I met Irvin Weathersby Jr. on the day before the United States national elections last fall. We were on opposite ends of the country, talking about his book, In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art & Public Space (Penguin Random House, 2025). The book is a work of nonfiction, a close examination of the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces, monuments, and markers of history. It confronts and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma. Beautiful in its language and masterful in scope, Weathersby asks questions about “the truths we are taught because we can’t look away.” He wonders if we “really do need to see death.” Scenes from the author’s life make this book read like a memoir, and Weathersby’s wise voice, as an art and cultural critic, interrogates works and histories that contain racial violence and oppression.
Irvin Weathersby Jr. is a Brooklyn-based writer, originally from New Orleans. He teaches at Queensborough Community College and at City College of New York, in the MFA in Creative Writing program. His work has appeared in several publications, including Guernica and Esquire.
I spoke with him via video conference about how we can confront white supremacy in public spaces, how experience is changed through the process of writing, and how we might reimagine a future where justice and healing are a part of our collective history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Rumpus: You begin In Open Contempt with an incredible scene, where a group of white supremacists are guarding the Confederate monument of Col. Charles Didier Drew in New Orleans. This happened after four other racist monuments were removed in that area. Why do you think this book is, “a calling to bear witness and to elucidate the complexities of time through language?”
Irvin Weathersby Jr.: I was focused on writing something else and when the monuments started coming down, I thought, “Wait a minute, this is my hometown. I need to go back and kind of check it out.” The book came from that space.
I had an incredible editor and agent, who both said, “We have to open here. This is so charged. This is so intense. This really sets the tone.”
What you get, in terms of preparing yourself to read the book, is me as an impassioned speaker and narrator. I try to be fair and listen and try to engage, where possible, and find some sort of common ground. That conversation really sets the overall tone for the book. I have a perspective, but I’m also listening to others.
Rumpus: So much in your book expanded my view of what monuments are and can be. Exhibition spaces you entered, the art that was readily available on the street, the monuments you visited in Europe, your own personal monuments, the ways that you spoke with your elders, the ways that your childhood home became like a monument to you. Were you thinking about this examination when you started?
Weathersby: I was thinking, “What ways have you been overlooking all of the spaces that you walk past every day?”I can’t really account for why I was in those spaces, why I had the elders that I had, or why I was able to perceive the world in the ways in which I do, but it makes sense this is what I had to do.
Rumpus: The book is strikingly intimate. You visit Morehouse, your alma mater, and say this is the import of setting in place, and how our lives are often unconsciously shaped by unseen sculptors of the physical and divine. You write about the courage to trust God’s will. Did your writing about the divine surprise you?
Weathersby: It was surprising to me, many times, when I realized that I wasn’t actually the author of these words. I felt my grandmother’s hand. I felt my ancestors. I felt so many people. I was trying to allow myself to be used as a vehicle, to testify. In many ways, that is a part of my upbringing. I wouldn’t even say that I’m really religious today, but I recognize the foundation of my youth: Christianity, going to church, the way in which I was raised. Those gave me some incredible systems of belief to have faith, to be optimistic about the way the world works, and to have courage that things will work themselves out. There are so many people who are praying for your well-being.
Rumpus: This is such a personal narrative. Not only tracing your family history but in each of the places, you’re in relationship with the artists, or with the community, or you’re with a family member. I’m curious about how you chose the monuments. Did you have a plan?
Weathersby: Yes and no. When I went to New Orleans, I relied on the resources of a group called “Take ’Em Down NOLA” which compiled a bunch of different sites throughout the city. Much of what I wanted to capture was spontaneous. I didn’t expect to meet white supremacists. I think I wanted to illustrate the surreal experience of what it means to be a Black person in the world, moving through spaces, how often our senses are accosted by these incredible images of hatred. You can walk around with your eyes closed, but if you do decide to open them and embrace the world around you, you can often be injured by what you see. There’s a number of things that I didn’t plan to see.
There was a moment when my wife and I were in Paris, and we were just really excited to go to the Louvre and, on the street, we see this [racist] relief. Even to this day, I still feel deflated by seeing that. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing, why I was seeing it, and what that meant for me, at that moment. From a bioregional approach, how can I access everything that has been in that space? All of the people—not just the people, but all of the species—that exist therein?
