The Overdetermination of Tamir Rice

All The Traces Have Left Town

Last month, I was leading a workshop at a university, and I told the event organizer I was from Cleveland, and she told me that a few weeks earlier, Samiria Rice had been there to speak. Rice was interviewed by the artist E J Hill, who is apparently working on something—I am not sure what; it is still provisional—that he wants to call the Institute of St. Tamir.

Hill’s is the latest in a list of art projects related to Tamir Rice. There was an art exhibit at FRONT International (and commentary on the coverage is here and here). There was a play. Samiria Rice is raising funds for an Afrocentric Center in Tamir’s name, and she threw a 16th birthday party for him last year.

Add onto all of these the fascinating, frustrating, and endless saga of the most symbolic of symbols to tell the story of the murder of Tamir Rice: the gazebo.

The gazebo at the Cudell Recreation Center has been beset by too many layers, its meaning multiplied so many times it has been stripped of resonance as a memorial for one individual boy who was murdered by police officers on November 22, 2014 while playing in a park. The gazebo is now a symbol in its own right—of art, or public history, or how we memorialize and remember.

First, the city decided to remove the gazebo, a decision that was very controversial. Samiria Rice was in favor, as was Councilman Matt Zone. But curators, historians, and others thought it the wrong decision, and some were cynical about the motive: that Cleveland mainly wanted to avoid it appearing in television coverage of the 2016 RNC.

I went there during the RNC for Belt Magazine, and it was a profound, overwhelming experience. Not only did we interview folks and write about it for the magazine (there is a great video here), but we discovered a curiously political description of it on Pokemon Go (and a fascinating follow-up here).

But back to the question of what to do with the original gazebo, which—and this was, I argue, the first mistake, going to be dismantled and shipped out of Cleveland—but to where? First, it seemed the Smithsonian wanted it for the Museum of African-American history; then, it seemed they did not. Then, Theaster Gates stepped in, to rebuild it in Chicago. That was in 2016. In July 2018, two an a half years later, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Gates’ efforts:

Last month, the Rebuild Foundation, with 826CHI, held a workshop for teens at the rebuilt gazebo:

Theaster Gates’ career is booming, and the gazebo’s strange home inside a building in Chicago may become meaningfully contextualized under Gates’ stewardship. Or, perhaps, it may be subsumed, its displaced iconography becoming symbolic of something else yet again: Black Lives Matter, death, history, seeds that become flowers, artistic ambition.

What does it mean when Tamir Rice becomes the stand-in for “anyone else who has suffered from oppression”? What does it mean that Cleveland’s role in his murder is now so abstracted? What does it mean that Samiria Rice cannot raise close to the amount of money Gates can to build a youth community center in honor of her son in Cleveland, a place where kids could also go to workshops to write about oppression, and plant seeds?

I flinched when I was told of a project containing “Saint Tamir” in it. Hagiography is dicey. The meanings we are ascribing to Tamir are mulitplying, becoming too-convenient stand-ins for too much. Meanwhile, Cleveland’s consent-decreed police force, the shameful prosecution of the officers who murdered a 12 year old boy, and the city’s long history of protecting the powerful at tragic cost become just broad strokes background fleshing out abstracted ideological expression—”anyone else who has suffered from oppression.”

And Cudell—and the Cudell Rec Center— what of it? It is a place, a concrete, grounded, particular place, where neighborhood kids played, and play, with a history that needs preserving, and telling. None of the exhibits, efforts, or links above are taking place in Cudell.

The inability to wrestle a narrative that settles—the memorials and art projects to a boy who was murdered endlessly proliferate— signals that something is not right. We are asking the wrong questions. Let’s start asking new ones, here in Cleveland, in the city who protected his killers, and then removed their traces. Before the art and the police and the elected officials all move further and further away from the scene of the crime.

Cleveland Chronicles is a record of life in Cleveland throughout 2019 as filtered through the lens of the chronicler. Please consider subscribing.