Sarah Lewis on “Aesthetic Force” as a Path Toward Justice

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Sarah. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

SARAH LEWIS: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be with you.

SB: Let’s just get right into it and dive right into your extraordinary new book, The Unseen Truth, which I urge all of our listeners to read and just go to their local bookstore and buy immediately. [Laughs] You don’t say it explicitly in the book, but it’s really as much a book about time as it is about image-making, visuality, and the construction of race. Could you start by speaking to the role of time in this text? And also, how do you think about the book from a time perspective?

SL: Mmm. First, thank you for that. “It takes so long for us to see.” That’s a line that concludes part of the book, stated to me by an extraordinary figure. I won’t spoil it. He was referring to how long it takes for us to see the construction of race and sight in the United States. I think we live with a mode of seeing that’s been fashioned by how much race structures all of our interactions, such that we don’t take the time to consider how long it’s taken for us to arrive at what is not a natural mode of engaging with the world.

This book looks at a moment that’s been long forgotten—I think, willfully buried—in which you could see, vividly, figures from Woodrow Wilson to Frederick Douglass to P.T. Barnum—see the fictions at the basis of this entire regime of racial hierarchy and domination, acutely. Then, over time, over decades, and even centuries, fashion ways to cover up these lies at the basis of this regime that has fooled us into believing that there could be any such thing as racial superiority and racial hierarchy. The book looks at a vivid moment in time through which to understand how long it has taken for us to build up this regime.

SB: In the book’s introduction, you note, “The project of modernity requires that we modulate our understanding of how race transformed what we even call vision. Race, as W.J.T. Mitchell notes, is a medium and a frame, ‘something we see through.’ It is ‘a frame, a window, a screen, or lens, rather than something we look at.’” And in the book you effectively—and by that I mean very effectively—go on to show how, from maps to paintings to photographs, race was formed in the United States. You refer to this as “conditioned sight” or “visual conditioning.”

SL: Mm-hmm.

SB: So, big question here, but where did your idea for this book begin? And how did you go about unearthing what you did, evolving it from there? Because it was a decade in the making, but I imagine the roots of this go back very far.

SL: Yes. Actually, a few things. On the way over, I was considering this question, not knowing that you would ask it. And I thought back to a quote that I think of often. Toni Morrison states that “the function of racism, the very serious function [of racism], is distraction.” It forces you to constantly explain things over and over again that one need not do. What that does is it robs you of time, because you’re in this Sisyphean effort constantly. When I decided to write the book, I realized that I had stumbled across a moment that caused that act. I landed in the archives, I was at Yale, I was a young graduate student, and came across an image that confused me and then arrested me. It was a photograph, it looked like Angela Davis, but white, taken by the most famous photographer in the nineteenth century, Mathew Brady.

I started to see these images in a constellation of archives. I didn’t understand what was happening, who these women were, and I learned that they were the most popular spectacle in the nineteenth century. Why? Because they embodied the very lie, the very fiction of white racial supremacy, and P.T. Barnum exploited it. He made his money back from this bankrupt state he was in through them.

SB: Yeah, that fascinated me in the book where you’re writing about Barnum basically running a shabby, shady business that’s about to fall apart. And it was primarily this “Circassian Beauty,” as he called it, that really turned his lot around.

SL: Exactly. Exactly. And he launches this spectacle at the end of the Civil War, in 1865. But for decades after that, from New York, to you name it, Springfield, even to the West Coast, they were the most popular sideshow performers.

SB: It makes me think very differently about my childhood experiences of going to the Barnum & Bailey Circus.

SL: I know, same here. What was I really a legacy of? What was I connected to?

SB: Like eating snow cones? It’s just a different—

[Laughter]

SL: No. I know, and I really enjoyed it then. But I’m glad I was attuned to understand that he was a critical truth-teller, as much as he’s now seen as this fabulator and con man. He in fact was able to look at these aspects of society that no one else wanted to address, put them before the public, and say, “What have we here?”

SB: There’s a little bit of uncanniness—and I don’t really want to talk about President Trump here, or former President Trump here—but there is an uncanniness between former President Trump and P.T. Barnum. It came into my head while reading your book.

SL: Mm-hmm. God, what to say. Well, one thing that is core for understanding American life and this book is that we have an almost impossible task in American democracy in describing who we are, because this country is based upon the unspeakable. This tension between slavery and freedom requires that we fashion a narrative to make sense of the incomprehensible. And one of the foundational tenets of the book that I think we also just need to understand in American democracy is that we haven’t done this solely through laws and norms. We’ve created these narratives through the work of culture. 

