. We don’t need to have suffered racist trauma to understand the messages conveyed in art and public space.