Black People Are The Silence They Cannot Understand
2001–2002

Audio

• Pope.L, Black People Are The Silence They Cannot Understand

  In Dave McKenzie: The Story I Tell Myself

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  Pope.L, Black People Are The Silence They Cannot Understand

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  Play Transcript

  Narrator: Artist Dave McKenzie reacts to Pope.L’s Skin Set drawings.

  Dave McKenzie: If I look at one of them, Black People Are The Silence They Cannot Understand, instantly it makes me have associations. And so for me, that kind of framing or trying to even deal with all the complexities of race, which are fictional, which are historical, and all sorts of other things, is such a provocative kind of challenge. And at the same time, I feel like maybe this sentence is as right and wrong as anything could be. At their best, they just make me laugh. And sometimes I find that I agree with them even though, again, if I were to try and explain why "black people are the silence they cannot understand," it would be impossible.

  Narrator: The drawings also make intentionally absurd claims about orange people, green people, and others.

  Dave McKenzie: If we think about the spectrum of color and its relationship to the way we define people, maybe they're two absurdities playing against one another. And at the same time, I think it's fraught with all sorts of simplistic notions of race.

  I think about the fact that there's a sports team called the Redskins, and what does that mean? How can that still be in 2020? So the "purple people" is a really absurd kind of text. But then it's also really imaginative, like who are the purple people, and what are they doing?