857: Museum of Now
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I'm WBC Chicago, it's This American Life. And I am joined in the studio by my co-worker, Emmanuel Jocey. Hey, Ira. Hey there. So I have come into the studio today with this, actually. Let me just get it out of this bag really quickly. Hang on here. So that is like a piece of rock about the size of a football, yellow on one side. Yeah, it's a piece of concrete. So there's a story behind this, which is a couple of weeks ago, I went to this one street in Washington, D.C. And on that street, there were like, I don't know, maybe a dozen construction workers who were using like all of this heavy machinery to like rip out the words, "Black Lives Matter," which had been painted on that street as part of like its big mule they'd done in 2020, you know, like right after the murder of George Floyd. Yeah, I actually saw that once. Is this a giant letters like 50 feet tall or something, two blocks long? Yeah, it was like huge and right by the White House. And what I was watching that day as I was there was the city just completely getting rid of it because of pressure they'd been under from the Trump administration. I thought that when I got there that there would be crowds or protests, but it was pretty empty. Like most of the people that I saw just sort of walked past and kept it pushing, ignored what was going on. But then I saw this one black woman sort of stop and like wave over to like one of the lone black guys working on a construction crew, just like, you know, pointing at the ground. Sorry. Are you asking for a piece of it? Yeah. It's a huge piece. Okay, I'll take this. Thank you. Oh my god, that's heavy. The piece she had was so big. She had to hold it. With two hands. It was a piece of the letter T in the word matters. And the woman holding it, J.C., she's a political lives in D.C. She told me she was sitting at a cafe nearby when she saw someone else who had a piece and was like, oh, I want one of those. You just walked right up. We were just like, oh, can I? Why not? I mean, he was very kind to like take a break and get me a piece. And then I didn't like the first piece that he gave me. Oh, what? I know, but I needed the yellow. Like, I feel like the yellow is really big. Because otherwise it's just a piece of concrete. Yeah. Like, my kids aren't going to believe me. If I say it's from Black Lives Matter Plaza, it's just a piece of concrete. Like, it needed the yellow. Oh, do you have kids right now? Oh, okay, you're talking about future kids. I'm thinking about them. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I started seeing other people who were doing this too, right? Just like grabbing these pieces of the mural for future generations that did or didn't exist. They were these two women who were in town for work. One of them was scared that they were actually going to miss their flight because her friend was waiting so long for the construction workers to break off
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