Prologue: This is part one of a two part series on white racism and the lack of empathy it creates. In this part, I provide a few examples that demonstrate this problem, and talk about why empathy is important in the fight against racism. In the second essay, I talk about my own “approximating experiences” and how they have helped me to develop empathy and an anti-racist conciousness. The prupose of these posts are not to attack Whites, but to point out how white racism and white privilege affect the psychology of Whites in America. It is an attempt to get Whites to think about ourselves and our role in racism.
I also understand that the lynching picture to the left is gruesome and offensive. I am putting it up to help show the brutality and force of American racism. This picture is one of many from the crtitically acclaimed book and exhibit Without Sanctuary. National Public Radio also has a good series of links on lynching: lynching in the US.
I found this article on National Public Radio a few days back, and then April sent me an email reminding me about this story. For those who don’t have time to listen, I’ll summarize. A group of three teenagers on Long Island, decided that it would be funny to taunt their two Black classmates by tying the hands of a Black doll and putting a noose around its neck. The students laughed so hard, it caught their teacher’s attention and they ended up being charged with a crime. The students apparently saw nothing wrong with what they did, and they admitted to the crime. What disturbs me most about this story is the complete lack of empathy and compassion that racism created in these young people.
Much of the racism in America today manifests itself in a lack of empathy. I am by no means trying to dismiss structural racism. I agree that our political, economic, and educational systems are structured in a way that recreates racism. However, I think there is a fundamental lack of empathy that underlies White racism. I was first introduced to this idea about 10 years ago when I got my hands on the first edition of White Racism by Joe Feagin and Hernan Vera (the book has since been updated with a third author, Pinar Batur). On page 174 of the first edition, they have the following quote:
“Empathy is an essential component of human social life. It tells us that a child’s cry means discomfort or hunger or allows us to relate pleasure to a smile and pain to lament. Empathy permits us to come together and communicate, and it requires significant personal effort. Most importantly for our arguments here, empathy is essential for the resolution of racial oppression and conflict.”
Feagin and Vera, also argue:
“The persistence of antiblack rituals has been publicized in the United States, although the widespread character and significance of these rituals tend to be ignored or denied by whites….But the cognitive acknowledgment of the racist acts of other whites does not necessarily bring an empathetic understanding of the pain that such acts inflict on the Black victims. Empathy is not the same as sympathy. Sympathy means feeling sorry for someone; empathy involves identifying strongly with the circumstances and pain of another human being…”
The lack of empathy that many Whites display is both a sociological and a psychological problem. It is the indifference to human suffering that allows ordinary people to engage in extraordinary acts of violence. It is the lack of empathy that allows people to sit by and blame people for their suffering. Each semester I show lynching photos like the one above, so my students understand the shear brutality of racism. One of the most disturbing aspects of these photos is how much glee and pride are evident in the faces of the White lynch mobs. In fact, I always show this picture above because it shows the White girl on the left smiling as if she is proudly posing with the victim. Think of the sheer lack of empathy and the viscous brutality that is associated with smiling at something like this. I remembered this after Hurricane Katrina. How could someone watch this people chanting for help and taking care of dying elderly people, dehydrated babies, and people going into diabetic comas and only be focused on looting? How could people be more concerned about destroyed property than the lives of their fellow human beings? This is what racism does. It makes people indifferent to human suffering, and it allows them to rape, rob, pillage, and kill without guilt or conscience. It allows them to watch scenes like the ones in New Orleans and be most worried about whether on not the Superdome will be ready for the upcoming football season. It allows them to look at racist insults as something that really people of color should turn a blind eye to.
Those of us who want to challenge racism need engage with this problem, and we need to find ways to make people, primarily White folks, more empathetic. Feagin and Vera believe that Whites can develop empathetic orientations through “approximating experiences.” Approximating experiences help Whites grasp what it is like to be the victim of racial discrimination. Citing a study by Tiffany Hogan and Julie Netzger, they say that approximating experiences most often come from three sources: relying on stories that people of color tell about their experiences, relying on general humanistic values, and relying on aspects of their own oppression. In the last case they note that White women who experienced multiple forms of discrimination (such as being a woman and being lesbian or Jewish) are more likely to develop empathetic orientations toward people of color. These strategies provide us a place to start to think about how an empathetic anti-racist consciousness can be developed in Whites.
