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About THE BLACK BOOK
“
These are our lives-they are worth celebrating;we are worth celebrating
”
The Black Book is a virtual year book dedicated to celebrating Black life at Brown University. The project is named after Toni Morrison’s The Black Book (1974) a collage-styled book of art, patent applications, ads, music, and photographs curated by Morrison herself that explores the experiences of African Americans in the U.S. Morrison said that the purpose of the book was to tangibly exemplify that African Americans were “busy, smart and not just minstrelized.” Similarly, The Black Book was created to interrogate conventionally violent practices of archivization and give Black students at Brown a way to share and relish in their own achievements, joy, and community in their own image. Black student life @ Brown and Black life in general is rich, colorful, and worthy of celebration. It is not a complement, mechanism, function, or pawn of white supremacy. The proprietors of Black life are Black people and it is radically beautiful in the quotidian. The Black Book features photos from student photographers of Black campus events, Black Picture Day: A Portrait Series of Black Students @ Brown, and student submissions of personal photos taken throughout the year. This is something for us. These are our lives- they are worth celebrating; we are worth celebrating.
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