Gay, African-American confronts racism

Isaiah Lopaz lets his T-shirts speak for themselves.
“And when do you go back?” reads one of the plain white T-shirts the 36-year-old American wears for his portrait series. 
“Where do you really come from?” is another. It’s a question the Afro-American hears all the time in his everyday life in his adopted home city of Berlin where some people seem to think he’s not a “proper” American.
Each of the T-shirts has its own story, some of which he has published on his website along with the pictures. 
“Where can we get some drugs?” When he first moved to Berlin in 2007, Lopaz had dreadlocks and as well as being stared at everywhere he went, he was constantly being asked if he sold drugs. 
“The first time it happened I thought, random. Then it happened a second time, and then a third time, and then it became a thing,” he writes. Once he was even followed around a supermarket.
Eventually he cut his hair short, which stopped most of the drug demands, though it’s still a problem for him.
Lopaz studied art and photography at the Art Centre College of Design in Los Angeles, moving to Frankfurt nine years ago to study with a famous German photographer, Wolfgang Tillmans.
When Tillmans moved to London, Lopaz moved to Berlin, where instead of photography he concentrated on illustration.
He got the idea for the T-shirts in April, writing down all the implicitly racist comments he’d heard over the years.
“The list was like this by the end,” he says, spreading his arms out wide.
The basic refrains he printed on T-shirts, and they don’t need much context to explain them.
His project has been a hit on social media, and he was even reported on in the New York Times recently – a great success for Lopaz, who sees himself as a mouthpiece for black people in Europe.
It’s not really about drawing people’s attention to subtly hurtful phrases, he says, it’s about showing how black people are made to feel in a predominantly white society and the racism they are faced with.
Some of the phrases also address the topic of hom-|osexuality. 
Lopaz, who is gay, finds the connection of skin colour and sexual orientation rather painful.
“I didn’t know you are gay: You are black” is one of the things he’s been told by mystified patrons in gay bars, and when he worked as a DJ in gay |bars, customers demanded he play them black music.
“‘I’m gay: I can’t be racist’. This idea, this statement, implies so many things all at once. A white person who believes that being gay excludes them from replicating racial oppression doesn’t understand the difference between race and sexuality,” writes Lopaz.
He is determined to continue the dialogue he has started with other black people and travel through other European cities, gathering more stories to process through his art.