Violence Impacts Every Step

In my conversations with the participating families, parents, grandparents and siblings shared their lost child’s favorite activities, their passion and their dreams. Many families have created spaces, rooms dedicated to their child. I saw many bedrooms turned into memorials filled with pictures and uncountable memories.

These shoes traveled daily with each child to daycare, school, basketball games and birthday parties. There is truth and symbolism in the saying “to walk a mile in their shoes…”–to a place where no bad press can erase all the steps each child took and the lives these children touched.

These shoes represent what could have been, the potentials lost, life-paths interrupted, and the heartbeats  stopped in their tracks. Violence and its implications is a responsibility we all must “wear” in order to truly move forward and heal as a city.

You can step on the articles…after all we “walk over” this issue every time we flip over a newspaper page and do nothing.

Whenever we lose a child’s life to senseless violence, the family’s’ pain is exacerbated by sometimes inaccurate, superficial and insensitive media coverage. This is further amplified by anonymous comments that relentlessly attack and hurt grieving families.

While bloggers can hide under “anonymous” veils, the families who have suffered the devastating loss have names and faces and their pain is as real as their children’s names etched on gravestone. Anonymous Boston aims to empower families by giving them a voice, while also tearing down the “anonymous” veil readers and bloggers can hide behind. It achieves this by juxtaposing large scale photos of the murder victims along with their own writings and family responses next to the Anonymous Comments found online.

This exhibition is outside of the affected areas of Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury because too many people in Boston have the luxury of turning a blind eye to what happens in these neighborhoods. Too many can stay distant and uninvolved, thinking “it’s not happening to my child.” As a city, however, we must show that all children’s’ lives are valuable—regardless of race, age or zip code.

While the viewer sees a final “product” it is the process that cannot be overlooked and cannot be depicted. It is sitting on the couch with the families, sharing in their grief, joys, memories, regrets and hopes. Many of the families that so bravely are speaking out and stepping up have found healing in this process. The goal is that our community can also find some healing not only through the dialogues that will follow the opening, but by taking direct action, by standing up and grabbing the “pen” and authoring their own stories. Ultimately, whenever TRUTH, no matter how “inconvenient” and “ugly” it may be, is spoken, that is when healing can begin to occur.

Anonymous Boston is much more than an exhibit; it invites you on a journey of “awakening” where individuals can face each other in their moments of truth and collectively carry the burden of grief and the beauty and humanity in all of us.

Anonymous Boston is inspired by these words from a Village Voice interview with Malcolm X:

Malcolm X: The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you will get action.
Interviewer: Wake them up to their exploitation?
Malcolm X: No, to their humanity, to their own worth.