"Race, Arts, and Aesthetics" is one of six thematic pillars of the initiative Our Shared Future: Reckoning with our Racial Past. These pillars can help us understand the past to build a better future. They are designed to make systemic racism feel identifiable, feel relevant, to our lives, and, most importantly, feel changeable.
Race is more than individual identification. Our understandings of race and belonging are also publicly constructed and reinforced. Popular culture and shared public spaces can expose the tensions between what we see and who is represented. This pillar explores how public representations of race affect our understandings of history, ourselves, and each other.
