March 6, 2026

In 2015, while working on #RacismIsASickness with 14 Philadelphians —Black, white, male, female, old and not so old—who agreed to sit for portraits of themselves wearing surgical masks with one word written on it that described their struggles with racism, I turned the camera on myself. I wrote a single word across my mask: ANGER. Five letters, all caps, impossible to ignore. 

It was my first protest against an insidious pattern of behavior of people who don’t even realize what they’re repeating, fueled by massive denial, hypocrisy and self-protection, encoded in their DNA, passed down to them from their ancestors from centuries past.  It was and still remains a pattern I recognize, an inheritance from ancestors whose will to survive was grounded in quiet vigilance, undeterred by threats seen and unseen.

For me, it was the first time where I freely expressed my anger through my art. I reclaimed the word that had been weaponized against Black women for decades. I understood anger to not only be an abstract emotion that described some inner chaos or lack of control, but fuel for confronting and acknowledging a truth too many American people refuse to see: that the system has been perfected over centuries to protect itself, to gaslight, and to erase those who have always carried the weight of history honestly. When I looked into the camera in that portrait, I wasn't performing. I was making visible rage, clarity, a refusal to pretend that denial equaled innocence. That is what my mask said, and that is where this essay begins.

***

Wearing that surgical mask on my face was an act of self-empowerment and a symbolic act of drawing a line in the sand. Since then, I've spent the last ten years thinking about patterns emerging from observing threads of behavior and denial that stretch far beyond a single encounter or a single person. I started tracing the loop: from the criminalization and displacement of Europeans centuries ago, to colonial America, to the systems that protect some people while erasing others, and to the ways denial and self-protection still show up in real time. 

No, it wasn't an abstract exercise. I was engaged in a process of grounding myself despite the insistence that no harm could come from me, that America was truly post-racial.  This coming from people who will, on one hand, celebrate ancestors who fought for independence for themselves and on the other hand, ignore the fact that those same ancestors were the architects of a system that shielded certain people from consequence, rewarded performative innocence and celebrated practices that perpetuated widespread harm. 

They can’t see the virus—or they refuse to—and when someone holds up a mirror, they treat the reflection as violence. That is the loop: the historical continuity of behavior, belief, and self-preservation, reinforced by centuries of social, legal, and cultural systems. It’s not moralizing. It’s seeing clearly what others would rather ignore: that the patterns of denial, gaslighting, and structural violence have been perfected over generations. And the clarity of holding that loop is both isolating and enraging. I see it in real time, everywhere, and I understand that for most people, acknowledging it is impossible—not because it’s invisible, but because they’ve invested themselves in never looking.

***

Over the years, I’ve watched this loop play out in real time, and nothing crystallized it more than observing white people perform helplessness, fear, and hopelessness while being fully insulated from harm by the very system they benefit from. I’ve reflected on the act of a few participants writing words like helplessness, hopelessness and fear on masks. At first glance, it seemed like vulnerability—but the more I held the loop in my mind over the intervening years,  the more it felt like performative denial: fear without consequence, vulnerability without stakes.

***

What I had to come to grips with is this:  They don’t really perceive this system to be terrifying and deeply threatening.  Despite what I see and have experienced, they believe the system shields them. Unlike their ancestors who fled Europe centuries ago for a variety of reasons, they themselves haven’t been tossed here and there enough by the violence enacted by institutions to preserve a set of beliefs and values catering to a status quo.  And yet, the words expressed on their masks revealed something powerful to me, not about their own personal struggles, but something else:  That there is really no room for Black folks to claim the same helplessness, fear, and hopelessness that they do. These are “human” emotions, and we really aren’t considered human to them.   There is only room for whiteness to claim innocence, to demand sympathy, to mask culpability while benefiting from centuries of structural protection. It was a perfect mirror of the loop in action—denial packaged as authenticity. That is what makes holding this loop enraging. I saw the hypocrisy, the moral laziness, the self-congratulating fragility, and the refusal to reckon with reality. White Americans have mastered the art of operating in a system that rewards self-preservation while punishing accountability, performed in unconscious perfection.  Meanwhile, the truths they deny—structural violence, historical continuity, inherited privilege—are the very things that Black people have always had to navigate, see, and name, often evoking responses that the naming is propaganda or worse. Holding this mirror offers clarity grounded in understanding that this loop persists, that the patterns are perfected, and that observing them honestly requires both vigilance and discipline. And, if you’re me, it requires putting words on a mask, looking into a camera, and declaring ANGER.

***

10 years later, as I reflect on this body of work, I can say that my practice of observing and naming patterns has evolved into a form of constant, quiet resistance.  It's the only way I can navigate a society that is doggedly insistent in its refusal to see itself. Since I donned that mask in 2015 and again, many times during a global pandemic (where the most vulnerable of lives were lost needlessly due to rampant denial and refusal to take decisive action), I’ve found that the more I see, the less I want to participate in a society so thoroughly invested in denying its own reality.

***

I know you didn’t ask, but let me make something clear: I have, in fact, withdrawn emotionally since 2015.  It hasn’t been out of a sense of despair or defeat, but a primal sense of self-preservation. I’ve created a space for myself where I can hold the truth without having it distorted, redirected, or weaponized by people who will never take responsibility. I’ve stepped back emotionally because I’ve grown to understand that people who are thoroughly invested in perpetuating and/or remaining passive against hypocrisy, moral laziness, and performative denial could care less about how it affects people who look like me.  I choose to no longer be consumed by a system that thrives on erasure and self-congratulation.

Withdrawing emotionally for my own mental health also demanded that I release my anger.  Back then, writing that word on my mask was a symbolic act, a defining moment of clarity and vigilance against forces so insidious.  It was a reclamation of a word and a state of being that has been weaponized against Black women like me for refusing to stop calling out erasure.  Moreover, it was a refusal to perform the same moral fragility that white Americans have perfected over generations.  Looking at that photograph 10 years later, however, brought me to some uncomfortable truths.  I realized that it was foolhardy for me to believe that the very people who felt (and said so in the act of writing these words on their masks back in 2015) so helpless, hopeless and fearful of a system built expressly for them, could somehow save me.  And out of this realization, I released something which created space for something else.  Freedom…true freedom, and a distaste for a form of power that comes from forcing others to see and accept life the way I do.  This is what drove Europeans to not only engage in violence against the British 250 years ago but to engage in violence against my own ancestors.  And if I claim to be better than this, I have to nurture this new space of seeing, naming what others cannot or will not, and letting the chips fall where they may.  

Looking back over the past ten years, I see that holding this loop—observing and naming the patterns of denial, self-preservation, and structural violence—has become a form of quiet, uncompromising vigilance. It is neither despair nor cynicism; it is clarity in the face of a society that refuses to see itself. The mask, the word ANGER, the self-portraits—they are reminders of what it means to witness honestly and fully.  I write this not to demand understanding or action from anyone else, but to mark the record of what it has been like to see, to know, and to name what others cannot or will not. To hold the loop is to hold both grief and freedom, to bear witness to patterns perfected over centuries while refusing to surrender the power of seeing. And in that seeing, I am still here, still naming, still observing, still creating space for truth on my own terms.