Michael Darough was house hunting when he arrived at a potential property about five minutes before his Realtor and parked in front of the “For Sale” sign in the yard.
He felt he was doing everything “right”: He didn’t have the radio on, he was wearing a polo and a pair of slacks. He kept his windows rolled down, signaling he had nothing to hide.
But he was still perceived as a threat.
“Since my windows were rolled down, I could hear everything that was going on. I was outside that house for five minutes, and in that time I could hear the neighbor saying, ‘I’ve got a Black man sitting outside this house,’” he recalled.
His Realtor showed up about two minutes later and they noticed a cop car slowing down and pausing in front of the house as they were about to open the door. The officer locked eyes with Darough, nodded and then drove off.
“If the real estate agent had been 10 minutes late, if I’d gotten there 10 minutes earlier, what could have unfolded?” Darough remembers thinking. “You can do all the things that you, quote unquote, are supposed to do, but still end up in this situation.”
If you go
What: “The Talk” photography exhibition
When: Now through March 8
Where: 300 Campus Circle, TCC Trinity River campus
Admission: Free
He didn’t have to look far for other situations where encounters with police ended fatally — while someone was sitting in their own apartment, in their grandmother’s yard, holding a cellphone or selling CDs.
This reality is something that people of color are all too familiar with, Darough said, and many parents try to protect their children by having what he calls, “The Talk.”
“As a young kid my parents had to sit down … talk to me about how I should carry myself on the street, how I should address police officers, how I should address other people,” he recalled. “If they wanted me to come home at the end of the day, they needed to make sure they had a conversation with me.”
That talk has its limits, as Darough was reminded time and time again while watching the news. The fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white officer in 2014 hit home especially hard for Darough who grew up in Ferguson, Missouri.
“My great-grandmother’s best friend lived right down the street. I was in those areas. I could have been a Mike Brown,” he said to a crowded room on Tarrant County College’s Trinity River campus. “So what was going on in terms of criminal justice and violence against Black males was hitting home for me.”
As someone with aunts and uncles who have worked in law enforcement, Darough said he supports the police, but wants to see issues within the system such as bias, training and stop-and-frisk policies addressed.
“I know there’s a difficult job that these police officers have, and they have to walk into tense situations and they have to make quick judgment calls,” Darough said. “But, I think there needs to be a little bit more hesitation as we’re all going into different situations … listening to some of these accounts it was more walk in and fire first.”
Darough channeled his frustration into art and created a series of black and white photographs called “The Talk.” The exhibition is currently on view in TCC’s East Fork Gallery through March 8.
Angel Fernandez, an associate professor of art on campus, first saw Darough’s work at Baylor University in 2016.
“Whether it was the Black Lives Matter movement, or addressing inequalities in our justice system, I thought that his work was addressing issues that I feel have an urgency and need to be addressed,” he said.
When planning for Black History Month at the gallery, he knew he wanted to bring Darough’s work in.
“Not only was it strong in terms of its content, the message and the subject matter,” Fernandez said, “but also how well crafted his photographs are … in terms of how it was pristine and compositionally minimal.”
Darough took notes while watching the news about specific cases and referenced the language in his work. For example, he has pieces titled “I Was in My Apartment,” “I Can’t Breathe,” and “It Was a Cellphone.”
Some of the most striking images on display, Fernandez said, are the photos without a person in them, that acknowledge all of the cases that didn’t make the national news.
“At first it’s like, wait a minute, these are like missing,” he said. “It reminded me a lot of … memorials where they’ll have the graves of the unknown soldiers.”
For Darough, talking about these issues — and acknowledging that we still don’t know the full scale of them — is the first step toward a solution.
“I hope and pray,” he said, “we have a day where we don’t need to have these conversations.”
Marcheta Fornoff covers the arts for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at marcheta.fornoff@fortworthreport.org.At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policyhere.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.