TED Audio Collective

Where would we be in our understanding of the United States without culture, without art?

Like, try to explain it to someone, and you really can't.

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman.

On Design Matters, Debbie talks with designers and other creative people about what they do,

how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on.

On this episode, Sarah Lewis talks about how art and images shape our political and social reality.

We construct narratives to bolster regimes of who belongs and who counts through the visual

landscape.

Some people think that race is a fiction, yet it is a fiction that our society has kept lethally alive for a long time now. How? Well, it is all about the details. To make a fictional

world seem real, you have to fill it in with images and sensory information. You also have to leave most of the real world out. But if you succeed, the real world will look a little different for your readers. In her new book, The Unseen Truth, when Race Change Sight in America,

Sarah Lewis traces the visual history of race in America. She explains how art, photographs,

movies, and pop culture turned the fictional idea of race into a destructive cultural fact.

It's a scholarly tour de force and a literal eye-opener.

Sarah Lewis is a celebrated art and cultural historian

and a professor at Harvard University.

She's also the founder of Vision and Justice,

a civic initiative to reveal the

important role of visual culture in shaping how we think. Sarah Lewis, welcome to Design Matters.

Thank you so much for having me. It's really an honor to speak with you. Sarah, I understand when

you were in high school, you were a 400-meter sprinter.

How did you find this out? Yes, I was. I loved running. That was my race, hard, hard race.

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