I’ve dealt with this in the Vision & Justice project, but The Unseen Truth tackles it in a different dimension, and we’re living with the outgrowth of it through our presidential politics. We’re living with the failure to tackle the fictional narratives. We have shored up as fact to legitimate the extension of the Lost Cause narrative that became the legacy of white supremacy. So, here we have cognates between a Barnum and a Trump for many reasons. But here, I think, we’re mainly able to see the importance of cultural narratives for racial policy in American life.

SB: One of the primary characters in your book, at least early on, is President Woodrow Wilson. Could you explain the role he plays in all of this?

SL: This is really part two of an answer to your first question. I stumbled across this footnote in a scholar’s book about Woodrow Wilson that I thought was almost impossible. So I tracked it down. And it led to really writing this book with a different level of stakes than I would’ve if I’d just seen the P.T. Barnum[–commissioned] Mathew Brady photograph of the “Circassian Beauties.” I learned that Woodrow Wilson, at the end of World War I, requested an official report about the look of a woman from the Caucasus region, from his chief of staff of the Army. And why? You would think he would have other things to do. The question for me became, what was so fragile regarding this knowledge, what was so in need of being shored up that he wanted a report about women from the so-called “homeland of whiteness” in that moment?

So this is a period of the resurgence of the KKK. It’s a period in which you’re seeing monuments erected to support white supremacy in the United States. It’s a period in which you wouldn’t think there was any nervousness about the racial project and its regime. What I found is that there was a deep level of nervousness about the illegitimacy of racial domination, racial hierarchy. The report was meant to offer evidence to push back against those concerns. 

The project, though, continued. I don’t think I would’ve written the book if I’d just found that anecdote and was able to understand its importance. We find its extension in the policies that he enacted that instantiated segregation, and that led to many of the policies we are still contending with today. The unspeakable nature of where we are as a society was understood by him. The unspeakable nature of building up a history of domination on a fiction was understood by a scholar, not just a president, like Wilson.

SB: Yeah, first president with a Ph.D., right?

SL: That’s right. Professor at Princeton. He was very well aware of the history of the Caucasus region. He wrote in [A History of the American People] about this legendary resistance leader named [Imam] Shamil, who was an icon in the nineteenth century. So he understood its role, the region’s role, in the formation of race. He ends up creating this regime that’s a precursor to racial profiling in, what I call racial detailing, a means of stating the unspeakable without outright decree. He finds ways to use culture to state what policy alone couldn’t, because it’s so odious.

SB: And there were others who were obviously extremely knowledgeable—not only knowledgeable about the region, but they went to it. George Keenan, the diplomat and historian. The poet Langston Hughes.

SL: Mm-hmm.

SB: They both detailed their time in the Caucasus region, effectively attempting to, as you put it, “write the record.” But ultimately, this was almost to little or no avail, at least over time.

SL: Yeah.

SB: Maybe initially some people read it, understood, “Oh, this is fictitious, what’s happening here with our understanding of the region.” But that disappeared.

SL: Yeah, yeah. The question becomes: When will a society admit that a fact is truly a fiction if it serves the majority? Those figures go. I decided to go myself with Nell Painter to the Caucasus region, writing the book, to see for myself if I had that moment of revelation. And we did. We came across many individuals who had no idea that the region had been used as a term to legitimate our racial regime here. Those who did know learned about it from the United States. They would come, they would tick a box that said “Caucasian.” 

They had no idea what it really meant. They thought it meant that they were from the Caucasus. [Laughs] But there are these figures who try—and it’s quite, I think, poignant in writing it—who try to come back to the United States and say, “Stop! Stop! This is all a lie!” And, no one listens. Even in the preface to Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, James McCune Smith tries to tell people. And, at that time, certainly no one wanted to listen.

SB: Most anyone born in the twentieth century, basically at one time or another, if you’re white, the only option of the box to tick says “Caucasian.”

SL: Yeah.

SB: And, what does that mean? That skewed view of—not just the world, but reality. Governmental documents, school applications….

SL: Mm-hmm. The terms amnesia and colorblindness are often used in society to understand where we are.

Part of the motivation to continue writing the book—because I extended the book after making a few discoveries—was that I wanted to make clear how willful and how intentional our policy, whether it’s educational or political, has been in mounting tactics to ensure that we don’t see these fictions. And those permeate the most seemingly benign areas of life—the teaching of geography in schools, for example. That’s one of the clearest ways you see it in the early twentieth century, nineteenth century. But that’s what we’re really living with today, these unseen tactics that we’ve found to cover up these moments of revelation.

SB: Many historians and scholars have looked at the evolution of the term “Caucasian” and its fabrication. You cite many of them. The fabrication of these notions around whiteness, which as you note—I feel like it was this breakthrough of your scholarship in a way that, of course, you address, and you acknowledge, and you write about all of that. But you go a step further in drawing this line between the Caucasian War and the Civil War. 

