Materializing a Gesture of Resistance

When the human body, a nation's flag, money, or a public statue is defaced, a strange surplus of negative energy is likely to be aroused from within the defaced thing itself. It is now in a state of desecration, the closest many of us are going to get to the sacred in this modern world.

—Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative

It is an interesting moment to reflect on the processes, strategies, and tactics through which one, as a citizen and an artist, engages in protest. Because protest always occurs in the aesthetic as well as the political register. Protest is an action or gesture—to occupy, to remove, to destroy—that must have an audience. A protest must be witnessed if it is to change the conversation, the trajectory of thought, the law, or the political context. It is a performance designed to be seen and heard.

It was just five weeks ago (as I write) that protests turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white supremacists clashed with counter-demonstrators over the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. A car driven by a member of the white supremacist group intentionally plowed into the crowd of anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring at least thirty-four others. This occurred at a "Unite the Right" rally that was organized against the backdrop of controversy over the removal of Confederate monuments throughout the country. Campaigns to eliminate monuments to the Confederacy from public spaces began in response to the 2015 mass shooting of nine African Americans at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Traditionalists (and white supremacists) objected to "erasing history," even though the memorials targeted for removal were not built during or immediately after the Civil War. They were created during the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights Movement as a means of intimidating African Americans and celebrating racism and oppression. These monuments performed their own version of erasure—concealing the violence of slavery and white supremacy under the cloak of a revisionist history. African Americans, anti-racists, and anti-fascists wanted them gone.

And when photos emerged of the alleged Emanuel AME Church shooter (an avowed white supremacist) posing with the Confederate flag, civil rights groups fought to end the practice of flying it on the grounds of their State House. Even the conservative Republican governor agreed, but only the legislature had the power to remove it. While lawmakers debated and stalled, in a powerful refusal of the Confederate legacy of racial intimidation and fear, Black civil rights activist Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole and cut down the Confederate flag. It was a carefully choreographed performance. Newsome and other activists designed the optics. They decided that a Black woman should be the one to cut down the flag and that a white man, activist James Tyson, would help her over the fence "as a sign that our alliance transcended both racial and gender divides"¹—a choice both political and aesthetic. Newsome and Tyson were arrested and the flag was replaced. Weeks later, it was finally removed by vote of the South Carolina House and Senate.

In his recent book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, Michael Eric Dyson states, "The only way to save our nation, and, yes to save yourselves [addressing so called white folk], is to let go of whiteness and the vision of American history it supports."² The removal of monuments and symbols that represent a deeply ingrained, white supremacist historical imaginary is one small step toward this "letting go."

But erasure is not the only aesthetic/political strategy. Last week in Central Park, a statue of Christopher Columbus was defaced—its hands stained with red paint and its pedestal scrawled with the words "Hate will not be tolerated - #somethingscoming." New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio condemned what he said was a criminal act of vandalism, but Daily Show host Trevor Noah disagreed: "… honestly, I don't know if you can even call this [End Page 286...