Irvin Weathersby Jr. — In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space - with Jamila Minnicks

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America's history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country's landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America's landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation's true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593299159?ic_referral=ez2syieKYD_dpr9Mw0FmRTpP4vSbInbHSgr7BZFIF7YwM645cxykPo400DldtJDvnWoHDbzZJFSqVtjWADskMqGbVGiY1IBUHYClOJ3TZ-3_hY4s_o15sFv7lmTDDtVeuAybogIrvin Weathersby Jr. is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. He teaches at Queensborough Community College and at City College of New York in the MFA in Creative Writing program. His writing has been fea­tured in Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, and a BA from Morehouse College, and he has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foun­dation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.Weathersby is in conversation with Jamila Minnicks. Minnicks' novel Moonrise Over New Jessup (Algonquin Books, 2023), won the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, is a finalist for the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was longlisted the 2023 Crook’s Corner Book Prize. Her short stories and essays are published in The Sun, CRAFT, Catapult, Blackbird, The Write Launch, and elsewhere, and her piece, Politics of Distraction, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jamila’s work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Jamila is a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Howard University School of Law, and the Georgetown University Law Center. She lives in Washington, DC.*recorded 2/16/2025