And, I mean, you note—and, I can’t find it anywhere else, so I believe this to be true—that there’s never really been any scholarship on that until this book, which is so remarkable. Tell me about this research, and your findings, and what led to you drawing that specific line, which, as you present, it seems so obvious.

SL: Yes. To the best of my knowledge, that is true. And it’s what created, I think, the courage that I had to summon to write this book. I am so grateful to have extraordinary Civil War scholars as colleagues—Drew Kaplan Faust, for example. And also colleagues who have written about the Caucasus region, but to find in the primary material—newspapers, for example—in the nineteenth century, that there was a phenomenon and an understanding about the importance of the Caucasian War during the Civil War, but to see no one had written on it, confused me for a long time. I was a first-year doctoral student at Yale in art history finding this. For a while, I thought, “Well, there just must be someone. I just haven’t found them.”

SB: Yeah.

SL: But no, and there’s a gift in that. I think when you as a scholar stumble on something, you have to ask yourself whether it’s being given to you because it’s yours to mine and to deliver or not. I realized over time that I’ve been given a certain set of skills to be able to address this lost history—hidden history—in American life. And that main skill was understanding the importance of culture for political life. Part of, I think, the reason why it was missed is because it didn’t operate primarily through literature. It was really operating through spectacle and through imagery.

Images that are now in museums from the MFA Boston to the Metropolitan Museum show this history. For example, walking past—I was just really strolling trying to check out another show—and I went past the Arms and Armor collection, and there’s a whole section called Caucasian Arms and Armor. I was like, “What is this? And when did we get this? And why is it called Caucasian?”

Because in America, you’d think that would mean “white armor,” but that’s not what it means. So I started to realize, Okay. The collecting practices of institutions offer us the evidence of Americans’ interest in the Caucasian War. P.T. Barnum does; the photographic history of someone like Mathew Brady does. And that created a way to tessellate and to triangulate around this history to be able to present it in a legible and clear way on the page.

SB: Yeah. So it was really your experience, and work—and scholarship as an art historian specifically—that led to this line or connection point?

SL: Yeah, yeah. I don’t think I would’ve written it, though, if not for the contemporary urgency of understanding it, because it’s a work of scholarship, but it’s meant to also help the general public in our conversations about race.

SB: We haven’t touched on him yet, but another major figure in your book is Frederick Douglass, who, in 1861, gave this lecture, “Pictures and Progress,” and you reference this at length. Other scholars more recently have also started pointing and shining a light on this. Duke University Press published a whole book and collection of essays around it. Tell me a bit about Douglass’s role and impact when it comes to visuality and race.

SL: Douglass does two things for us in this conversation. He’s able to help us understand the role, not just of images, but of the conception of the nation in the nineteenth century. He writes this speech, “Pictures and Progress,” all about this during the Civil War, when he’s expected to talk about really anything else, other than pictures. But there he is, doing so. And, I think, he offers a second point here, which is that the unspeakable in American life would require images—culture—to express what never could be.

He comes into this project as a means of understanding the stakes of what could have looked like these trifles, these photographs just flitting around that I was stumbling upon. As I mentioned, the preface of his autobiography indicates that he understood the stakes of the instability of the racial project, and he found that that was a tool he could use to advocate for freedom and for equity. So, he’s there as a philosopher—he is a cultural historian, but he’s a theorist, not just of the photograph, which is I think how he’s been positioned, but of culture, broadly defined. And he’s writing in a kind of isolation, but prophetically so. He believes and knows that, as he anticipates, he says a hundred and fifty years later, we might, you and I, Spencer, be talking about the function of culture for political progress in American life. So, he’s hoping that he’s laying a groundwork that we’ll pick up on.

SB: Groundwork is a word we’ll touch on later. [Laughs] On the subject of time, you note in the book, “Scrutinizing images was part of the early photographic viewing experience. Viewers pored over photographs—still then a new technology—looking for corporeal clues about the people before their eyes.” From a time perspective, I wanted to get your take on the experience of looking at images at, say, the turn of the twentieth century, versus today. What do you think has changed with this barrage of pictures, videos, TikToks that we now face daily?

SL: Timelessness is a key term here. So much has shifted in the period between that viewing experience that you just recounted, that Douglass would’ve had—this extended time in homes poring over photographs as an embodied experience, like a campfire feel, to today. But what hasn’t changed, I believe, is the ability for a photograph to move us from the synchronic to the diachronic, this one moment in time to all time. One of the gifts of the artist, or even someone who doesn’t intend to be, but becomes one, because of what they’ve captured with their phone one day, is to stop time, to get us to not let the world go by and to arrest us enough to pay attention to what’s squarely in our sights—or should be, but isn’t. I think that fundamental feature has not changed over the course of the centuries that we’re discussing here.

