What We’re Really Afraid of When We Look at Her

A white woman’s reckoning with the sacred power of Black women in public space

May 14, 2025

She stood there in bronze. Arms on hips. Body unbowed. A fat, Black woman, unmoved in the storm of Times Square. And somehow, that was enough to make headlines.

Some called Her infuriating.
I call Her revelation.

Grounded in the Stars, the towering sculpture by British artist Thomas J Price, is twelve feet of quiet, embodied power. She doesn’t protest. She doesn’t perform. She simply stands. And in doing so, She shifts the world.

I recognized Her—not because She looked like me, but because She looked like truth.
The kind I first encountered as a white teenage girl, reading The Color Purple, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Celie. Maya. Janie.
They weren’t symbols. They were the first voices I followed without hesitation—long before I had the language to understand why.

They shaped how I think about power, about survival, and about the divine—not as something distant or disembodied, but as rooted, scarred, knowing, and still loving.
Undeniable.

This is where my unlearning began. And something freer rose in its place: the knowing that God might not be above at all. She might live close to the skin—within grief and pleasure, in the curve of a spine, in the stillness of a woman who refuses to perform for you.

As Audre Lorde said:
“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”

That whisper didn’t belong to me. But it found me anyway—and changed me.

And here’s the thing: writing this in 2025, as a white woman, is not without risk.
But safety is not the point. Allyship that fears discomfort is not allyship. It’s maintenance of the very systems we say we want to dismantle.

This sculpture doesn’t ask for approval. It doesn’t explain itself. It simply is. That is enough to rattle a culture built on dominance and denial.

Thomas J Price is intentional about that. As he shared in his U.S. solo exhibition Beyond Measure, his work challenges the visual language of power—who it belongs to, and who gets to be immortalized. His sculptures push against the historic weight of monuments that glorify empire and violence, and instead, they elevate everyday presence. Especially the kind that has been excluded. Especially Black women.

In Price’s words, his figures are “deliberately ‘archetypes’”—not portraits of individuals, but embodiments of possibility. The kind of representation that leaves room for real people to see themselves in the art. The kind of sculpture that says: you were always worthy of being cast in bronze.

And She is not alone.

Black women have always been here—carving space in flesh, in stone, in silence—long before whiteness learned to look. They were not missing. They were dismissed. What’s shifting now is not their presence. It’s our perception.

I do not claim to explain them.
I behold them—in bronze, in brushstroke, in breath:

Simone Leigh’s Brick House on Penn’s campus
The Maya Angelou Monument in San Francisco
Alison Saar’s sculptures of Harriet Tubman and the Freedom Riders
Kara Walker’s silhouettes that still haunt the white walls they adorn

These are not just monuments.
They are correctives.
They do not commemorate empire.
They upend it.

So yes, I saw God the other day in Times Square.
She was Black.
She was fat.
She was magnificent.
And She wasn’t asking to be saved.
She is holding space—steadily, unapologetically—for something better.

P.S.
When you see Her—cast in bronze, carved in memory, or walking beside you—don’t just look. Behold her. And stay present.