{"id":5938,"date":"2018-02-20T06:18:31","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T11:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=5938"},"modified":"2018-02-20T06:36:24","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T11:36:24","slug":"sonya-clark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/02\/20\/sonya-clark\/","title":{"rendered":"Unraveling The Confederate Flag To Ponder \u2018How Long Would It Take Until The Confederacy Didn\u2019t Haunt Us Anymore?\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat would this [Confederate] flag look like if we took it down to its threads?\u201d Sonya Clark<\/a> wondered. She had made art about the Confederate (battle) flag before.<\/p>\n

But the idea of literally unraveling the racist flag was on her mind with the arrival of the 150th anniversary of the end of the United States\u2019 Civil War. Which also coincided in 2015 with an increased awareness of the systemic racism running through America that fuels murderous violence against African-Americans. \u201cThis was around the time it became front and center in the press,\u201d Clark says. \u201cNot that it was new, but it was news, the legacy of human beings who are of African descent whose bodies get treated as less than human. By this I mean police brutality and modern day lynching of black people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spread of smartphones had enabled more brutality against African-Americans to be videotaped, to be documented\u2014and everyone was then watching the evidence on their smartphones. \u201cIt was hard for people to bear, to look this history in the eye,\u201d Clark says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that the way in which African-Americans are treated in this country is tied to the history of the enslavement of the people. The system is rigged,\u201d Clark says. Schools for African-Americans are worse. Incarceration rates for African-Americans are higher. \u201cAnd police are more brutal. And that\u2019s all because of this deeply embedded notion that black and brown bodies are not as valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI really started thinking about how long would it take until the Confederacy didn\u2019t haunt us anymore,\u201d says Clark, who will be presenting her participatory performance “Unraveling” the Confederate flag at Amherst College\u2019s Mead Art Museum<\/a> in Amherst, Massachusetts, at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday and again on April 5<\/a>. Deconstructing the Confederate flag became a metaphor. \u201cI just wanted to see what it would look like. If that piece of cloth was taken down to its threads would it become this passive thing? Would you think that maybe it came from the American flag?\u201d<\/p>\n