There are many images that I could probably throw out in this conversation that I would say, “Yeah, that stopped me that day. I really paused on it, thought about it.” Same with Douglass, that’s what he is referencing in his speech. So, it then raises a second point, which is, okay, if they have this extraordinary power, we have to reckon with what that means about us and how we’re going to engage with it going forward.

SB: Yeah. Now it feels like so often to look at pictures the way we consume them; it’s like drinking from a fire hose or something. And then, every once in a while, this one photo comes through that just stops everybody. This week it was Donald Trump after getting shot in the ear.

SL: Mm-hmm.

SB: This episode will come out in September, but we’re talking now in mid-July. And, I can think of, as I’m sure you can, countless times across history, where there’s an image that just steals the imagination, almost. It makes people understand an event or a series of events differently than they would have otherwise.

SL: That’s right. Yeah, absolutely. You could go decade by decade, year by year. But what it also speaks to is that we have…. We’re talking about seeing here, we have many modes of reading the world, and one of them, I think that’s most salient today, especially because of the force of technology, is how we are engaging with cultural literacy, our ability to actually synthesize narratives presented through imagery, or objects, monuments, and create meaning out of what that places in front of us and what we see.

SB: Completely. The flimsy image becoming a solid monument, and what does that mean? Or, what does it mean for an image to be on page one of The New York Times? And, how does that represent the time or the culture that we’re in?

SL: Mm-hmm. Exactly. Yeah.

SB: I wanted to touch on a few paintings that you reference in the book, particularly Frank Duveneck’s 1870 painting called “A Circassian” in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. [J.M.W.] Turner’s 1840 “Slave Ship” painting and Winslow Homer’s “The Gulf Stream,” which dates to 1899 and that was reworked in 1906…. I realize it’s a multipronged question, but could you talk about these three paintings in particular and how they connect to this conversation?

SL: This question about what it means to see today, what it means to see in the past, I think is, for me, the reason why those three paintings, the Duveneck, and the Turner, and the Homer were so critical. In each case, you have a central figure whose life and whose identity seems somehow stable. You have a so-called “soldier”—we’ll get to that in a second—and a set of enslaved beings on a ship, and then a Black man. And in each case, you see how the confrontation with the picture upends society in different moments and forces a reckoning with, again, the instability of the racial regime. The one I think is most vivid in my mind initially here is the Winslow Homer “Gulf Stream” painting. This is a work that’s now in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, but struggled to find any home for some time, because it presented to the public this question.

The image—for those who haven’t seen it who are listening—is of a Black man in a ship that is surrounded by sharks. A storm is on the horizon. We’re not quite sure which direction he’s going. And this is 1899. So, this is wartime, in effect, for the United States. And it’s not quite clear that he’s going to make it. This is a period of racial nadir in American life. It becomes what Frederick Douglass would call a “thought picture,” a concept, a portrait, a conversation piece. 

And the lack of security around the fate of this Black man and the United States at large forces the dealer for Winslow Homer to write to him to say, “Can you just offer a narrative to people that would make them comfortable with this work? Because I can’t sell it,” in effect. And he writes back to them and he refuses, and he points them to this oceanographer, Lieutenant [Matthew Fontaine] Maury.

But, in that moment, we start to see how these conversations that could be had no other way were being centralized around paintings. The Frank Duveneck one, this is a painting that occupies an entire chapter of the book, the third chapter. It was, for me, the surprise of the book. It came to me when doing what I tend to do is go to different institutions, see what I can see, and came across this painting of a, now we’ll reveal it, Caucasian soldier, or Circassian soldier, in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. It was just skied high in this salon hang, so multiple rows of paintings, and it’s one of the first paintings to enter the museum’s collection. 

And knowing what I do about this false foundation of racial formation and the role of the Caucasus region in it, I was startled to see it. I knew how many narratives it contained. And, it was just naturalized in the landscape, representing what that history has become: something seen and then disregarded.

The history of that painting—and I won’t spoil it for the people who haven’t read the book—and the way in which it is retitled, and then has its title returned, I think, again, speaks to the role that, uniquely, culture plays in excising these hidden lies in American life.

SB: And the importance of, as Sanford Biggers, the artist, would probably put it, re-righting history, R-I-G-H-T, as much as W-R-I-T-E.

