“In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space” by Irvin Weathersby Jr.
c.2025,
Viking
$30.00
256 pages
The issue appears to be permanent.
It’s been happening for a long time. It doesn’t look like it’ll stop any time soon, either, and though you’ve been able to work around it, you shouldn’t have to. Some say it might be better some day but you’re not holding your breath. As in the new book, “In Open Contempt” by Irvin Weathersby Jr., some things are too set in stone.
Cemeteries are filled with them.
So are parks, campuses, galleries, museums, and courtyards where, for centuries, humans have left their carved and constructed monuments and artwork celebrating and commemorating our heroes. Those works may be so familiar, in fact, that you might barely notice them, although many of the monuments have lauded white supremacists.
Says Weathersby, while some works have been removed in the recent past, many still stand, quietly, unobtrusively.
In his hometown of New Orleans, for instance, there was great controversy over the removal of statues honoring Civil War figures. The Ninth Ward street that Weathersby lived on as a child honored a slaveholder. Schools he attended nearby were named after men who established racist laws and ways of life.
He didn’t know to question those things when he was a child, or even as a young man. When he enrolled at Morehouse, an HBCU, though, he “began… unlearning…white supremacist culture.” Stories from his great-grandmother helped him see white supremacy clearer.
He found it in South Dakota, at Mt. Rushmore and at Wounded Knee, and he saw its effects at an Indigenous Writer’s Festival where he learned of the Dakota 38.
He sees it in art everywhere. He saw it once, when he was jailed overnight for a bike ticket he’d already dealt with. White supremacy is there when he thinks about the innocent people killed by police, and he thinks about how close he came to being a policeman himself.
“Look,” he says, “white supremacy everywhere.”
And, he says, if we have the courage to actually see it, to look hard and clear at it, “there exists a chance to heal and become empowered.”
You know how you can stare and stare at something, only to suddenly realize that there’s something about it that’s surprising, even shocking, right in front of you? That’s the sense you’ll get as you read “In Open Contempt,” that smack-your-forehead, duh feeling you get when your eyes are opened wide.
And yet, like many of the things he discovered and points out, author Irvin Weathersby Jr. keeps a quiet presence in his book. His words are soft, but urgent. Gentle, but insistent. Firm, but prodding, leading, like having a presence sitting on your shoulder, whispering in your ear and urging you to see, to notice, demanding that you tell others, too.
Readers who drive or walk past a monument to a historical figure every day will surely be spurred to regard it with fresh new eyes, after reading this book. You may never view artwork quite the same, either, because what you’ll learn inside “In Open Contempt” is monumental.
