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Open Walls (Edlin G. Lopez and Albert Orozco)
Open Walls (Edlin G. Lopez and Albert Orozco)

The 45th president is only symptomatic of a nation built by white supremacy, settler colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and US imperialism. No new library is necessary to help us understand this moment, as the library exists already in white spaces we can read as texts: carceral spaces filled with stolen people; commodified monoculture and resource extraction on stolen land; museums of stolen objects and ideas; pipelines and borderwalls allowing capital to move but not communities; statehouses, built through the stolen labor and knowledge of enslaved people; militarized police violence as environmental design. These library stacks (architecture, urban design, and infrastructure) are both produced by and reproduce whiteness as an intentional racial formation and as biopolitical tools of the colonizer state. They are continuous with each other as a system, depend on individuals' complicity with white supremacy to uphold them, and are never neutral. The white behaviors and white spaces in this image are but a few examples of the harm that white supremacy inflicts upon all of us, including those who are themselves racialized as white. Whiteness is not neutral, white architectural space is not neutral, and for those who read this nation every day in its white constructions, this moment was already written in stone, concrete, and steel.

Brenda (Bz) Zhang
Brenda (Bz) Zhang