Teaching Tolerance

I was asked to create a lede illustration for Dr. Gregg Suzanne Ferguson’s “Black Students and Educators at Confederate-Named Schools”. Having grown up under the shadow of (literally) a huge confederate flag in Tampa, FL, I had personal experience on which to draw. A decided to depict the psychological terror in a somewhat literal way by creating a scene reminiscent of a horror film.

For the final illustration, I settled on stark shadows and harsh colors to create an ominous mood.

Feature and spot art for a piece called “Debunking The Mobility Myth” written by Dr. Robert L. Reece. The piece explores the peculiar form of gaslighting that black students experience when learning about America as a land of opportunities. The contrast of the American myth versus their daily reality can at times make the students feel unseen.

When approaching the assignment, I grabbed on to the author’s experience with Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. The idea of a story about an invisible man making a person feel seen made for too good of a visual to pass up. For the lede illustration, I used a Penrose staircase to show the sometimes futile and exhausting nature of trying to succeed in a system designed for the opposite outcome.

The foreground kids in the spot were loosely based on Corey and Shawn from Boy Meets World. And in a sign of what would become a recurring theme in my Teaching Tolerance work, I hid a white supremacist monument in the Penrose staircase.