The “ Embrace” Statue Depersonalizes and Deracializes MLK and Coretta King. And Insults Them

Good intentions don’t count.

This picture — taken by the artist himself — shows how bizarre and depersonalized the whole statue is.

Hank Willis Thomas is a Brooklyn-based Black conceptual artist who created “The Embrace” statue. The statue is depicts the embrace between MLK and his Coretta King after MLK won The Nobel Peace Prize.

The statue is supposed to memorialize the embrace.

But the statue neither memorializes the embrace nor honors the Kings.

You can’t memorialize the embrace when you reduced it to nothing more than two pairs of arms hugging. You have taken out the emotion, the love, and the closeness from the embrace. So, instead of memorializing it, you are making it look like a bodily action performed with no emotion, hope, or love

The statute is also supposed to honor the Kings. But it doesn’t do that either. I mean the Kings are faceless, bodiless beings. How does that honor them?

What the statue does instead is totally depersonalize them. It depersonalizes them by removing their faces, bodies, smiles, and emotions. All we see from the statue are four hands that could belong to anyone.

You can’t honor the Kings when you are reducing them to just two pairs of arms “embracing” each other. Two pairs of arms completely delimbed…