This Is Not For You: An Activist's Journey of Resistance and Resilience by Richard Brown (review)

This book is a memoir of artist and activist Richard Brown, a native New Yorker who adopted Portland, Oregon, as his hometown after retiring from the Air Force. His prose is elegant yet conversational, with a poetic concentration of feeling and images. The short, compelling chapters tell a life story from childhood to later middle age with a skillful blend of narrative and flashback. The scope is the World War II era to the present. The book's major theme is the evolution of a brilliant man, equal parts artist and activist, whose work involves the central political themes of our time: racism in policing and in environmentalism. It tells deeply human stories with nuance and insight about what politics really is: how people treat each other every day. The text does an especially good job at describing how corruption in White-dominated military and police institutions manifests as racism and how one man — at first individually and later collectively — organized to create positive change. It describes Brown's experience of racism as being surveilled and second-guessed at nearly every turn in his life.

Brown was born in New York City in 1939, the first-born of five siblings who grew up in a stable and strict household with two hard-working parents. The opening chapters recount life in uptown Manhattan in the afterglow of the Harlem Renaissance, when Langston Hughes lived across the street from Brown's school, Sugar Ray Robinson drove around the neighborhood in his lavender Cadillac, and the 369th Harlem Hellfighters paraded down the avenue in military dress. Brown's mother, Agnes Brown, hailed from St. Croix and worked in a candy shop on the first floor of their building. She was the artist in the family, and her drawings and fashion designs entranced her son, as did a book of pictures by the experimental photographer William Mortensen. Richard Brown senior was a skilled mechanic by trade who ruled his household with stern discipline, including physical punishment of all its members. In retrospect, Brown views his parents' intense regulation of their children's lives as the best way they knew to protect them. He reflects candidly on the early deaths of Black men he knew who, lacking rules and discipline at home, were lost to drugs, gun violence, and police brutality. Brown studied art and photography at the School of Industrial Arts in midtown Manhattan. When his graduation date became compromised, however, conditions motivated him to join the Air Force at the earliest possible date, after he turned seventeen in February 1956.

Brown's training, travels, and confrontations with racism in the Air Force compose the center chapters of the memoir. From basic training in Lackland, Texas, to tech training in Illinois, assignments in Oklahoma, the Philippines, Michigan, and Germany, Brown had to choose friends and allies wisely in systems that always held him in suspicion first and asked questions later, if at all. Brown served twenty years, knowing that he would exit still a young man, prepared to devote himself to art. His first job out of the service, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, brought him to the Pacific Northwest in the late 1970s. Brown's entry into Portland centered on his relationship with a lady friend, and his photography provided another kind of passport to community. Brown showed his pictures at church-based venues and neighborhood gatherings. At one of these settings, he met Kathryn Bogle, a widely published journalist, professional social worker, and leading figure in the African American community. At the time, Bogle was writing for the Portland Observer, and she appreciated Brown's talent and got him connected to the paper. Brown was the staff photographer and a major presence at the Observer for the next fifteen years. An engaging sample of photographs is included in this memoir.

Each section of the memoir...