Last night, Justin was working on a history project for school that involved drawing a picture of a particular event (I think they had to select from 3 options).
He suddenly announced he’d screwed up. I asked how.
“I just remembered we’re not supposed to draw any violence.”
“Well, you can probably start over; we have plenty of construction paper. What’s your topic?”
“The Klu Klux Klan.”
That was one of the three options, with instructions to “depict the topic, and don’t show violence. Justin had drawn a brown-skinned man hanging from a tree.
I sat down and thought. I’ve written a significant number of papers on neo-nazi and racist movements in the U.S. and I consider myself reasonably well informed on the topic. I couldn’t think of an accurate depiction that didn’t involve violence.
So we talked. What we decided was that sometimes you had to draw an ugly picture to show an ugly thing. He went back to work, adding all the things that had been mentioned about the Klan: torches, a burning cross in front of a house, and some expressions on the faces of the white-robed men that I can only describe as evil. It’s an ugly image, but it’s right. It’s what happened, and Justin knows that it’s important not to forget what really happened.
I told him if the teacher didn’t think he’d done it right, to have him to call me.
I got no call. He got a B+.
