I asked a lot of friends and people I'd meet, "Can you tell me a story of a micro-aggression that happened to you in a place you didn't expect it to happen?" I wasn't interested in scandal, or outrageous moments. I was interested in the surprise of the intimate, or the surprise of the ordinary.

So you're just moving along and suddenly you get this moment that breaks your ability to continue, and yet you continue. I wanted those kinds of moments. And initially people would say, "I don't think I have any." Their initial reaction was to render invisible those moments weaved into a kind of everydayness.

You become a role model because of what you do as a person. There's a certain point where being a role model might come from standing up for yourself and getting rid of emotion that doesn't belong to you, emotion that is being brought on because of racist actions of others.

For instance, if you're a black guy and you got pulled over, and you didn't know that any other black men were being pulled over, you would constantly in the back of your head be thinking, "What did I do?" rather than, "I didn't do anything, these are just the conditions I live under."

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

For me her image, the triptych, became a study of the weight the black male figure carries, given the fact that they are targeted by the police, and are constantly in danger of being misread in public spaces.