SL: Mm-hmm. Even in ways that the artist doesn’t intend or that the museum doesn’t necessarily intend. And, what makes difficult conversations about race and justice, I think, more direct when culture is involved is that it depersonalizes the means through which we have to rewrite history. It’s not about a debate any longer. It is an embodied fact in the room, that painting, that monument. That occurred to me when I realized that, in teaching vision and justice, I don’t have contention in the classroom about these difficult topics, because I’m teaching from the object, not asking for opinions across lines to be debated.

This object is one example of that. Turner’s “Slave Ship” is yet another. This is an object that really makes clear—as Marcus Wood, and Cheryl Finley, and others have described—how unrepresentable slavery has been and still is. How almost impossible it is to describe the horrors of the regime. And it helps us understand how odious it is that there’s now an attempt to rewrite what slavery actually was by describing the skills, for example, that came out of this regime.

The Turner Slave Ship painting was done in 1840. And it attempts to show the ways in which the slavers of the slave ship Zong threw overboard the dead and dying—that’s part of the title, in order to recoup their losses from the insurance company. You see this sole brown leg being devoured by these fish, but there’s a sublime sunset in the background that forced many for decades to review it without mentioning slavery at all. So, literally unspeakable and seemingly unrepresentable at the same time.

SB: Yeah, it’s about as graphic as it gets. You can’t ignore that. The work of the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston, I also wanted to bring up here. I learned about her through your book. I did not know who she was, and then I went into this wild deep dive. [Laughs] You include two of her pictures. One showing a [geography] class from 1899, and the other, a fourth-grade class at a museum in 1900. As I was learning more about her, I immediately thought, Someone needs to do a biopic on this woman immediately.

[Laughter]

SL: I agree.

SB: But anyway, I feel the need to bring her up here, because I want the listeners to know her name, Frances Benjamin Johnston. And I think she should be more well known than she is. Even The New York Times only recently published her obituary in 2021—sixty-nine years after her death—as part of its “Overlooked” series. Anyway, I wanted to say thank you for introducing me to her. What is it about her work that drew you in and led you to including her in this project?

SL: There’s one aspect of the work that relates to time that was central for this. We see in the first photograph in this chapter on Frances Benjamin Johnston, a geography class at Hampton in Virginia that shows us the Black and Native American students receiving so-called “instruction” about the seeming just natural order of the world. But, it’s an image that feels as if you’re looking at a fly stuck in amber. There’s almost a regimented freezing that takes place—and it’s arresting. It shows her, I think, power as both a choreographer and a photographer. She’s staging these tabula rasas for us. 

But I wanted us to understand the force of images and photography as a kind of propaganda—which is really the mission of her effort to document the so-called “success” of these instructional programs, such as the one at Hampton—but to also put before us the need to interrogate what these images, what culture was doing, to create a kind of racial propaganda.

That’s the legacy of Johnston that we’re—through her body of work, able to address—both the intended consequence of this propaganda, fundraising for the school, and the unintended consequence of just, we can now better examine how culture was a form of racial propaganda at the time.

SB: There’s a meta nature to these images, too, at least in the context of your book, the “looking at looking.” We are watching the people who were already looking at…. We’re looking at the looking, basically.

SL: Mm-hmm. We’re looking at the looking. And we’re looking at the scripted nature of how race and education refused to instruct us on how to look. The images show instructors with students. But when you look at how history was taught in the years of these photographs, you see that there is this deployment of not just the discussion that happens in the classroom now, but teaching scripts. They’re chilling to read today. They’re so chilling that I think some would just laugh at the level of racial propaganda that was at work in those classrooms.

When you see these books cracked open on desks of teachers, as a researcher, you can go and figure out what books they’re reading from, what scripts they’re using. And that’s when I realized that I had to, in effect, also examine the subtle critical looks I was sensing in the figures of the students—who had to question whether what they were being told could possibly be true. This is a moment in which you’re seeing students in a segregated school system being taught about their own so-called “inferiority.” There’s now, I think, nascent great work on the fugitive resistance tactics that were used to push back against this curriculum. Jarvis Givens is a scholar who I want to salute in that way, Fugitive Pedagogy is a great book about this. I couldn’t have written much of chapter four without it. He’s able to excavate from the archives these moments where you see students actually pushing back against what they’re being taught. What seems to be just a frozen photograph really is something that’s far more dynamic, and that’s really what the chapter is about.

SB: The tension between pedagogy and propaganda.

SL: That’s it.

SB: Okay. Just to stay on your book a bit longer—and then I want to jump into some other things—the “”Appreciation” section, you note that you survived this near-death car collision while writing the book and how, after the crash, you better understood what the book needed to be—and rewrote much of it. I wanted to ask, could you speak to this in specifics? Because of this event, what exactly changed you, and in turn, what changed the texts?

