RACE/HUSTLE by Zora Murff

Days ago we visited the MASS MoCA museum in North Adams in western Massachusetts.

There were many interesting art exhibits in this huge museum which once housed the Sprague Electric Company in the mid-20th century.

My favorite display was called RACE/HUSTLE by Zora J. Murff. It included a photo of Obama (top right next to the drones) when he went to Flint, Michigan due to major water contamination there to reassure the public that the water was safe. He pretended to drink a glass of local water but people saw thru his hustle.

Here is a description in the handout.

Bruce

With Bully Pulpit and other works, Murff wants to tell people what they may not want to hear. Imperialism and white supremacy have wreaked havoc both outside and inside the US, on bodies as well as minds. Resistance through a plurality of methods is necessary, but some methods, like anti-capitalist organizing and armed resistance, are punished by the state, and others whose ideas about appropriate behavior dominate the public sphere.

RACE/HUSTLE means to nudge, surprise, or entice people toward mental transformation - through education and exposure to ideas and images, we can expand our imaginations of what liberation looks like and how to get there. While more is need to move people from the symbolic register to real, tangible organization, RACE/HUSTLE is a call looking for an answer.

In the words of Pure air: ACTION...UNITE...Commit class suicide! Against a pervasive and decades-old pessimism.

Murff proposes a revolutionary optimism articulated well by the late Assata Shakur, a US-born revolutionary who defied imprisonment and found refuge in Cuba:

"Through the lies and the sell-outs.
The mistakes and the madness.
Through pain and hunger and frustration,
We carried it on.
Carried on the tradition...
Carry it on now.
Carry it on 
TO FREEDOM!"