Rumpus: You have a powerful expression of then and now, a throughline, running through this book. As a reader, I felt like I was in the spontaneous and experiential discovery about what was happening in those moments, almost as if the past and the imagined future is present. You write, “. . . if you believe in the magic of moments past and present aligning to create a future that provides answers to your life’s questions, you might find them.” Did the journey of writing the book itself changed your experience of then and now?
Weathersby: I honestly think it did change my experience. There’s one thing to be there, in a moment, and be as present as possible, but there’s another thing called reflection. I think [I was] taking that step back and trying to articulate what those feelings were, trying to distill some sort of sense of what I felt. There’s a moment toward the end where I go back to Monticello and talk about the notion of how these things happen to me all the time. Sometimes I’m in the present moment and the past will collide in a way that is jarring. It often allows me to foretell what’s to come. That is as a result of me trying to be open to the world—knowing the spirit world, the things that are in front of me, the art itself, to move me. Sometimes they happen in the moment. I was very certain. Other times, I had to take a step back and reflect to say, “Okay, this is the then and now.”
Rumpus: Does that impact your writing, as you’re thinking about your work, or as you’re teaching? Do you still have those perceptions or appearances of them being one?
Weathersby: I do actually. I think it happens often. There are moments throughout the course of my life where I knew that something was changing in me. I knew that I was going through some sort of transition. I knew, even when I went to Morehouse, that I had to do this. I didn’t necessarily have enough money to stay on campus or live the way in which other students did. I knew it would be hard, but I also knew I would be better for it, you know? I have these moments often.
There was another moment, recently, when I went to see the screening of The Piano Lesson, August Wilson’s play that had been adapted [for film]. I was sitting in a theater in Manhattan, seeing the actors talk about it, and I had this kind of surreal moment: I remembered reading August Wilson at Morehouse College. I just had this incredible experience. Then, I saw myself in the future here at The New Yorker Festival on stage, thinking, “I will be here, on this stage, eventually.”
Rumpus: How did you approach the process of writing, or the turning over of possibilities, as you wrote this book?
Weathersby: I like to think of myself as absolutely non-dogmatic. I’m open to ideas. I’m open to discovery. I’m open to everything. I try to meet people where they are, right? When people ask me if there’s a superpower [I would want]—I often steal my wife’s answer, but it’s mine as well—I say I would wish to speak all the languages in the world so I can engage with people. [I want to] be in their space, in their culture. That’s just how I try to move through the world. I really try to provide questions and be curious about the world around me. This book is not always about answers. I think it’s much more about questions—trying to help people figure out how to formulate these questions—or how to not suppress them. I wasn’t necessarily so conscious as I was writing it, but I try to be fair to everyone and I think every human is redeemable. I didn’t come to this with this one slant or this one idea like “This is what I’m trying to kind of get across.” This is not propaganda. This is just me experiencing the world and trying to engage with it.
A good friend and I were just talking about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, The Message. My friend is half-Jewish. He said, “What do we do with white supremacy? Do we just get rid of all white people?” I said, “Maybe this is a complex idea, but white supremacy is not really just about white people. Right? That’s not the point.”
These are the system of beliefs and behaviors that have been shaping our lives for the past seven or so centuries, but it’s not necessarily about white people. In my book, I think there are a lot of really well-meaning white people, really good actors. There are also a lot of bad ones. I think that goes across all ethnicities. I really am trying to meet people where they are, even my own family. I talk about my great-grandmother and how I really never liked how she was so full of hate. But then, when I sat with her, during that last conversation, something else kind of opened up to me. I thought, “Wait a minute. Maybe I was being too judgmental, or not really hearing her experience, or understanding why she felt the way she felt.”
Rumpus: It was a very beautiful portrait of her as well. I’m thinking too about the way that you brought in systemic racism around the Whitney Plantation, which I visited in 2018 and had an experience there. It was great to revisit it through your work too, and that chapter where you talk about many things, you also speak about the influence of money on institutions, how they are “capable of insulating you from the truth and disrupting it at once.” What kinds of questions were you holding about wealth and relationships to power, and how did that evolve?
