Systemic racism is being blamed for a whole host of problems these days, but one cause I didn’t dream of was “systemic racism in sleep.”
Brittney McNamara highlighted the issue on Friday in Teen Vogue in a story about Fannie Sosa and Navild Acosta, the creators of Black Power Naps (BPN), described on its website as “a sculptural installation, vibrational device and curatorial initiative that reclaims laziness and idleness as power.” Ok, whatever that means …
They created BPN because they were tired, “but it wasn’t just any old fatigue,” reported Teen Vogue, “they were specifically experiencing a generational fatigue familiar to Black people and people of color.” As Sosa claimed, “We inherited this exhaustion.”
They don’t simply claim that worrying about current racial tensions is keeping them up at night. They seek “a recognition of the hundreds of years of sleep deprivation that Black people and people of color have experienced as a result of systemic racism, a way to push back against the false stereotype that Black people are lazy, and an investigation of the inequitable distribution of rest.”
David Adams
Article URL : https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/culture/alexa-moutevelis/2020/07/13/dream-teen-vogue-explains-systemic-racism-sleep