Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

by Carolina De Robertis

For people of color—from those who dwell in the prison of a powerless poverty to those enraptured by exceptional privilege—our silence serves as the perennial grindstone sharpening the amnesia of white America. As such, our radicalism as artists resides in a shared and vocal awakening and a rigorous literacy campaign regarding the specific historical conditions of one another’s colonization and neocolonization and the eruptions of art that resist it. To continue to exclusively understand race in the United States through the black/white lens of the Founding Fathers (i.e., the exploitation, commodification, and enslavement of African Americans alone) is to unwittingly reinforce the genocidal and ethnocidal political structures that have been integral to the very foundation of white supremacy and slavery in this country.