We were asked to engendering a conversation, and realized, we had to have it first…
After the Morehouse design presentation by members of the college administration, our group sat down and let ourselves to talk about race. I say “let” because that’s what it felt like. During earlier challenges, group members had used their racial and cultural identities to background their ideas; however, the nature of the identities themselves had never been discussed.
On Monday, we sat down to a diverse table. It soon became clear that our composite identity was much more complicated than I’d assumed.
Two of our group members were actually from Morehouse (cheating!) We had Brandin, a student (representative of our audience of “young black men”? Or not?) and Derrick, a professor (young or not, by whose standards?) To Brandin, “black” didn’t exist beyond language, and shuttered identity conversations. To Derrick, race was a construct that students needed to be taught to look beyond.
So from the start, we were looking at the ambiguities of identity – almost subverting the design challenge from the start. “Young,” “Black,” “Men” ? We began focusing on the transformation of a personal identity in different spaces – showing the shift in behaviors and self-identity between one location and the next. Pretty soon, however, our interest settled on the dividing line itself – not between different spaces, but between the individual and any given space.
How could we represent this in a public way? As a bag of clothes or “identities” that our “young black man” needed to carry and shift through in different spaces? Or as some kind of a wall?
We began to focus in further on ideas from the Ta-Nehisi Coates book, Between the World and Me.
One last thought on how our group may have subverted the design challenge, before I move on to a new post about what we came up with on Tuesday:
While discussing the empowering element of the Morehouse design challenge, the campaign “It Gets Better” (serving queer youth) was brought up as a possibly model for uplifting exchange.
Visiting studio leader Reginald Harris then spoke up and reminded us that for those identified as young black men, “It doesn’t get better. It gets different.”
How do you empower that?