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The writer selects words to paint images of context on the canvas of the minds of their readers. The fine artist paints images that provoke words of context in the pages of the minds of their viewers. Both create meaning 1n their own distinct ways. But in this arresting piece by Craig Rippon. named "American Lexicon," oil on canvas, a component of the series American Woman: A Pin-up (Lynching}, painter-turned-writer/writer-turned-painter dares us to confront and consider, a fearless, seamless, and apprehending narrative, holding the eye both captured and raptured at once in a furious and unapologetic conflagration of. both. the written and the painted word.

We witness a sense-assaulting representation of the trope of the powerful Black woman. her skin lit and glowing in all the stark and naked glory of her unfettered physicality and towering sexual awareness. if not practiced prowess. baiting the viewer to fall for the utter romanticism of her seeming invincibility. But those who know better know better.

Confirmed by her knowing expression, and one with only the most nuanced hint of the inherent danger she knows she is risking, she acts here within an agency fully of her own making - and taking - presenting her "self' as a form the white man has continually divulged himself to regard, and covet, in most part, as an object of desire and derision at once, all while she intends, as usual, to leverage her power 1n some modest and fleeting way to her means.

Yet, all that raw strength notwithstanding, she remains here as some "thing" or some "one" to be seduced, or to whom one must helplessly submit, harkening back, 1n decadent role-playing reversal, to the days of blurred slave/master sexual dynamics although the true systemic hierarchy of power back then, as today, was never at risk or in question - persistent dynamics that still reverberate in contemporary society today, echoes of a damaged but not-so-dormant psyche, whose whispered shame throughout long generations continues to indict - and yet stil I, rarely, convict. In "American Lexicon," the prey becomes the predator, but only ever as far as the white man will allow.

The powerful Black woman mostly acquiesces to sex, though willingly, especially in the absence of that rarer factor of mutual human surrender known as love, and she does so, again, more often than not, because fewer better choices are afforded her than to simply give in, once again, to that age-old male-female/white-Black power dynamic, which, to this day, leaves the Black woman precisely that, consumed - consumed of her emotional and economic strength and self­esteem. Note, this is not entirely to characterize her as a hapless or helpless victim, because she is often fully cognizant and complicit 1n this disbalanced coupling, but it also serves to recognize that she hardly emerges as a victor from this struggle - never truly fully ascending by familial or social or other means.

Do I mean to denounce interracial sex as solely a loveless and disingenuous act of exploitation? Hardly. Interracial relationships are, indeed, perhaps the only hope we have for ultimately curing - or, at least, putting in deeper remission - this country's chronic racial and racist pathologies. However, when the actors in that same interracial, highly sexualized, and socially unequaled pairing are that of a white man and a Black woman.

In the best of cases (so as not to perpetually dwell on the worst), sexual consummation in these circumstances, more often than not, comes through tacit coital encounters, relationships, or cohabitation, and none of which bestow any socially legitimizing form of connubial bliss nor blessing.

It is precisely because of that problematic past, that one cannot help but look at them today and wonder, hoping to keep that single, scrutinizing eyebrow from reflexively rising with jaded or fully merited skepticism. It is essential to note here that African­American women have long occupied a unique place in the history of this country's artistic depictions.

In the best of those examples, the artistic merging of sociopolitical and sociohistorical elements and the African-American female form elevates such work beyond cheap exoticism, or pastiche, and serve as essential cornerstones, anchored to the foundation of the American creative consciousness, upon which is then erected a three-pillared message of immeasurable import, both touching the woman of color, while indirectly challenging the white male gaze. First and foremost among these crucial messages, there is the pinpointing of an appreciation of a higher level of Black beauty that might better and authentically manifest itself through an abandonment of fake fingernails, false eyelashes, and the wearing, weaving, and gluing of hair from other ethnicities onto their heads.

The Black woman, having internalized a foreign value system, and attempting to imitate, if not altogether emulate, her white counterpart, becomes, at best, a distortion of herself, and at worst, an outright caricature. This 1s not to say that such accouterments are destructive or necessarily objectionable in and of themselves, but once the practice becomes a legitimizing rite of passage for the young and impressionable Black girl, or a pervasive ritual for mature women of color to seek and sustain subconscious validation, or when it all becomes an obsession tied implicitly or explicitly to her sense of self-worth, then this is when seemingly benign practices of commercial aesthetics become existentially lethal.

