“Ignorance allows for racism, but racism requires ignorance. It requires that we don’t know the facts,” says Sarah Lewis, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and founder of the Vision & Justice programme there, which connects research, art, and culture to promote equity and justice.

Ms. Lewis was at the UN Headquarters for an event marking last week’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

In an interview with UN News’s Ana Carmo, she discussed the crucial intersection of art, culture, and global action to tackle racial discrimination in the face of ongoing challenges.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

UN News: How can art contribute to both raising awareness of racial discrimination, and inspiring action towards its elimination?

Sarah Lewis: I grew up not far from the United Nations, just ten blocks away. As a young girl, I became interested in the narratives that define who counts and who belongs. Narratives that condition our behaviour, narratives that allow for the implementation of laws and norms.

And what I’ve come to study is the work of narratives over the course of centuries through the force of culture. We’re here to celebrate much of the policy work that’s been done through different states, but none of that work is binding and will last without the messages that are sent throughout the built environment, sent through the force of images, sent through the power of monuments.

One of the thinkers in the United States who first focused on that idea was formerly enslaved abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, and his speech Pictures in Progress, delivered in 1861 at the start of the American Civil War, offers a blueprint for how we must think about the function of culture for justice.

He was not fixated on the work of any one artist. He was focused on the perceptual changes that happen in each of us, when we are confronted with an image that makes clear the injustices we didn’t know were happening, and forces action.

UN News: This year also marks the 60th anniversary of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. How do you think societies can really engage with these historical struggles for racial justice, particularly in the context where racial discrimination is still deeply entrenched?

Sarah Lewis: We are speaking at a moment in which we’ve altered norms around what we teach, what is in our curriculum in states around the world. We are in a moment in which there’s a sense that one can teach slavery, for example, as beneficial, for the skills that [it] offered the enslaved.

When you ask what nations can do, we must focus on the role of education. Ignorance allows for racism, but racism requires ignorance. It requires that we don’t know the facts. When you come to see how slavery, for example, was, abolished but transformed into various forms of systemic and sustained inequity, you realize that you must act.

Without the work of education, we can’t cohere, safeguard and implement the norms and new policies and treaties that we advocate for here today.

UN News: You speak about the power of education and this idea that we need to change the narratives. How can we as societies ensure that the narratives and bias really change?

Sarah Lewis: If education is important, the related question is, how do we best educate? And we don’t only educate through the work of colleges and universities and curriculums of all kinds, we educate through the narrative messaging in the world all around us.

What can we do on a personal, daily level, leader or not, is to ask ourselves the questions: what are we seeing and why are we seeing it? What narratives are being conveyed in the society that define who counts and who belongs? And what can we do about it if it needs to be changed?

We all have this individual, precise role to play in securing a more just world in which we know we all can create.

UN News: When you were an undergraduate at Harvard, you mentioned that you noticed exactly that, that something was missing and that you had questions about what was not being taught to you. How important is to include the visual representation topic in schools, especially in the United States?

Sarah Lewis: Silence and erasure cannot stand in states who work to secure justice around the world. I’m fortunate to have gone to extraordinary schools but I found though that much was being left out of what I was being taught, not through any design or any individual culprit, any one professor or another, but through a culture that had defined and decided which narratives mattered more than others.

I really learned about this through the arts, right through understanding and thinking through what mainstream society tells us we should be focusing on in terms of the images and artists that matter.

I wrote a book ten years ago on – effectively – failure, on our failure to address these narratives that are being left out. And in many ways, you can see, the idea of justice as society’s reckoning with failure.

Justice requires humility on the part of all of us to acknowledge how wrong we have been. And it’s that humility that the educator has, that the student has and it’s the posture that we all need to adopt as citizens to acknowledge what we need to put back into the narratives of education today.

UN News: You speak in your book about the role of the ‘almost failure’ as a near win in our own lives. How can we all see the somewhat progress being made, to achieve the elimination of racial discrimination in societies, and not feel defeated by the failures?

Sarah Lewis: How many movements for social justice began when we admitted failure? When we admitted that we were wrong? I would argue they all have been born of that realisation. We cannot be defeated. There are examples of men and women who exemplify how we do it.

I’ll tell you a quick story about one. His name was Charles Black Jr, and we’re here today, in part because of his work in the United States. In the 1930s, he went to a dance party and found himself so fixated by the power of this trumpet player.

It was Louis Armstrong, and he had never heard of him, but he knew in that moment that because of the genius coming out of this black man, that racial segregation in America, must be wrong – that he was wrong.

© Unsplash/Joshua J. Cotten

A mural of the I Am a Man protest that took place in Memphis, Tennessee, during the Civil Rights Movement in the USA.

It was then that he began walking towards justice, he became one of the lawyers for the ‘Brown v Board of Education’ case that helped outlaw segregation in the United States, and went on to teach every year at Columbia and Yale University, and would hold this ‘Armstrong listening night’ to honor the man who showed him that he was wrong, that society was wrong, and that there was something he could do about it.

We must find ways to allow ourselves to not let that feeling of failure defeat us, but to continue. There are countless examples I could offer in that vein, but the story of Charles Black Jr. is one that demonstrates the catalytic force of that recognition of that internal dynamic that is the smaller, more private encounter and experience that often leads to the public forms of justice that we celebrate today. 

Listen to the full interview on SoundCloud: