Foreign Children, 1977

Arriving as a cartoon but lingering as serious criticism, Foreign Children offers a parody of a previous era’s “we are the world” clichés. At the center of a composition ringed by racist stereotypes, a pajama-clad white child, reminiscent of SaintExupéry’s Petit Prince, holds his security blanket and sucks his thumb, seemingly anxious about the diversity that surrounds him. In the canvas’s upper corners, the stenciled words “WON WORLD” eviscerate any happy unity with an implication of domination. In the bottom left corner, a book lies open to words by the Victorian-era poet Robert Louis Stevenson, whose cringe-worthy poem “Foreign Children,” redolent of an outdated colonialism, Robert Colescott’s painting indicts with cutting humor.