Otherness: A Pearl Made Perfect from Pressure
When I look around, I see a sea of brown. Perfectly melanated bodies looking like gold dripping from each corner when the sun hits in all of the right cocoa-butter coated places. From the suruban streets to gentrified projects, there is a sea of similar faces. The only thing that becomes different with every passing month and year are those missing faces that are taken from “the ghetto” and caged away in further isolation, forever branded as a criminal.
It was not long ago that Black Wall Street pioneers found self acknowledgement through achieving a sense of rebirth only to catch heat in their own community. African American’s suburbans may be thriving now, while urban communities are becoming ghost towns.
You see, year by year more and more of our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters are sucked into the system. The prison industrial complex here in America robs us of the ones we love from our communities, subsequently robbing us all of our identities. Because when we are in a constant loss of human lives and potential, everyone involved is forced into survival mode. Our communities are infiltrated and wiped out by the white men who hire our men to build these institutions who keep our people locked in cages.
And still, the physical act of incarceration does not compare to the one of the mind. The ways we love and communicate are altered due to our constant state of survival. Pressure to perform gender-roles consistent with societal norms keeps our people trained and chained. Men are taught to be hyper-masculine while black women are expected to be the care-takers of their community.
In the series “Otherness”, artist Omega the Poet is captured wearing an orange round-neck t-shirt, light colored slacks and white pearls looking to be painted on by a white hand. The orange shirt and light pants are meant to replicate a prison uniform on a black man outside of the walls in prison. And the pearls are meant to symbolize the white man’s attempt to paint men and women of color in his distorted image. Omega does so he believes by embracing both “my femininity and masculinity”. He talks more about this in his approach at love in his latest song titled “Boy”. “Boy” can be found on all platforms besides SoundCloud debuting February 21st as part of an album project titled Eros. Just as pearls are beautiful treasures formed in pressure so too are we. That’s our superpower: we’ll always create magic in even the darkest of circumstances.
Otherness: A Pearl Made Perfect from Pressure credits:
Creative Lead | Stylist: Columbus Hinson
Muse: Omega The Poet
Photographer | Visual Director: Kennedi Carter
Creative Director | Producer: Melquan Ganzy
