DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS
A different way to build monuments can be empowering — and painful
In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and as Confederate monuments continue to come down, what comes next? What are we building up? Over a video call, Op-Ed Editor Raj Mankad convened two of America’s leaders in making art that reimagines public spaces and got out of the way. Rick Lowe is a co-founder of Project Row Houses and a professor at the University of Houston. He has led efforts across the U.S. and Europe that mix art, architecture and community organizing to spark change for the good. Walter Hood is an artist, landscape designer, urbanist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Rick Lowe: The lack of knowledge of history and also the revision of it — that really concerns me. How do we deal with the presence of white-dominated history in our environment without wiping it away and giving a pass? How do we deal with these things that challenge us to look at history, sometimes in empowering ways and sometimes in painful ways?
Walter Hood: I think it is generational and regional. I was talking to students at Princeton University because I designed a piece there critiquing Woodrow Wilson. The adjacent building was the home of
the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. I called the piece “Double Consciousness” but ended up changing it to “Double Sights,” because Black students had a problem with the name. They could not relate to my use of the work of W.E.B. Dubois, who was the leading Black intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century. They just wanted Woodrow Wilson’s name off the school’s name, which I agree with. The sculpture shows Wilson’s complicated legacy, including his racism, by showing his own words alongside his detractors — Dubois, Ida B. Wells and others. A month ago, I had a Zoom conversation with students there because they wanted to understand the piece better. I kept saying, it’s not about the piece. It is about us being able to develop this conversation to take us somewhere. But they are more reactionary to it. It is all or nothing.
Rick Lowe: No contextualization. I don’t know if that’s a Millennial thing or not. But it just seems like something that is missing. Education previously was about how to rigorously understand the context of things, there will be things that you like and things you don’t like. You find meaning in between.
Walter Hood: There are these moments, in America, we let [things] go to ruin and then we resuscitate it. Then we let it go to ruin again. There are these 40-to-50-year moments. We are at such a moment. People with fists out. People are reading books on racism. That’s the good stuff. The protests after George Floyd’s murder reminded me of the 60s, when the marches and protests hit TV.
The clips are showing things that were invisible. It brings you to tears. So where do we take them? Now that I understand you have empathy, where do I take you?
Rick Lowe: After getting to that empathy point, how far are folks willing to go? Black Lives Matter is about respect. How do we learn to respect? There is a possibility of intersecting the respect for Black people in with the respect for many others — immigrants, gender diverse people, women — all these kinds of things. The reason I bring that up, if the movement is perceived as “us against them,” people become resistant. While I have endured a lot of racism and racist things, I also think back and I remind myself of the sexism I might participate in. Not because I am a bad person. It is hard to live in this world and be a man, and not be sexist in some way. Just as it is hard to live in this world as a white person and not be racist. It should be an opportunity to look at this as a moment in time to elevate humanity, its respect for the true diversity of the world in all ways — race, gender, sex. It is a great moment but we have to figure out strategies to be able to dig roots deeply in broad populations.
Walter Hood: I’m trying not to use the term “diversity” and am trying to use the term “difference.” Diversity is like integration. Talking about difference allows people to be themselves to a certain degree without having to morph. It’s like double consciousness. When I say diversity, I have to morph into the white world. I’m tired of morphing into the white world. At a certain point, I want to be different. I want them to want me to be different.
Rick Lowe: That’s a great distinction. “Diversity” has this tone of everything is resolved and flattened out. “Difference” implies a certain tension.
Walter Hood: We know we are different. We use that difference. Whites are afraid to use their difference in the way we use it. They use their difference for power. People have to manifest or transform themselves into that sameness to be accepted. Difference suggests Whiteness is there, Blackness is there, Brownness is there. It is all there.
Rick Lowe: The terminology of Black was about the power and strength of difference. But I also use African American because I understand the historical context. I respect the people behind that movement. I agree with you, I like the directness and the implication of a powerful identity that has its own value instead of skirting around it.
Walter Hood: Can this country accept difference?
Rick Lowe: If you ask the average person on the street, we’ve been fed the notion that America is the most diverse nation in the world. But if you look at it deeper, yeah, there are a lot of people from a lot of different places but does it live up to a notion of acceptance of what those people bring? America has had this weird idea of people merging into this melting pot.
Walter Hood: E pluribus unum. Out of many one. Out of all these people we will get this one type. Native, indigenous people, you don’t quite fit the bill. Slaves you don’t fit the bill.
For many western European immigrants — it’s easier to bring them into the fold. I don’t know about you and your public art work, but with making landscapes you have to conform to this aesthetic.
Rick Lowe: I’m working on this Tulsa Massacre Centennial. It is a history that people don’t know a lot about. Even there they didn’t know a lot about it. The Black folks that were burnt out and ran out of their neighborhood, they had enough resilience and rebuilt a great thriving neighborhood.
Walter Hood: They are still there.
Rick Lowe: So many places around the country that went through similar scenarios, have not been able to, those communities have been so destroyed, there is no energy to bring that history back to us. It is a gift to the country to have that Tulsa centennial, calling attention to the economic crisis of Black people in this country. All segments of America have played a role in sustaining that oppression.
Walter Hood: I am working in LaVilla in Jacksonville, Fla. It was the home of the Johnson brothers, who composed “Lift
Every Voice and Sing.” The historic train station was the place where free Blacks arrived and spilled out on the scene. There were flop houses and brothels. The entire community was almost completely erased. They have four shotgun houses they saved. I took inspiration from your work with Project Row Houses in Houston and a few others’ works. We are taking the shotgun houses and placing them in different places. And telling different stories. Not one singular thing. The more I can bring these other things in — brothels, segregation, women who owned land — it provides a context for talking about things that people are uncomfortable with.
Rick Lowe: Have you run into the name changing of streets and monuments coming down?
Walter Hood: Oh yeah. A few weeks ago Princeton voted to take Woodrow Wilson’s name off the school adjacent to my sculpture. One of Princeton’s trustees who was ardent about keeping the name — went to my piece, and read something that changed her opinion.
Rick Lowe: Here in Third Ward, back in the early 1990s, when I was first hanging out here, I was on this tour with Deloyd Parker and folks from Shape Community Center, this tour of dangerous places that they wanted to be torn down. Coming out of the drug epidemic and crime, people connected that stuff to vacant buildings. So the response was: get rid of the buildings, you get rid of the problem. There was another side you can see with hindsight — taking away the historical infrastructure of the neighborhood that sustained its future as a neighborhood. People had good intentions, but they were paving the way for gentrification. It is a condition that real estate, particularly in a place like Houston, looks for, uncomplicated land without buildings. That whole notion of removing things has a back side to it.