UC Berkeley effigies: It’s not art if it’s anonymous

Hours before a black student union-led protest against police brutality was scheduled to begin at the UC Berkeley last weekend, effigies of black lynching victims were found hanging on campus.

Lynching is an act of domestic terrorism, designed to keep African Americans “in their place” of poverty and degradation.

Part of what people all around the country have been protesting for the past weeks is the idea that black people aren’t visible as individuals in society — a condition that makes them economically and socially disposable.

Obscurity’s benefits usually flow to those who are already entitled.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks released a statement saying that “the imagery was deeply disturbing,” and “the impact that it has had on our campus community is undeniable.”

The response from the anonymous group?

“We are a collective of queer and POC [people of color] artists responsible for the images of historical lynchings posted to several locations in Berkeley and Oakland,” reads the statement they hung up on a campus bulletin board.

There’s a valuable tradition in African American art of reappropriating traumatic words and horrific imagery.

Well-known artists like Kara Walker and Pat Ward Williams have used images of lynching in their work; the rap group Public Enemy used a photograph of a lynching for the cover of one of their singles in 1992.

All of the artists I named above pulled these terrible events out of the shadows, allowed themselves to be named, and dealt with whatever fallout came their way, because that’s the price of reclaiming history and demanding personhood.

Sexuality has nothing to do with lynching, so claiming a queer identity isn’t relevant except inasmuch as this group hopes it might provide some protection against a lack-of-empathy accusation.

Maybe this group really is pulling off a radical act of subversion, a serious indictment of the way history continues in the present.