Guest Post: Artists Against Police Brutality

Guest Post by Lydia Smith

APB: Artists Against Police Brutality: A Comic Book Anthology (2015, Rosarium Publishing),edited by Bill Campbell, Jason Rodriguez, and John Jennings, uplifts the pen- and pencil-ings of several dozen artists to make a poignant, collective call for revolution against police brutality, and against institutions of oppression everywhere. From Missouri to New Orleans, and from the specificity of a strip-mall parking lot to the enigmatic possibility of Afrofuturistic beyonds, this small volume is dense with groundbreaking ideas while still accessible and engaging. The collection showcases literary criticism, comics with and without verbiage, personal narratives, and treatises on subjects ranging from syndicate superheroes to family histories.

Perhaps one of the most riveting pieces is author, educator, and poet Sofia Samatar's evocative reframing of Black lives murdered by state and vigilante violence – as the killing of artists: "We need to see Aura Rosser and Michael Brown, Jr. as artists within the context of a white supremacist state foundationally opposed to art, a state that desires to operate in secret where art seeks public communication, a state that sees black and brown people as disposable where art declares the sanctity of these creative and mutable lives." 

Much as APB as a whole speaks to the power of art – of first hand expressions – to record, reframe, and revolutionize, Samatar's essay examines how art is a medium of resistance to the systemic reduction of Black lives. Samatar challenges that illustrating those brutalized by police and state violence as artists is to expand them into their actual humanity, to emphasize to the complacent majority that Black lives not only matter but are indelibly creative forces. 

Samatar continues, "The state speaks in statistics, reducing human beings to ciphers, pathologizing black and brown communities as toxic spaces. Art speaks the language of experience. It's the expressive vehicle for the irreducible in people, for what sings in the breath, what can't be counted or contained." After Michael Brown, Jr.'s murder by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, Brown was found out to be a writer who had a lyric jar. Brown had uploaded musical tracks to SoundCloud in the months before his death. In the reframing of Brown as an artist, Samatar looks beyond the statistical: "When I think of this young man, I think of his lyric jar crushed beneath the boot of the state. Look at all this broken glass."

Samatar's powerful piece is amongst like company in APB. The collection is full of pieces that could easily stand-alone in their pathos, research quality, and truth speaking. Yet APB is a collective work, and all together it forms an exhortation to be shared, to be read again, to move us to action. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): police brutality, police violence, violence, death, racism, mental illness.

Proceeds of sales of this book benefit the Innocence Project.

Lydia Smith (they/them) works at a preschool and occasionally finishes reading a book.