SL: I’m so grateful for the miracle of that event. I had a near-death car collision during the pandemic, a drunk driver T-boned my car and the car careened into the concrete divider on the West Side Highway. The airbags deployed—really saving my life. And I had what often is described as that white-light experience where you see what you know in that moment is the beyond, and you really do cut through time. 

And what surprised me in that moment among a thousand other things, because I survived it without, well, any broken bones, just one main scratch, which the EMTs couldn’t believe, because of the speed of the collision, was that I saw this book. [Laughs] It’s the middle of Covid, and I was seeing in this sort of dreamscape of what was happening in the future, what I would be robbed of completing if I were to go in that moment, because it was near certain—the physics of it—that I was going to die. There was no other way to understand what was about to happen.

I saw that book and thought, “Really?” [Laughs] “Of all things, I’m seeing a book? Okay.” I’m seeing, of course, loved ones and friends, too. But it was first and foremost in my mind. Why? Well, at the time, maybe sixty percent of what’s now published was on the page, on my computer. But something occurred in that event that transformed me into the person required to really see it through. To literally get out of that experience, I had to crawl out of a burning car, which I’ve watched too many movies to…. I know what can happen next. And that level of fear and willingness to confront it to save my own life lowered the bar in this second shot at life I have, regarding what I consider to be truly a threat. I’m writing about difficult topics and, pre-collision, I was, I think, a little nervous. Post-collision, what I realized was that the book needed to be worth the effort of my life. I’d gone through so much to retain it and to still have it.

There’s really a race with, I think, writers and scholars, we hope to be contributory for our generation and to offer a new foundation for the next. I began to see how much was lost in scholars not writing about this moment in time. It’s robbed us of the vocabulary I think we need to understand some of what we are mistakenly calling things like amnesia, or color blindness, or censorship. I think none of those are even appropriate terms for the intentional racial politics that have been with us for centuries. So that’s one way to tell you a bit about how that experience let me complete what’s now called The Unseen Truth, which was once called Caucasian War, actually.

SB: So I have to mention, and this really struck me, your previous book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search of Mastery, which was published in 2014, so it’s ten years old this year.

SL: Yes.

SB: In that book you write, “When we surrender to the fact of death, not the idea of it, we gain license to live more fully, to see life differently.” You also write in it how Franklin Leonard, the film executive and founder of The Black List, had survived a car crash that “altered the course of his life.” And you go on to note that he “had one thought on his mind now. You get one go-around.”

SL: That’s it.

SB: And it was just striking to me that there was this subject that you wrote about, and then you yourself, just several years later, experienced just that.

SL: Yeah, I think that we are, sometimes unbeknownst to ourselves, preparing to have an experience that will come later. In writing The Rise, I acquainted myself with the different skills I needed to endure what I then went through and to find growth and joy and revelation. And I don’t harbor any ill will towards the person who hit me. I don’t even think about him in any other way but with gratitude. And that is because my orientation is to be able to seize life just as my friend Franklin did, just as many others have who I know who’ve gone through these life-altering experiences. It made me question whether…. And I know we have free will, but whether there isn’t something such as destiny that we want to engage with. It’s a very un-American notion.

SB: Well, there’s a great haiku you referenced in The Rise, by the seventeenth-century poet and samurai Mizuta Masahide, that I think is relevant here. And it’s, “My barn having burned down / I can now see the moon.”

SL: That’s it. Oh, I mean, Spencer, I can’t tell you how different my filter was for what constituted my attention or merited the time I had as I was in serious pain recovering from what your muscles go through during that—because everything had burned down, and then it was reconstitution time.

SB: I’d like to turn to your family and your upbringing here, and start with your grandfather, who, in 1926, when he was in the eleventh grade, was expelled from a New York City public school for asking why the history textbooks had no Black people in them and didn’t reflect the world he saw around him. And you’ve cited him as being a key inspiration for Vision & Justice, which makes total sense. But could you talk a bit about your time with him and the impact he’s had on you, both as a child and in your youth, but also over time and even now?

SL: I often now feel that we receive information when we should. And I only learned about that aspect of my grandfather’s life—that he was expelled, right shy of graduation for asking that question—when I was about to graduate from college, or I was a Harvard sophomore. But thinking about my life, and it put to me this question that, in some ways, I’m grateful he’s not here to answer himself. How did that transform him? How did that allow him to think about the arts differently? He became this artist creating the very scenes he knew he should have been able to find in those textbooks with his paintings. And he was an extraordinary jazz musician and just someone whose approach to life—very cool, very zen—always struck me.

