This piece of protest are was made by Dread Scott, an African American visual artist known for his works regarding the experience of African Americans in modern us. Part of his artistic statement is that the he looks towards “…an era without exploitation or oppression of any people.” He wants his art to emphasize how critical subjecting people into certain fates or outcomes based off of their background can impact a whole community. This flag does just that. In 2015, Scott produced his own version of the N.A.A.C.P. flag that would be used to mark lynchings that would occur and would be posted outside of the NY headquarters on 5th avenue (1920-38). The flags typically would be a black-and-white illustration, however Scott decided to be more explicit with this message through saying “A Man Was Lynched By Police Yesterday.” He produced this flag in response to the fatal shooting of Walter Scott by a South Carolina police officer. The main purpose was to highlight the amount of horrors that go unnoticed that minorities in general deal with on a day to day basis. There are countless of lynchings and systematic oppressions that occur today and still aren’t being properly recognized and handled appropriately. Scott’s response to his work was him dating back to the Jim Crow era where Black people were terrorized by lynching and how lynching would be used as a threat that for whatever reason, or no reason at all, you can be killed and the killers wouldn’t receive any sort of punishment. Now the police are playing this same role of terror that Lynch mobs would play back then. The same people that are supposed to protect and serve to help the community are the ones damaging it. I believe that this piece of work is still appropriate today with the increase of different instances happening all over America of minorities getting mistreated by the law and are facing injustice. These are the events that make the political system seem so flawed when it claims to be there to treat everyone equally and provide equal protection amongst all those people. This piece of work can be used to criticize the social and political state of America. It shows just how little these events are being valued and as time goes on the value begins to constantly decrease and decrease even more. This alongside the lack of effort to make any change, there is no telling how much society will progress as time goes on, if progression is even an option.
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