In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space

Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction

“An awe-striking masterpiece of love.”
—Jason Reynolds, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“The sentences alone in In Open Contempt make it one of the most memorable books of the decade. But it’s the unexpected lingering and genius crafting of consequential action that makes this one of the freshest explorations of space I’ve ever read. Irvin Weathersby Jr. has made something we’ve never before seen, felt, or witnessed.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

A stirring journey into the soul of a fractured America that confronts the enduring specter of white supremacy in our art, monuments, and public spaces, from a captivating new literary voice

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.

Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation’s true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely.

Irvin Weathersby Jr. is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. He teaches at Queensborough Community College and at City College of New York in the MFA in Creative Writing program. His writing has been fea­tured in Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, and a BA from Morehouse College, and he has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foun­dation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.