48” h x 60” w

A faint line runs across the base of my thumb where, 30 years ago, I accidentally sliced it with a knife while rushing to prepare the dessert order for a table I was waiting on.

Intentional acts leave other marks, and in preparation for this show, I extrapolated the idea of a personal cut to a larger societal abuse. My accidental cut healed quickly—it’s true about a sharp knife cut being better than one by a ragged, rusty blade. The mark carries no lasting pain, just a reminder to slow down before I do something foolish. Yet there is more to the marks left by a history of de jure segregation in housing, schooling, and opportunity in this country than “do not do that foolish thing again.” A quick and careless act left my mark. Segregation was intentional, long-lasting, and orchestrated by local, state, and federal governments. It was not created by accidental happenstance and cannot resolve itself in that manner.

Many people look at the marks left and think of them like scabs that note a past, but do not impact the present and future.  “The laws have changed,” they state, “Segregation now is just choice.”

As Richard Rothstein wrote in The Color of Law: “segregation perpetuates itself, and its continued existence makes it ever harder to reverse (Rothstein, 197).”  Sitting in a different seat on the bus is rather straightforward. Attending a different school is more complicated. Overcoming decades of policy that intentionally hampered your family’s ability to create generational wealth and delivered inferior education combined with the “false sense of superiority that segregation fosters in whites [and] contributes to their rejection of policies to integrate American society (196)” is another matter entirely.