So back to those Long Island White kids who think it is funny to put a noose around a Black dolls head. When their Black classmates were subjected to this racist ritual, I bet they thought of a scene like the one in the picture above. How could these White teenagers do this without knowing the fear, pain, disgust, sadness, and anger that lynching symbols create for African Americans? How could they not feel this ways themselves? How could they be like that little White girl in the picture above–completely indifferent to human suffering. If we are ever going to change racism, us White folks need to ask ourselves how we can move toward understanding and empathizing with the pain and suffering that our racism creates. Rather than focusing on our own views and experiences, we need to step outside of our perspectives and try to develop the approximating experiences that challenge the apathy indifference that racism creates.
This post and others like it can be found at Rachel’s Tavern and a new anti-racism blog called Ally Work.
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Racism certainly plays a part in lack of empathy.
One explanation is also the simple fact of developed tolerance to images of human suffering, and since much of the suffering happens among non-whites (in developing countries) perhaps there is racial aspect too.. As an anecdote, I distinctly remember a case (few years ago, IIRC) where there was a police was apprehending some violent with a guy (who had barricaded himself inside a shop or something),here in Finland. It was shown on TV, and what made the case notable was the fact that he had shot one of the dogs the police had, and it was shown on TV.
Soon, the TV company, and many newspapers, got a flood of letters demanding cencorship, claiming that this should have never been shown, that children will have huge traumas and it was so unspeakably cruel that even adults are in complete shock. Such violence shouldn’t just be happening, and the criminal is a veritable demon, they wrote.
I suppose they don’t watch any fictional police series, or non-fictional news.
violent with a gut…
Darn, violent guy with a gun!
*sigh*
Never mind…
Rachel: I’m saying this in good faith… posting the picture of a lynching is absolutely gratuitious to your point.
The picture archives of lynchings was horrifying, as well as educational. Interesting to see all the white people among them. I guess that the racism-induced lynchings of black people created the lack of empathy that let majority whites lynch their own, as well.
Those of us who want to challenge racism need engage with this problem, and we need to find ways to make people, primarily White folks, more empathetic.
Good luck on this task, but until you’re willing to address the issues of race honestly most of the people, not just white folks, you want to change aren’t going to be receptive to the spin in your message. Case in point was your decision to post a lynching photo. I certainly understand that this is how you see the world but your passion on this issue, and the skew inherent in your position, isn’t shared by those you want to convert, and in fact, you probably do more to alienate them than you do to convert them to your brand of anti-racism.
This is a great point, one I’ve been thinking about for a while now. We need to start looking more at the micro and the interior (empathy, one of those hard-to-quantify concepts) as well as the macro, exterior stuff (politics, institutional structures)
I wrote about this here.
I’ll add here that I’m thrilled that some people are studying “how to improve people’s ability to feel empathy” from the point of view of psychology. I hope that the methods mentioned in Hogan and Netzger’s study turn out as effective as I’d like them to be.
A question to TangoMan: Why do you think it’s inappropriate to post a lynching photo in a post that discusses the unwitting cruelty of a mock-lynching “joke”?
I think the Lynching picture was perfectly appropriate for this post, particularly because of the White girl’s reaction. I think the image White people have of most lynching is of a bunch of scary, angry, toothless White male hicks in hoods. They can thus be safely appalled by lynching because its not by anyone like “them”, it isn’t normal Whites but soulless deviants. Seeing that apparently normal White girl beaming with glee over a Black man hanging from a tree helps break down that psychological barrier.
I do want question this statement though: “Rather than focusing on our own views and experiences, we need to step outside of our perspectives and try to develop the approximating experiences that challenge the apathy indifference that racism creates.”
