Coming Soon
Friendly Game of Baseball
“Aww shit, another young brother hit
I better go over my man's crib and get the pump
Cause to the cops, shootin' brothers is like playin' baseball and they ain't never in a slump.”
Those lyrics, released on July 23, 1991, by the group Main Source on their album Breaking Atoms, serve as a haunting prologue to a story that America refuses to finish. When Large Professor penned "Just a Friendly Game of Baseball," he was providing a visceral commentary on police brutality. He depicted a society where Black men are targeted and killed as if they were merely figures on a scorecard—a "game" where the rules are rigged, and the umpire is blind.
As I look at the landscape of 2026, I realize that while racism is the foundation of this stadium, the problem is often more nuanced than a white cop hunting a Black man. While that raw hatred exists, it doesn't account for the full, lethal reality. Sadly, in this game, Black officers have also insisted on their time on the field. To understand this, we have to look at the "Irony of the Negro Policeman."
The legendary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat once painted The Irony of the Negro Policeman (1982) to highlight a sharp, painful contradiction. He saw the Black officer as a man wearing a mask of authority that was designed to oppress people who look exactly like him. In many ways, the uniform acts as an initiation into a "Club"—a blue brotherhood that demands loyalty to the badge over loyalty to the community.
When we look at the killing of Tyre Nichols on January 7, 2023, we see this irony in its most brutal form. The five Black officers involved— Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith—weren't just acting on personal whim. They were part of an elite "SCORPION" unit. This "Club" within the department socialized them to believe that aggressive, paramilitary violence was the only way to "score" in their job. In that moment, their Blackness was secondary to their membership in a system that views the Black body as a target. Whether it was the "warrior" culture of the unit or a warped sense of power, the outcome was the same: a young Black man was beaten to death by men who should have seen themselves in him. This isn't a new phenomenon, but the faces on the field shift.
The Rodney King Beating (March 3, 1991): The world watched as four white LAPD officers—Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, and Theodore Briseno—savagely beat a man while dozens of other officers watched. This was the classic image of the "game"—white supremacy in a state uniform.
As Basquiat and Main Source suggested, the uniform itself carries a weight of fear. It isn't just about "not liking" Black people; it’s about being socialized by the media and the "Club" to believe that Blackness equals a threat. If you are told every day that the neighborhood you patrol is a "war zone," you start treating your own people like enemy combatants.
What terrifies me most is how our legal system validates this manufactured fear. Under the "objective reasonableness" standard from Graham v. Connor, an officer’s panic is their greatest legal protection. If an officer can argue they felt their life was in danger—even if that fear was born from biased news cycles and "Club" indoctrination—the law often shields them.
In the cases of Rodney King and Tyre Nichols, the defense is the same: the officers were "managing a threat." The law essentially says, "I understand why you were afraid," granting a license to kill based on a socialized hunch. This turns a lack of emotional control and systemic bias into a valid legal defense.
We cannot expect the "friendly game" to end if we remain spectators. We have to look beyond how we’ve been socialized by a media that profits from our fear of one another. We have to challenge the "Club" mentality that allows an officer—regardless of race—to divorce themselves from their humanity the moment they clock in.
It is time for more people to get involved and demand an end to Qualified Immunity and the "reasonableness" of fear. We need to dismantle the systems that prioritize aggressive policing over human life. If we don’t collectively challenge the fear that has been pushed on us, we are just waiting for the next "inning" to claim another life. We are not targets. We are not "outs." We are human beings, and it’s time we demanded a new set of rules.
WHY AMERICAN WOMAN: A LYNCHING SERIES
WHY AMERICAN WOMAN: A LYNCHING SERIES
Her body is the canvas, mocha hues, set against her country’s red, white, and blue backdrop, telling our story for generations.
I’ve always been a fan of pin-up art and erotica and have been greatly moved and inspired by the works of artists like Alberto Vargas, Gil Elvgren, and Hajime Sorayama. However, for as long as pin-up has existed as an American art form, few images have focused on Black women, and none of the few illustrations merged historical elements into their compositions. Painting nude or semi-nude women does not interest me in and of itself. Painting “pin-up” art of Black women had to be about more than “Look, white artists do it. I can do it, too.” The traditional phrase “pin-up” and its close relationship to the word “lynching” was too enticing to be ignored. Hence, the series appellation. The word “lynching” redacts the word pin-up in my mind and so is reflected in the series logo. Between the years 1882 and 1968, 3,446 Blacks and 1,297 whites were lynched. Lynching typically involved extreme brutalities such as torture, mutilation, decapitation, immolation, and desecration.
Why a lynching series? What could I possibly be attempting to do? Idealistically, there are several things I hope my series will address. Using the Black female body as a totem for issues that have faced the larger African-American community; hopefully, forcing candid conversations about racial inequities is my intent. The Black woman, having internalized a foreign value system and attempting to imitate her white counterpart, becomes a distortion of herself. Highlighting an appreciation of Black beauty that might manifest in the abandonment of fake fingernails, false eyelashes, and the wearing, weaving, and gluing of hair from other ethnicities onto their heads would be ideal.
Also, I wish to reconsider the cultural origins of presenting the Black woman as “strong and independent,” brimming with a “combative attitude,” and how that stereotype has sometimes benefited and simultaneously harmed her image. The artistic merging of social/political and historical elements and the African-American female form elevates the works beyond pastiche.
Lastly, white men who appreciate the erotic nature of these paintings and are attracted to African-American women should consider these visual offerings an opportunity to experience a reckoning with the social-historical components that combine to make up what they find alluring.
This is the ideological approach to my “pin-up” art and, for me, separates my work from pornography. Truth is the goal; the Black female form is the vehicle by which larger, more complex, honest conversations about race may be sparked.
