Milk of Justice, Obviously

On my way to work, I go past a series of paintings mounted on a wall, one the public artworks that went up after the police murder of George Floyd.*

How do we explain the obvious, and what's obvious anyway?

I've been thinking about how author Martha Wells effectively presents things that would be obvious to the characters in her futuristic Murderbot books, but aren't obvious to us, the readers.
She doesn't over-explain, so we just don't know how some things work in Murderbot's world, not exactly.
Over the span of four books (so far), however, Wells gradually reveals the world's working, in a naturalistic way--as the characters interact with some new setting or other character, we get bits of information that we can piece together, if we want.

And it struck me that I see this painting, below––"After Jamar", by Lane Eliyahu––the way Murderbot sees its world--from the inside.
The painter counts on the viewer to know her symbolism, though it's  specific, insider knowledge.

I am (we are) seeing art history in the making. One day (if we're lucky) art historians will teach "The Iconography of Protest Art in the Twenty-Twenties".  

It will have to be explained--(or may have to be explained now)--that people took (take) milk to public protests, to pour into eyes in order to counter the burning tear gas that police spray.

In the painting, the milk being poured onto a fallen protester's face is turning into flowers and butterflies and dragonflies:

 
Milk has a lot of symbolic connections---the nourishing mother (alma mater), the milk of human kindness, the land of milk and honey....
(Milk may contain bacteria, however, and the CDC instead recommends rinsing eyes with water for 10-15 minutes.)

The T-shirt of the woman on the ground reads "JUST US?" Justice.
I looked up the roots--there are many, including the book The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (inspired by the 2009 police shooting Oscar Grant to death at Fruitvale Station):

''Hate U Give emphasizes "Just Us" speaks to painful realization that those who remain comfortably unaffected are unlikely to be immediate allies."

--via Bustle, 2018

 The painter, Lane Eliyahu, writes:

"I saw up close how the most vulnerable among us are the first to stand up against shite supremacy. Black transgender and gender-nonconforming people are the first to step into harms way."

The obvious becomes obscure, in time. Interesting to live long enough to see that happen.

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*The series of paintings was curated by Burn Something Collective of Twin Cities-based Black and POCI femme, nonbinary, and trans artists---you can see the artworks in their exhibition catalog on Issuu, August 2020. "After Jamar" is on pages 16/17.