I say that because it’s allowed me to live out an answer in my own life with his accompaniment. I know he’s around. I certainly feel that he was in that car that day. So, he asked a question that the Vision & Justice project lives out. Now, I think, it’s a testament to what can happen in the United States that here I am able to ask these questions and teach these topics at Harvard, when he was expelled from a public school two generations prior for trying to do the same.

SB: Yeah, ninety-eight years.

SL: Yeah, exactly. I love that. And we’re not so far from where he was in high school sitting here talking to you in Brooklyn. But he’s allowed me to think about the nature of time anew. I write often in Montserrat, where he’s from, where his parents and grandparents are from. It makes his life, growing up in Montserrat, and the fact of that volcano being there has let me think about the urgency of the work that I do, and the need to be present to the moment, and to not waste time. Montserrat is this island I love. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this documentary Under the Volcano. It’s about all the music that we probably don’t know has come from that island, because of George Martin creating this music studio there, where Stevie Wonder recorded, and staying in Elton John’s— But, they’re doing it in the shadow of a volcano that’s active.

SB: No, I mean, I’ve been to Montserrat. actually.

SL: Oh, you’ve been!

SB: Yeah.

SL: What?

SB: [Laughs] Yeah, I’ve been there.

SL: What? No.

SB: And it’s wild because immediately when you set foot on the island, you sense the fragility. You just know this feeling of like, Whoa, half this island could be gone tomorrow. There is that sense. And yet, there’s such a liveliness to the place.

SL: Yeah, yeah.

SB: And it’s this in-between…. Living on the edge, almost.

SL: That’s right. But it embodies the condition that we’re all in without our own awareness of that fact. We’re always on the edge, really. Emergencies remind us of that fact. But I love being—I mean, you probably would wake up and go to, what, Woodlands Beach, or one of the beaches you loved in Montserrat, too. It’s paradise. But there’s also a volcano. [Laughs] It’s the full set of extremes. But you create anyway. And you go on anyway.

SB: Yeah, building in the face of adversity, basically.

SL: Exactly. Exactly. So, he’s given me that gift.

SB: Well, we’ve noted so much about your new book, but I wanted to also highlight your Vision & Justice project—and class. Could you speak a little bit about how that project came to be? I know you have a book, as well, that’s going to come out in the future of that same name.

SL: Well, I think the question that my grandfather put to me is, what is the role of art and culture for justice? Over time, teaching the course at Harvard, Vision & Justice, guest-editing the issue of Aperture in 2016, I realized that there were coming to me many folks, educators, writers, scholars, who wanted to understand how to better teach the answer to that question in the classroom. And institutions also needed support in thinking this through.

So the Vision & Justice organization became this initiative that really marshals resources—whether it’s public-facing courses, publications, conferences—to educate the public about the urgent work of art and culture for equity and justice in the United States. There’s a book series that I’m excited about that’s launched this year. The first book is the edited essays of the work of Maurice Berger, who wrote “Race Stories” in The New York Times, the column that we urgently still need today—he passed during the pandemic. The first two monographs are on the work of Coreen Simpson and Doug Harris, and I co-edit that with Deborah Willis and Leigh Raiford. So it’s a radial initiative.

SB: You mentioned Maurice Berger, who I know was a friend and mentor of yours. But, this is also stemming out of so much incredible work that scholars were doing in the nineties that really paved the way for you. Scholars including Hal Foster, Toni Morrison, Deborah Willis. Could you talk a little bit about the impact of their work and how that’s shaped the project?

SL: Yeah, absolutely. There’s no way that this work would happen now if not for those conversations, foundational scholarship, and discussions. My last conversation with Maurice was about the Vision & Justice Project. And I grew up with works by Deborah Willis on my coffee table.

SB: Your parents were reading her?

SL: Yeah.

SB: Oh, wow.

SL: Yeah. So, it was just in the air. It structured my understanding of the world. Coming into contact with Frederick Douglass’s work was foundationally important for the project. And while there are many other scholars I can mention here and in and outside of the discipline of the visual cultural realm, it really was the historic framework that Douglass gave it that transformed the project from one that was probably going to remain in art history or cultural history to a work that could penetrate the world beyond, because here is this man who is articulating a thesis that he knows will live on in the next century, in the next couple generations. 

That moment of reading “Pictures and Progress” was really the moment when Vision & Justice began. And I was grateful that Michael Famighetti at Aperture, the editor of the magazine and now at the foundation in general, was happy to have what’s normally a very contemporary, topical magazine, have this historic wrapping through making Frederick Douglass the armature for the entire issue.

SB: You’re currently working on another book, and we mentioned this term earlier, “groundwork.” The book is called Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law. Could you share your definition of “groundwork” and how are you engaging with this term “ground”?