I think it’s really important to look at the story’s of other people, especially minorities, but I think that “develop[ing] the approximating experiences” is something that occurs inside our perspectives, not by stepping outside of them. Feagin and Vera seem to agree; their three methods of developing these experiences are “relying on stories that people of color tell about their experiences, relying on general humanistic values, and relying on aspects of their own oppression.” The first one requires the stepping outside, but the second and third both require deeper engagement with ones own self and personal perspective. So I’d argue that if approximating experiences are what we want, then we need to encourage more storytelling by Whites qua Whites, not only so we can learn from them, but so they can learn from themselves and create these commonalities that link their own experience to that of their fellow human beings.
We had a small discussion around this one as a result of Linda Alcoff’s article on the strenghs and weaknesses of approaches to understanding white racism:
http://alcoff.com/content/whiteque.html
Stef,
Why do you think it’s inappropriate to post a lynching photo in a post that discusses the unwitting cruelty of a mock-lynching “joke”?
I suppose you and I are interpreting Rachel’s post differently. I think she’s trying to change attitudes about racism and it appears that you take her post as being a lesson centered on lynching jokes. If I misread her post and you are correct, then I’ll change my opinion for the lynching photo would be a tactic similar to those employed in the scared straight strategies – taking kids who get caught driving drunk to the morgue and showing them the carnage that results from their actions, etc. This photo puts a gruesome reality to the superficial joke – the kids didn’t understand the full impact of what they were joking about. Good tactic.
However, if Rachel’s aim is to dialogue with broader society, then telling people that unless they side with her interpretation of the issues of race they’ll need to confront their own subtle culpability for the actions of past racists, who lynched black men and thought nothing of making the event a family affair, well that’s a losing tactic, for most people don’t identify with those crimes and lecturing, on the basis of her ideology, that these people do in fact have share many commonalities simply turns people off to her ideology.
Boy, must suck to be confronted with the ugly reality of one’s deeds, in a manner of speaking. More than ever, Brownmiller was right: lynchers are just like rapists, fine upstanding citizens all, not the stranger in the alley at all. Thinking that lynchers are gap-toothed banjo-playing inbreds diverted attention from who they really were: ordinary people who embraced hatred as a daily value.
There’s an excellent Wikipedia article on lynching which presents a pretty fair picture of this appalling piece of our history. Racism plays an enormous part in the history of lynching, but I would caution against an uncritical acceptance of the cardboard-cutout version of racism and its interplay with mob action being purveyed. Things were usually more complicated than conveniently packaged.
I don’t think the picture is gratuitous. Its an image we all know, but one we really are prompted to deal with the reality of. Prompted now to think about it, I’m not really sure I’ve ever seen an actual photograph of a lynching. But seeing the reality serves a purpose. It shakes one from the comfort of just thinking of this as an idea. I know there was a time not long ago when such violent racism was conducted in the open. Still, seeing the grave acts committed in front of a crowd of seemingly polite on-lookers makes it much more real to me. Its horrible, and it is something we, as a society, must not forget. To let this just be an idea is to foster the kind of attitude of casual racism we see in the anecdotal story. I saw a lot of that growing up. The perpetrators rarely seemed to really think about what they were doing. They just did it. The were warped by ignorance and acted out all the horrific ideas they heard about. Maybe they weren’t violent, but the ideas certainly were and I find little comfort in a current lack of violence when the ideas behind them are so consumed with hate and violence. I grew up in a racially diverse community, but I’m afraid this did little to temper the insticts of budding racists. While I suspect many were taught away from racism through the experience of growing up with blacks, asians, latinos and whites all together, I have no doubt the diversity instigated some who maintained a more sheltered existance. I saw blacks be taunted with racial slurs. Jewish students pelted with change. Asians provoked with crude stereotypes. Harsh photographs like this one tell a powerful story and hopefully one that can shake some people into understanding.
Robert links to the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
as evidence that:
>I would caution against an uncritical acceptance of the cardboard-cutout version of racism and its interplay with mob action being purveyed.
But the only thing that article adds to this is that most lynching was on the basis of race, that a tiny minority was on the basis of social class or political party. Apparently even the claim that it was “frontier justice” on occassion was debunked; usually even in the “old west” it was used largely against people already in the hands of law enforcement – often Chinese or people seen as the wrong social class. So how does this make the issue “more complex”?
