The Brooklyn Museum is currently showing an exhibition, The Question Bridge, that shows the Black male experience in America. The Question Bridge consists of a series of interviews from Black men of all walks of life about their experiences. The Huffington Post published an interview with the creators of the project on their site on Monday.
From The Huffington Post:
As we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it’s important to remember that we still have a long way to go in the fight against racial discrimination. A recent exhibition that confronts stereotypes and attempts to bridge divisions between people is “Question Bridge: Black Males” — a new video installation currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum that consists of a series of interviews with Black men in the United States today. I asked Chris Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas, two of the collaborators — along with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair — about their project, which originally began as a response to the 1996 Republican convention in San Diego. In 2007, Hank Willis Thomas helped to revive the Question Bridge interviews, and it evolved into the exhibition on view today. You can read the team’s e-mail responses below.
HuffPost Arts: What are some stereotypes of black men that really irk you?
Question Bridge Team: Black men are angry, obdurate, lazy and thuggish beings who don’t care for their families and resist attempts to educate and inspire them.
To some extent we’ve all internalize these impressions but we on the QB team have discovered that it only takes the process of asking them a meaningful question for these impressions to be exploded! A black man you might identify as the most belligerent will come forth with a poignant and probing question and/or answer when given the proper opportunity. How this process works is something worth exploring.
To see the full interview, visit the Huffington Post. For more information about the project, visit the Question Bridge website