LA / USA .  1992. Oil (60 X42”).

                                            

ARTIST COMMENT:  The fundamental problem of the US is a kind of racism which is both blatant and hypocritically sanctioned and one which has continued unabated since the Declaration, finally breaking open with the civil rights movement of the sixties.  Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, makes his racist views, considered by some as an impassioned plea in the behalf of slaves, known in his book NOTES ON VIRGINIA.  The most not so subtle condemnation of the entire race of Black people and by extension all people of color is that "their griefs are transient."  Grief is necessary for a moral consciousness without which love, human compassion, morality cannot exist.  Blacks were inferior beings--no wonder he had no qualms about slavery.