Writer Irvin Weathersby Jr. explores America's museums and monuments in his new book, "In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space."

It's part memoir and part reflection on how our creation myths as Americans often contradict our nation's true history, according to Weathersby. He said the book tries to encapsulate that feeling of what it means to be a Black American.

ABC News' Linsey Davis sat down with Weathersby to discuss his book in more detail.

What stories do we tell ourselves about the past? How do they inform our present, and our future? Where did we learn them and what if they’re wrong? In today’s episode of Hello Monday, Jessi Hempel sits down with Irvin Weathersby Jr. to explore how we challenge existing systems, and the beliefs and ideas that prop them up.  

Irvin is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor, originally from New Orleans. His new book is In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space. In it, he explores the myths about America and its people that are woven throughout our art, our monuments, and our public spaces. And how we can go about unravelling them.

This week, we're joined by author and educator Irvin Weathersby Jr. to discuss his new book, In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space. We delve into the complicated legacy of monuments and art—what they represent, how they uphold systems of white supremacy, and what it takes to envision something new. Irvin also shares how his identity as a “teacher who writes” informs his work and perspective.

By Sonya Lea

I met Irvin Weathersby Jr. on the day before the United States national elections last fall. We were on opposite ends of the country, talking about his book, In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art & Public Space (Penguin Random House, 2025). The book is a work of nonfiction, a close examination of the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces, monuments, and markers of history. It confronts and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma. Beautiful in its language and masterful in scope, Weathersby asks questions about “the truths we are taught because we can’t look away.” He wonders if we “really do need to see death.” Scenes from the author’s life make this book read like a memoir, and Weathersby’s wise voice, as an art and cultural critic, interrogates works and histories that contain racial violence and oppression.

A spirited and often poetic treatment of an important and timely topic.

On a sweltering  July day, in the Carriage House on the St. Joseph’s campus in Clinton Hill, Irvin sat down for a conversation with Tim Coover, a Foundry Fellow, Writer’s Foundry Review editor, and a former student. Over coffee and chocolate croissants, they discussed many topics related to Irvin’s forthcoming memoir: art, politics, the value and the danger of museums, and how to be a citizen of this contradictory country.

Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships

Irvin Weathersby Jr. lectures in the English Department at Queensborough Community College, teaching composition and creative writing. A 2019 Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Mr. Weathersby often writes about race and the Black experience. A former high school teacher and re-entry educator in Baltimore, the South Bronx and Harlem, his writing centers on marginalized communities. Irivin’s essays have appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic, The Root, EBONY, and elsewhere talks about his upcoming book, In Open Contempt (Viking/Penguin), a memoir-in-essays focused on expressions of white supremacy in art found in New Orleans, his hometown, and around the world.