Also, we cannot neglect to consider, or daresay reconsider, the cultural origins of presenting that trope of the Black woman as both strong and independent, brimming with a defiant confidence, if not an all-out combative attitude, and how depictions of that stereotype have equally benefited and harmed her image.

Lastly, white men who continue to appreciate, if not eroticize and fantasize about the sensual/sexual nature of these paintings, and are, through them, therefore, more attracted to African-American women, they should also consider, if not welcome these visual offerings as an opportunity to confront and grapple with individual and collective self-reflection, and have a ruthless reckoning with the sociohistorical roots that continue to bear the bitter fruit of the very visual aspects they find most alluring, many factors of which go further and generationally deeper than mere physical attraction.

Many would say that the point of fine art - in fact, what makes it 'fine' - is its desire to rise above the objectification of its subjects, particularly when those subjects of the art, as in the case, are nudes. However, in "American Lexicon," I would posit that its intention, its very objective is objectification, especially when one considers the purposely excessive use of racial slurs and cultural pejoratives in the painting, which, at once, surround and tattoo the nude, if not brand her as if with marks of the whipping post, accusing her of being a multiplicity of objects that she obviously is not.

This is objectification as strategy; objectification objectified, and through the extreme fervor and hyper-ignorance that the painting puts on display, it emasculates the power of the hatred of that vocabulary, the hurtful nature of that lexicon. Beauty is made ugly in this piece, or, by contrast, it is elevated to the sublime and made even more beautiful when so luridly and violently juxtaposed to the ugly that threatens to mar it. "American Lexicon" forces us to examine and perhaps redefine what is beautiful and ugly in the world in concert, or 1n contrast, to what is beautiful and ugly in us.

Throughout millennia, worldwide, and over centuries here in America, persons of both white and Black descent have come to mostly celebrate the beauty of the mulatto, that which is the result of when white European and Black African DNA mixes into an ideal amalgam, seamlessly fusing the best of the physical attributes of both races. And, as is often the case, one set of genes randomly dominates over the other, or vice-versa, or both are distributed in glorious equal measure. If only that same symmetry and harmony could occur in the psychological, emotional, and social strata of our "selves" as it does in the physical nature. But with "American Lexicon," where the visual and verbal are not nearly so harmoniously blended, we are reminded and admonished to concede that there is still much work to be done.

While such millennia may have perfected the biological congenital union, how many more decades, centuries, or millennia must we wait for the social to reach that same egalitarian ideal - liberating us all to finally speak the same language, free of pre-judgement, i.e., free of prejudice, and with it, undergo yet another ruthless reckoning with, and a release from, the heartless enslavement of resentment and guilt. But just as with the paintings and the writings of old, only time will tell.

The subject of "American Lexicon," even as we see her here, stripped bare, ultimately does rise above the cacophony of hatred that surrounds her, and she triumphs as victor, because while ink and paint are temporal, true beauty is eternal. We are reminded of that defensive and deflective childhood chant, when we were faced with undeserved mocking - "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" we would sing. However, in this case, and in this country, sadly, and as a direct result of the shameful history of chattel slavery, punitively exploitative sharecropping, and not much later, the municipally sanctioned barbarian acts with impunity of white-hooded, cross-burning, fruit-hanging Jim Crow males, all of which undoubtedly serve as, at least, one set of roots for the inspiration behind this piece, 'sticks and stones' were indeed used daily, and did, in fact, 'break bones.'

In closing, along with its nude, the piece itself also rises above the erotic depravity of its confrontational subject matter, because hate hyper-intensified is hate, effectively, muzzled, and neutered. And within that forced and pregnant silence, there is space for thought, opportunity for learning, and dare I say, a hope for age-old wounds to even begin healing, and slowly scarring, on both sides of that racial divide. And in so doing, America may yet still learn to evolve its consciousness and elevate its vocabulary to speak a new and more loving lexicon. In time.