Who are American heroes? What are American values? How do the answers to these questions change with time and perspective? Irwin Weathersby Jr. takes up these fundamental issues of our times in his indispensable In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space, which examines how we bear witness to sites and perpetrators of racial trauma, both collectively and individually.
Weathersby opens the book in New Orleans, just after Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s 2017 fiat that Confederate statues be removed from public spaces. He visits the sites of these absences and talks with people there: unaware tourists, gloomy white supremacists, a man who paused to see whether his dog would be willing to pee on a pedestal that used to elevate the figure of Jefferson Davis. Elsewhere, sites attempt to tell a more complete history, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which offers a tour about the lives of Jefferson’s over 600 slaves. Weathersby also visits sites of counternarratives, including the partially completed Crazy Horse memorial that stands in tension with Mount Rushmore, and Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War, a bronze statue of a contemporary Black man atop a horse in the style of Civil War monuments. Weathersby explores public spaces from Louisiana to Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, New York and beyond, and his vivid prose will likely have you searching online to see what he describes.
Weathersby also examines the history of the public spaces he encountered throughout his life as a Black person from Louisiana. Weathersby’s longing for education led him to Morehouse, a historically Black college in Atlanta whose campus showcases inspiring sculptures created by Ed Dwight, the first Black candidate for NASA’s astronaut program, whose rejection by NASA spurred him toward the arts. Learning about Dwight’s life showed Weathersby “how our lives are often unconsciously shaped by unseen sculptors of the physical and divine.” The New Orleans street where Weathersby grew up was one of dozens in the city named after enslavers. His family home was demolished after Hurricane Katrina. Monuments, Weathersby writes, “may appear to underscore the past—and they do this too—but in the process, they suppress other events and stories that shaped the commemorated life and space.”
In Open Contempt asks the reader to explore their own landscapes, and Weathersby knows what they will find: many traces, both obvious and subtle, of white supremacy. “Go looking for white supremacy, find it everywhere. Go looking for nothing, find white supremacy everywhere.” In this impeccable book, Weathersby exhorts readers to pay attention, and he offers his own story of looking so that we can see—and confront—our history alongside him.
