“Ignorance allows racism, but racism requires ignorance. It requires that we do not know the facts,” says Sarah Lewis, an associated professor of African -American and African -American studies at Harvard University and founder of the program of vision and justice there, which connects research, art and culture to promote equity and justice.
Mrs. Lewis was at the UN headquarters for an event that marks the International Day of last week for the elimination of racial discrimination.
In an interview with UN newsAna Carmo, discussed the crucial intersection of art, culture and global action to address racial discrimination against ongoing challenges.
The interview has been edited by length and clarity.
UN news: How can art contribute both to raising awareness about racial discrimination and inspiring action towards its elimination?
Sarah Lewis: I grew not far from the United Nations, just ten blocks away. When I was a child, I became interested in the stories that define who counts and who belongs. Narratives that condition our behavior, narratives that allow the implementation of laws and norms.
And what I have come to study is the work of narratives in the course of the centuries through the force of culture. We are here to celebrate much of the policy work that has been carried out through different states, but nothing of that work is binding and will last without the messages that are sent throughout the surroundings built, sent through the image force, sent through the power of the monuments.
One of the thinkers in the United States who focused for the first time on that idea was previously enslaved abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, and his speech PHOTOS IN PROGRESSDelivered in 1861 at the beginning of the American Civil War, it offers a plan of how we should think about the function of culture for justice.
He was not obsessed with the work of any artist. I was focused on the perceptual changes that occur in each of us, when we face an image that makes it clear that the injustices we did not know were happening, and the action forces.
UN news: This year also marks the 60th anniversary of the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination. How do you think societies can really commit to these historical struggles for racial justice, particularly in the context where racial discrimination is still deeply rooted?
Sarah Lewis: We are talking at a time when we have altered the rules around what we teach, what is in our curriculum in states around the world. We are at a time when there is a feeling that one can teach slavery, for example, as beneficial, for the skills that (he) offered the enslaved.
When you ask what nations can do We must focus on the role of education. Ignorance allows racism, but racism requires ignorance. It requires not to know the facts. When you get to see how slavery, for example, it was abolished but transformed into various forms of systemic and sustained inequality, you realize that you should act.
Without education, we cannot co -take, safeguard and implement the norms and new policies and treaties that we advocate here today.
In the past, a hopeful future for South Africa was hindered by apartheid, but the overcoming of racial injustice paved the way for a society based on equality and shared rights for all.
UN news: You talk about the power of education and this idea that we need to change narratives. How can we, as societies, make sure that narratives and bias really change?
Sarah Lewis: If education is important, the related question is, how do we educate better? And not only do we educate through the work of schools, universities and curricula of all kinds, We educate through the narrative messages in the world around us.
What we can do at a personal, daily, leader or not, is asking the questions: what are we seeing and why do we see it? What narratives are transmitted in society that define who counts and who belongs? And what can we do about it if you need to be changed?
We all have to play this individual and precise role to ensure a fairer world in which we know that we can all create.
UN news: when you were a university student in Harvard, you mentioned that you noticed exactly that, that something was missing and that he had questions about what was not being taught. What importance is to include the issue of visual representation in schools, especially in the United States?
Sarah Lewis: Silence and erase cannot be stopped in states that work to ensure justice worldwide. I am lucky to have gone to extraordinary schools, but I discovered that much was being left out of what they taught me, not through any design or any individual guilty, any teacher or another, but through a culture that had defined and decided what narratives mattered more than others.
I really learned about this through the arts, through understanding and thought through what conventional society tells us that we should focus on terms of images and artists that matter.
I wrote a book ten years ago about, indeed, failure, in our failure to address these narratives that are being left out. And in many ways, you can see, the idea of ​​justice as the calculation of society with failure.
Justice requires humility on the part of all of us to recognize how wrong we have been. And it is that humility that the educator has, that the student has and it is the position that we all need to adopt as citizens to recognize what we need to return to the narratives of education today.
UN news: You talk in your book about the role of “almost failure” as a nearby victory in our own lives. How can we see the progress of some progress to achieve the elimination of racial discrimination in societies, and not feel defeated by failures?
Sarah Lewis: How many movements for social justice began when we admit failure? When we admit that we were wrong? I would say that everyone has been born from that realization. We cannot be defeated. There are examples of men and women who exemplify how we do it.
I will tell you a quick story about one. It was called Charles Black Jr, and we are here today, partly due to his work in the United States. In the 1930s, he went to a dance party and found himself so obsessed with the power of this trumpet.
It was Louis Armstrong, and I had never heard of him, but I knew at that time that due to the genius that came out of this black man, that racial segregation in the United States must be wrong: that he was wrong.
A mural of the protest from I am to man that took place in Memphis, Tennessee, during the civil rights movement in the United States.
It was then that he began to walk towards justice, he became one of the lawyers of the ‘Brown V’ Education Board that helped prohibit segregation in the United States, and continued to teach every year at the University of Columbia and Yale, and would maintain this ‘Listening night Armstrong’ to honor the man who showed him that he was wrong, that society was wrong, and that there was something that was wrong.
We must find ways to allow ourselves not to let that feeling of failure defeat us, but to continue. There are innumerable examples that it could offer in that line, but the story of Charles Black Jr. is one that demonstrates the catalytic force of that recognition of that internal dynamic that is the smallest and most private encounter and experience that often leads to the public forms of justice that we celebrate today.