Transcribing interviews for my new doc ‘The Injured Body’

Lauren Jimerson, art therapist and fine artist, originally from the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation, near Buffalo, shares the story of a recent micro-aggression:

And she’s like, ‘Where do I know you from?’ and, I said, ‘I don’t know’, like I go a lot of places… I said, ‘Well, I’m affiliated with Ganondagan, have you ever been there?’ And she said no. And then she made a comment about how she thought, or she knew (I feel like she might have said she knew) I had to be Asian, or Oriental, or she said something like that. And, I personally took offense to it.

And it’s not the thought of being Asian. It’s connected to this idea that Native Americans look a certain way. You know, due to images that are out there, in mainstream media, and there’s also the concept of like, all the Indians are dead, you know, like they don’t exist anymore. And even though I mentioned Ganondagan and at one point I said something about being Native American, she still was like, I was Asian.
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microaggressions #racism #womenofcolor #film #documentary #theinjuredbody #neelumfilms #rochesterny #microaggressionsareracism #microaggressionsarereal

Transcribing interviews for my new doc ‘The Injured Body’

Sady Fischer, Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, describes her vision for a better world:

The first thing I would say is for everyone to get the term colorblind out of their vocabulary. We do see different races, different communities, different looks. There’s this Audre Lorde poem, it is my all-time favorite, and she says: ‘It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.’

[…] I tell people all the time, I want you to see who I am, I don’t want you to pretend that you can’t see that I’m female. I’m proud of being a woman. Don’t pretend that you don’t see that I am a Latina, I’m very proud of my background and my heritage. I don’t want you to pretend that I’m not a queer woman. People say, ‘I don’t even see you as that, I just see you as Sady.’ But I see myself as that. I’m proud of my partner, our household, our family and the community that we belong to. I want you to see all those things. What I don’t want is a value judgment assigned to any of it.

microaggressions #racism #LGBTQrights #womenofcolor #film #documentary #theinjuredbody #neelumfilms #microaggressionsareracism #microaggressionsarereal

Transcribing interviews for my new doc ‘The Injured Body’
Amanda Chestnut, an artist, curator and educator based in Rochester, NY, talks about her work:

‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ by Langston Hughes was so important for me to read. I’ve read a lot of his poetry. A lot of archival work I’ve done has been related to Hughes’s experience of being Black in America. His poetry has overlapped with my archival work in many ways. But this essay in particular was really important for me because he speaks to actively choosing to be Black and actively choosing to glorify that Blackness, instead of being a creator and having aspirations toward a normative white standard. He emphasizes that it’s ok to be Black and that Blackness is glorious, is the word that he uses. And that was really important for me to read as I was coming into being an artist. It was important for me to be able to actively choose to talk about race and to make work about race. Because when you’re a person of color your work is always about race, whether you want to admit it or not. Everything you make is influenced by race and everything you make will be read through that lens.
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microaggressions #racism #womenofcolor #film #documentary #theinjuredbody #neelumfilms #microaggressionsareracism #microaggressionsarereal