Self Portrait
Growing up we are taught the importance of history and its impact on the world we call home today. One of the earliest figures I remember learning about is Johnny Appleseed, the barefooted, pot wearing, folk hero that fathered America’s early apple orchards. As I got older, the history lessons began to grow more in-depth. We learned about the “great” Christopher Columbus, who it turns out is not so great, and the “shot heard around the world” that started the American Revolutionary War. Many of these lessons were accompanied by those old grainy Schoolhouse Rock!, videos that glorified American traditions. History soon became my favorite topic and I generally excelled in it. I came to consider myself pretty well rounded when it came to the history of the United States and much of the world. That is, until it came to the final weeks of my junior year.
The final project in my ceramics class was to create a self-portrait using any media. However, it wasn’t like a typical self-portrait that solely focused on physical appearance. I focused more so on the things that fill me up as a person and the people who have enabled me to be the woman I am today. Many of which were strong female icons including Eleanor Roosevelt, Florence Nightingale, and literary figures such as Louisa M. Alcott and Greta Gerwig. After a long night of cutting faces and quotes out of magazines and modge podging them onto a thin canvas panel, I went to bed pretty content with my collage. I woke up the next morning to a completely different world. The internet was bombarded with posts regarding the murder of George Floyd and the civil unrest that followed. A narrative that has become so common in the United States that it often doesn’t make the front pages or the news at all. An often innocent black man killed by a white police officer.
As I went to finish my follow up questions for the final project, I found myself staring blankly at my collage. My eyes darted back and forth across the glossy canvas, straining to find a single person that wasn’t white. They finally settled on a single man staring into a dark audience as he held his newly awarded Grammy. One man. That’s all I could muster to add to my collage. One. Black. Man.
It sickened me how woefully unaware I was when it came to the accomplishments of black people, specifically those of women. We had learned about black people throughout history but it was often from a perspective of pity rather than that of celebration. I looked back to when I was flipping through those magazines and it occurred to me that the majority of people of color I saw were Athletes and Hip-Hop artists. Is that their sole purpose? A form of entertainment for white Americans? Although this may appear a generalization, growing up this seemed an overall public opinion.
It dawned on me that I wasn’t as well rounded as I had thought. Why have American public schools omitted the vast accomplishments of people of color from the textbooks? Where are the chapters on the strong black women who fought alongside their white counterparts for equal suffrage? Why do we learn about Florence Nightingale but not Mary Mahoney, who became the first licensed Black nurse in the U.S. in 1879?
Now here I am, 4 months later still working to fill the gaps left by the whitewashed history classes that are still taught across the country. Still trying my best to honor and uplift the black people who have been painfully forgotten about. I still have a lot to learn but I’m forever grateful for the project that finally exposed me to the true American heroes, the black and brown people this country was built on.
