You’ve seen the fliers around campus: Yellow and black caution signs emblazoned with “Warning: Ugliness Ahead!”
These signs advertise the startling exhibit “Them: Images of Separation,” which hangs in the Busch Student Center until Nov. 26.
The display includes a series of everyday objects from the past 100-or-so years, from postcards to T-shirts to comic strips and board games. Some are reproductions of objects from the 1800s. Some pieces were bought this year on the Internet.
The tragic theme that unifies these objects is that each popular artifact promotes stereotyping, prejudice and hate.
Bigotry isn’t always blown up and framed. This month, however, it is-loud and clear, big and bold for everyone to see in the BSC.
And Saint Louis University students are looking. Patrons of this shocking gallery often line the hall, reading and absorbing outrageous examples of discrimination and prejudice.
And that’s just what students should be doing. These contemporary objects prove that caustic nuggets of prejudice can easily slip into our daily lives, our collective culture. By refusing to acknowledge a problem, a dominant group stifles it. But the issue remains, boiling, lurking, fighting its way to the surface. There’s a suffocating power in silence.
Race meant something this election season. Race as an identity, race as a symbol, race as a framework for meaning; even blatant racism and the categorical validity of race, itself, have come up for debate.
What does President-elect Barack Obama’s racial classification mean for the United States? Obama is a multi-racial man, and now he is one of the most powerful men in the world. He is the symbol of United States’ leadership.
He has broken the traditional mold of power in this nation, 40 years after the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and 143 years after the end of slavery.
One need only digest the grisly pictures of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy lynched in 1956 for merely looking at a white woman, displayed in the BSC to see how far this country has come.
Obama’s election invites a dialogue about race that Americans have now begun and must resolve.
Institutionalized racism is over, but discrimination and prejudice still exist. They must be called out and obliterated. Not just for race, but for all matters-gender, religion, sexuality, class and other strata.
By bringing to attention what was once ultimately subtle-little bits of material culture swallowed subconsciously-senseless hatred becomes easier to see. Bigotry is in your mind, but when it’s pasted onto a lunch box or printed onto a greeting card, we can prove it exists.
That’s part of this nation’s growing-up-addressing its neuroses, faults and ugly blemishes. Then, we can be certain that this country should change, and how.