SL: I published a few articles about this idea of “groundwork” being the aesthetic strategies or the tactics that artists are using to ask the question that’s not been stated, what do we mean by “stand your ground” in the context of this critical law that’s resulted in the deaths of so many Black and brown men and women? Stand-your-ground laws in over thirty-three states, it gives you license to claim the ground under your feet effectively as your own, and often is used to justify the seemingly unjust killing of many.

“Ground” in that term is unquestioned. Who has the right to it though is political and racial. Artists in this groundwork project include Hank Willis Thomas, Theaster Gates, Mark Bradford, Amy Sherald, all who are using the composition of their works—monuments, paintings—to think about this, both representationally, as we know, representation, if you’re in the arts, you hear that term “ground” used in the aesthetic register. What’s the “ground” of the painting? It’s the surface. And then, it’s also the representational ground in the three-dimensional space that could be carved out of a painting. But, they’re also engaging with the third term and definition of “ground” here, by which I mean reason. In the legal context, that word is used often as a cognate for rationale.

SB: “What’s your legal grounding?”

SL: Exactly. Exactly. And we use it in everyday sentences. So that’s a way in which an artist can be a productive disturber of the peace, asking us to make vivid and clear what’s not being discussed.

SB: I also just like the play on the term “laying the groundwork for,” which this is certainly doing, I think.

To finish, I thought we’d end on the subject of “aesthetic force”—something you write about in both The Rise and, to a certain extent, in The Unseen Truth—and that really gets to the heart of your work. And maybe who you are as a person also—an aesthetic force. Could you speak a bit about the power of aesthetic force and how, from your view, it shapes our understanding of each other and the world around us?

SL: Yeah. Well, I think the way to best do that is by offering a story, to begin. It made me think of the idea—I learned from the extraordinary trumpet player and friend Wynton Marsalis about this time in American life that really transformed the narrative of justice. And, it took place in 1931 in Austin, Texas, when this young boy, just sixteen years old, Charles Black, Jr., was going to a dance to try to meet some girls at the Driskill Hotel, and that’s what he says about the dance. But history remembers it differently, because he was just struck still by the power of this trumpet player he’d never heard of before—Louis Armstrong, king of the trumpet, turns out [laughter]—and he heard a lyricism, and genius, and power, and mastery that made him question the worlds of segregation around him.

His friend from Austin High [School] was with him. He remembers and heard it too, but he instead uttered a racial epithet, commonly used by African Americans during the day, and he walked away. But, Charles Black, Jr., because of the aesthetic force of Louis Armstrong’s horn and the power of his music, understood that there was a question being put to him: “Will you continue to support the status quo or will you walk towards justice?” And he found himself walking towards justice. He goes on to become one of the lawyers for the Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, that goes on to outlaw segregation in the United States. Charles Black, Jr., goes on to teach constitutional law at Columbia and Yale. And every year, holds this Armstrong listening night to honor the man who inaugurated this life-changing shift in him and for all of us.

Aesthetic force is critical for societies that care about justice. I think it’s an ancient idea. I touch on it with Frederick Douglass, but you can think of it in even the context of how Aristotle described it when he said, “Reason alone is not enough to make men …” or I would say, women, “… good.” He understood that rational argument was not enough, really, to transform our thinking. Why? Because there’s so much that we don’t know we don’t know—about ourselves and about each other. There was no other way, I could imagine, for a young boy in Austin, Texas who believes the world around him is set up correctly to see that perhaps there is genius in the body of a Black man he’s passing by on the street. But when you hear in a way that goes beyond words, beyond argument, the incontrovertible evidence that he has mastered something no one else has, then you have to ask questions of society and of your role in it.

It’s what it did for Charles Black, Jr. I think it’s what it did for Frederick Douglass and his argument about the function of pictures. It’s what he anticipated it could do for all of us. I think it’s what we’re seeing—it does take place when you reckon with what monuments really state or offer as narratives in society. It’s so much of what is so dangerous about the curricular-censorship conversations we’re having. We’re excising from curricula the evidence we need to honor the full humanity of all students in the United States. And so, “aesthetic force,” a term from the book The Rise, became a way of understanding the work of culture for justice in what came afterwards with Vision & Justice, and as well with The Unseen Truth.

SB: I’d say, The Unseen Truth is aesthetic force.

SL: Well, I appreciate you saying that. I hope it does work in the world that will be contributory for our discussions about race, and justice, and equity.

SB: Sarah, thank you so much for coming today.

SL: It’s really a pleasure. Really an honor. Great talking with you. It was wonderful.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on July 17, 2024. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Emily Jiang, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Diego Mallo based on a photograph by Stu Rosner.