No Actual Bodies Needed or “Girl, What are You Looking at?”

Abstract

It was an expected narrative, Black/Brown body perpetrates violence and makes life unsafe for non-Black and Brown bodies. The desensitization to the lynching of Brown and Black bodies in American history and culture was a dominant theme in the work. In that moment, like the themes of Ken Gonzales-Day's photographic images, US American narratives are so cruel and tyrannical that the Black/Brown body does not need to be present in order for the literal and/or figurative lynching of Brown and Black bodies to occur and continue. The White security guard had created a nonexisting Black man, who he claimed shot him, but ironically, institutional Black body absorbed the bullet. The Black woman with her head wrapped like Dana in Octavia Butler's Kindred, has jumped out of the 1920s depicted in the reverse negative photograph, and she is standing right next to author in St. Paul inside office in 2017.