Weathersby: Both of my grandfathers were illiterate men—they were laborers—they didn’t have access to opportunities. As a result, my life is where it is now.
Titus Kaphar linked his genius to the cover. [The cover of In Open Contempt includes Kaphar’s painting, PAGE 4 OF JEFFERSON’S “FARM BOOK”, JANUARY 1774, GOLIATH, HERCULES, JUPITER, GILL, FANNY, NED, SUCKY, FRANKEY, GILL, NELL, BELLA, CHARLES, JENNY, BETTY, JUNE, TOBY, DUNA (SIC), CATE, HANNAH, RACHAEL, GEORGE, URSULA, GEORGE, BAGWELL, ARCHY, FRANK, BETT, SCILLA, ?] He’s making this work about Black people for Black people, but by and large, most Black people can’t access it in terms of the price point, right? How these pieces sell for seven or eight figures, it’s a troubling thing when you think about the money, when you trace it all the way back. [Kaphar] calls it a visual reparation for all the people that Thomas Jefferson enslaved. People didn’t have access to that as well, and I think about that often.
In the book, I’m also walking through Richmond and seeing all of these incredible mansions and thinking about the history of the world, aware that I don’t have access to this wealth, or why I can’t buy these incredible works of art that I love. It’s really maddening. I think this is one of the things that the art world has to deal with.
Another scene [in the book] is when I’m at the French embassy here in New York and [art curator] Thelma Golden is on the panel. We have an exchange about this idea of repurposing spaces that were formerly used to oppress people. Many of the artists on that panel talked about how hard it is for them to have this incredible wealth. These museums are really beautiful spaces, but we trace the money and where does it come from? It is important to think about the redistribution of wealth and to own up to debts that are owed, not just to me but the ancestors of people who look like me. There are a number of things that we need to reconsider as it pertains to museums and money and foundations and the root of all of these things.
Rumpus: Do you feel like in institutions that boards and donors can play a part in that in kind of breaking that down, or does that need to come from more of a grassroots effort?
Weathersby: I think all movements should be attacked from every angle, so definitely grassroots. But also, I think the donors also need to speak up. Look, I think there’s a lot of really well-meaning donors, a lot of people who would say, “I don’t need billions of dollars. I want to change the world for the better.” I think that that’s really admirable. But we need something larger scale. Being open to the public is a way to engage with everyday people. Ownership is also a tricky term, right? What does it really mean to own a work of art? So yeah, these are all the questions that I was grappling with.
Rumpus: There are always places where there are no monuments. My family is from the Louisville, Kentucky area. I was deeply moved by your experience of “Promise, Witness & Remembrance” at the Speed Museum. There was no marker in the city where Breonna Taylor was murdered. What needs to happen to redress the harm of the absence of memorialization?
Weathersby: I think the way forward is trying to mark some of these spaces of import, so people who are engaging with the world could be able to have access to what has happened. In that space [they can] be able to contextualize the world around them. There are no markers to indicate where [Breonna Taylor] was killed, but there are a number of things throughout the city of Louisville that honor her. I think that matters. I also think about the emergence of graffiti or street art—what that was about, in terms of really trying to inject one’s presence on the world, however temporal. To make the self and others aware of humanity, it’s a form of expression that we need to continue to push forward.
The Equal Justice Initiative is doing a number of things. They want people to truly be aware of where lynchings occurred and how they impacted communities. Once we can understand where we reside, where we live, in relation to the past, it gives us more understanding of how we can move forward more collectively and more humanely. It seems like a really bizarre thing to live one’s life without an awareness of what came before, not just in an abstract historical context, but truly where you live, currently, this block, and what you know.
One of the things that I like to do, in terms of meditation, is sitting in silence. One of my favorite meditations is called walking meditation. The idea is to really walk through life, really taking in all of the life forms, like the trees, and focusing on that. Then everything else, all of these man-made structures, is stripped away. You start to feel something different. You are able to access something more. There is clarity of mind, or clarity of purpose, or place. That’s the beautiful thing, just sitting in silence: you never know what’s going to emerge where you are. I truly believe in spirits, in the spirit world, and the psychic nature of humanity. To live one’s life completely blind to that, I think is unfortunate. We, as humans, can access so much more.
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Author photograph by Boris Brenman