The Wikipedia article is a good starting point. It was not intended as a proof that things are complex.
The complexity arises from the fact that lynching as a tool of social control has an involved relationship with race and/or racism, not a simple one. Rachel is presenting a narrative of unempathic whites hanging blacks for fun, as background for her consciousness-altering agenda.
However, the real picture of mob violence is a lot more interesting than that. Mob violence was used by poor whites to (in their mind) protect themselves against economic competition. It was used on occasion to “correct” outcomes of a perceived-to-be lenient, weak, or absent justice system. It was used as a cover by established rich people to kill their upstart economic competitors under pretext that the upstarts were thieves. It was used by racists to keep minority groups – particularly, though not exclusively, blacks – living in fear of the white majority. It was used to send overt signals to immigrants or migrants that their particular group was welcome or not welcome in a particular community. It was done in hot blood and in cold, by yokels and by the urbane, by people who thought they were serving as the instruments of social justice and by people who were cynically exploiting the mob for their own selfish ends.
It was complicated, in other words.
I object to the oversimplified version not because there’s anything wrong with raising the general level of empathic feeling (there isn’t, usually), but because it is perilous to play such rhetorical games with known history, particularly if strong claims are being made. If you make a strong black/white claim about something that in fact has nuance and context, then the bright student who discovers that your strong claim is actually weaker than it was presented is likely to reject the good end which the strong claim was used to buttress.
In addition, validating this approach to historical analysis opens the door for counterprogramming from people who are truly vile. Joe KKK can find a picture of a white guy who’s been lynched and use a similarly simplistic analysis to advocate for God knows what calumnies – and people of good will find themselves in a difficult intellectual position, because they just finished accepting this approach for an argument they find congenial.
I think there are better examples of unempathic racism to use than this one, if there’s a desire to avoid side issues and complexities.
Everything in American culture and society is set up against having empathy. Sick people are blamed for being sick (those ad council ads which tell people not to eat too much junk food are also, implicitly, blaming people for having food-related health problems). Poor people are blamed for being poor. Rape victims are blamed for being raped. If people started developing empathy on a large scale, not only would racism be greatly diminished, so would classism and ableism.
I used to think that people were ableist by accident and they just would forget that not everybody can climb stairs. But no, they’re ableist because they fear and hate disabled people. They fear and hate poor people. They fear and hate victims. And they fear and hate people who are perceived to be part of a victim class (people of color).
Why this terrible rage against other people? Why this lack of empathy? It helps maintain the system, so it’s encouraged in the media as much as possible. But the message is sticking, so it has to be resonating with people in some way. And I think it’s because middle class life in the United States is so precarious. Most folks can’t be unemployed for more than a month or they’re going to be in trouble. If they lose their jobs and can’t find another one quickly, they’re screwed. If they get sick, they will probably have to declare bankruptcy and, again, they’re screwed. Our total lack of a social system means that any middle class person has the potential to be thrown into poverty with a dizzying speed.
This alarming to contemplate, so we try not to. The people who have terrible things happen to them deserve it somehow. I’m not like THEM so I’m safe. I don’t have their moral shortcomings, so I won’t get diabetes or lose my house or any thing like that. This denial is what keeps some people going. It’s active hostility against empathy, not random cluelessness. They will fight for the fiction of safety.
This is all strongly tied to racism. Black people have bad things happen to them (like the federal government standing and watching them drown as levees broke in NOLA), so therefore, they must deserve to have bad things happen to them, so best to fear and hate them. There, but for the grace of God and my overwhelming piety and specialness, go I.
I’m not so sure having empathy will help all that much. Unfortunatley, racism is not going away any time soon, empathy or not. It will take generations upon generations for it to end. It starts with education. People have to be taught not to hate.
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TangoMan,
I think she’s trying to change attitudes about racism and it appears that you take her post as being a lesson centered on lynching jokes.
