Your Ways Are Strange to Us as Europeans

In this Tedx Talk held at Uni Heidelberg, artist Isaiah Lopaz combines theory and narrative to examine the various racisms mapped in Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Him. This transdisciplinary series of works initially included hand printed t-shirts, photographs, and text based works. Across different periods of time, Lopaz was photographed in areas of Berlin that were significant to his everyday life. In each photograph Lopaz wears a white t-shirt with black lettering, recording racist concepts, notions, and ideas, imposed in conversations with white others. Photographs from this series were initially presented in blog format and were later exhibited in stages of publication spanning print, digital, radio, and video media. The invitation to center a Tedx talk around Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Him and Lopaz’ experiences also came with a request to create an installation and to facilitate a public conversation about racism. The first question posed during the conversation was, “So what does it feel like to tell a room full of white people that they are racist?”. During the course of the discussion, Lopaz and activist, curator, and film maker Rachael Moore were tasked with : proving that racism exists and explaining “how” the experiences that Lopaz documented were racist. Other questions and statements included :

“I don’t listen to rap but I heard that there’s a lot of people using the n-word. If Black people don’t want to be called the n-word, shouldn’t they stop using it?”
”When people know that I’m Russian, they don’t like me. You see, that’s a kind of racism!”
”But don’t you think that when there are more Black people in Germany, when there’s more mixing that there will be no more racism?”