By Alexandra Brodsky • @azbrodsky • 10 years ago

New Favorite Tumblr: People of Color in European Art History

via medievalpoc.tumblr.com

via medievalpoc.tumblr.com

You know how there were no people of color in Europe until the Enlightenment? Well, yea, that just isn’t true.

People of Color in European Art History works to combat the erasure of POC from European history through a well-curated collection of images and accompanying commentary. Historical whitewashing matters. The creator writes:

The ubiquity in modern media to display a fictitiously all-white Europe is often thoughtlessly and inaccurately justified by claims of “historical accuracy”; this blog is here to emphasize the modern racism that retroactively erases gigantic swaths of truth and beauty.

A tertiary effect of showcasing these works is to provide a vehicle for correcting assumptions that works of fantasy based in “re-imagined” worlds of Medieval or Renaissance Europe that omit the contributions and presence of People of Color are made with “historical accuracy” in mind. In fact, the opposite is often the case.

Modern media does not exist in a vacuum.

Check out the full blog here.

Washington, DC

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com. During her four years at the site, she wrote about gender violence, reproductive justice, and education equity and ran the site's book review column. She is now a Skadden Fellow at the National Women's Law Center and also serves as the Board Chair of Know Your IX, a national student-led movement to end gender violence, which she co-founded and previously co-directed. Alexandra has written for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Nation, and she is the co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future. She has spoken about violence against women and reproductive justice at campuses across the country and on MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, ESPN, and NPR.

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com.

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