Rashid Johnson (b. 1977)

Snatching Your People Up (2010) is a typically powerful work by Rashid Johnson, one of the most eloquent articulators of contemporary African-American experience. Like abstracted and uneasy graffiti, scattered white spray paint on black canvas bodies forth a cosmos of disarray and contrast. The title quotes Antoine Dodson, who became an internet sensation following his local television interview after a home invasion and the attempted rape of his sister. His outburst – ‘Well, obviously we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. He’s climbin’ in yo windows, he’s snatchin’ yo people up, tryin’ to rape ‘em. So y’all need to hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband cause they rapin’ everybody out here’ – spawned countless catchphrases, weighted with the uncomfortable reality that millions of YouTube viewers were laughing at the flamboyant vernacular of a gay, lower class black man following a serious and upsetting crime. Dodson himself noted the irony that he had ‘a hit on iTunes, but we're still in the projects’ (A. Dodson, quoted in E. Haines, ‘“Bed Intruder” songster turning fame into a future,’ Associated Press, 31 August 2010). The title Snatching Your People Up repurposes Dodson’s words, gesturing toward the exploitative, appropriative stereotyping that made him famous. Johnson’s I Talk White (2003), the titular words written in toothpaste on a mirror, similarly conveys the anxiety of attempting to assimilate into white society while retaining self-identity. Language is a badge of difference. Traversing its contemporary context, Snatching Your People Up also returns chillingly to the origins of a racist country: Dodson’s description of the rapist’s actions just as aptly defines the enslavement of black people on which the wealth of America was built, and whose lasting consequences Johnson so intelligently explores today.