This section relays the artist’s inner monologue and interactions as a child gradually becoming aware of racial, ethnic, and class distinctions in American society. The texts (transcripts available under each image) reflect actual encounters Holder experienced growing up in Manhattan, New York. The works ask us to contemplate differing youthful experiences; where Medgar Evers is a household name, where predominant narratives are given sufficient criticism, where identity is defended. Perhaps this was your childhood too. If it wasn’t, how would you have been shaped differently? How much more enriched would we be if we all learned a bit from what could be a shared experience, enough to bridge our country’s divide? These mixed-media works were created in the late 90s, but the sentiments resonate decades past the artist’s childhood and the date of creation.

Holder explains of this series: “The configuration of society was very clear when I was eight. I divided all of humanity into two lists: Good Guys and Bad Guys. At the top of my Bad Guy list were The Klu Klux Klan and Nazi’s followed by slave traders, the CIA, the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover. The Good Guys included Paul Robeson, The United Nations, Harriet Tubman, American Indians, Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt until I discovered her husband had put the Japanese- Americans into Internment camps.”