Can you make a sandcastle racist? I didn’t think so, but then I went to the beach to see the amazing sand sculptures at Revere beach and I saw this one:
Titled The Color’s In the Mind,Red Orange Green Blue Shiny Yellow Purple Too, it depicts an artist pallet of colors with an object for each color. So cute, look at the frog and the–wait, what is that?
Tucked between the fruit is the head of a policeman. Okay, pretty odd to have a policeman’s head representing blue instead of fruit. And next to the cop’s head is an eggplant, sometimes used to symbolize black people in not so nice ways.
A cop’s head and an eggplant. Color’s in the mind. I see a backhanded comment on BLM. Is it me? Leave it in the comments!
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Author: Susan X Jane
Susan X Jane, Principal of Navigators Consulting, has over 30 years of experience exploring race and representation in both the public and private sectors. Susan is a transracial adoptee—a Black woman raised in a White family and community—an experience that created an early focus on the way race shapes our concept of ourselves and each other.
Susan has worked to address race and racism as a community organizer, nonprofit program developer, professor of communications, and consultant to corporations and impact-focused institutions. As Principal of Navigators Consulting, she draws on decades of experience to work with organizations in the public and private sectors.
To any who seeks to build a better world, she offers her skills as a teacher, coach, and strategic partner to help create diverse and inclusive environments where the humanity of all is respected and protected.
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Susan X Jane 
Are you the artist? That is good to know what the artists is thinking and I wonder if, as the artist, you thought about what other people were thinking about in the summer of 2016 while there were many protests in the streets and a very active and contentious debate about police brutality that spilled onto the beach that summer in the form of tension. Curious: I asked a question and shared an answer–why do you feel the need to attack me when you could just share your own thoughts and leave it at that? What I “preach” is that different people will have different interpretations of cultural symbols based on lived experience and those differences are worth exploring, and I am practicing that by responding to you without attacking you or casting aspersions or making assumptions about you.