I read her post as discussing ways to change attitudes about racism, rather than a post trying to change attitudes about racism directly.
then telling people that unless they side with her interpretation of the issues of race they’ll need to confront their own subtle culpability for the actions of past racists, who lynched black men and thought nothing of making the event a family affair, well that’s a losing tactic,
I didn’t read this ‘tactic’ in the post. When I saw the lynch photo, I didn’t think “Hm, I’m at fault for what happened here.” I thought “How horrible that people can pose and smile with a dead man that they or members of their community murdered…how horrible that they clearly don’t think of the murdered man as human.” (I’ve seen people pose like that with game or fish they caught, and that’s what it reminded me of.)
This is a really good discussion here. I actually agree strongly with David’s point. I certainly didn’t articulate that, but you right, people need to look outside to others and inside themselves as part of an ongoing process. That would definitely make my point a lot stronger.
As far as the brutality of the picture, I think if you don’t see the picture you can’t get the point. It is one of hundreds of them collected in the book, including a large number of them on postcards. Yes, people did make most cards of lynching photos. My view is that is we do not know our history we are doomed to repeat it. My late Grandfather was in WWII. His job was to help liberate concentration camps, and he guarded to army photographer. This photographer gave him hundred of pictures to take with him. The things my grandfather saw were so horrible that he could not bear to speak of them for years, but after about 40 -50 years, he brought out these pictures to show to us. Those pictures were horrible, and they rely relayed that terror of the Holocaust in a way that words could not. Even though they were terrible, it was a valuable lesson to me about man’s inhumanity and the brutality of anti-Semitism and facism.
I also think Les is on target when he connects this to other ism–ableism, classism, and sexism. This is a general problem with oppressions.
typo correction–David, “you are right.”
Les, I have to note that I totally feel more empathetic to my racial oppressors now. When I was a freshman, I saw the exhibit that photograph is from. Yes, it struck me that the people were looking at the camera. Also, I was surprised that anyone would want to send their friends a postcard from a grizzly murder, but then again, we have Abu Gharib. I always wonder about people who try to overintellectualize issues or say we must curtail our message to fit somebody’s delicate sensibilities. Seriously, unless the post said “racism is all ‘s fault” for any value of x that isn’t white people, the people with the vapors would be offended anyway. Also, it is kind of annoying when people always try to change the subject. I mean really, can people with less power than other people ever get a hearing?
I don’t go to poor people talking about how they have to work three jobs and still are worried about where the next meal is coming from and try to derail the subject to how sad I was that I didn’t have enough cash to go to another country on spring break and act like an obnoxious jerk. You know why? It’s totally not the same thing, and no, an exception to a rule isn’t oh so thought provoking.
I don’t think the picture is out of line, but I do find it gruesome. But, I’m reminded of my Grandfather telling me stories of the public hangings they had on the courthouse lawn on Sunday afternoons when he was a kid. To here him tell it, the whole thing was a party and they even had lunch on the lawn after the executions were over.
IMHO, taking your children to watch a death (even court sanctioned) shows an extreme lack of empathy. And having studied world history for many years, it seems to me that empathy is something that as a species humans lack.
I find that many individuals are empathetic, but that larger groups seem to loose their individual characterisitcs and revert to some “group think” or something.
The picture disturbed me, but I am disturbed by the evening news and what passes for entertainment on television. And I second the suggestion that the first step to getting rid of oppression is education. You have to be taught to hate.
Tango,
I read the topic of lynching jokes, as contrasted with the photograph of the lynching, as an example in microcosm of the lack of empathy in our society. Thus, the post is both about lynching jokes – and the context of why they are horrifying and inappropriate – and also about the larger issues of empathy and race in society.
Further, I would say that just because Rachel’s argument doesn’t seem to you to be the one most likely to sway people who disagree with her, that doesn’t make her argument illegitimate. There’s room for a lot of people to make a lot of different arguments. It’s not the case that only the most persuasive should be used.
I think the whole point of public displays of lynched bodies was to inoculate the children against empathy. If the children see that the adults consider death of a black person as a excuse to have a party and have celebratory snapshots, well, black people can’t be very important, can they – or fearful?
This reminds me of the recent movie (and short story on which it was based) Brokeback Mountain – one of the lovers had been taken, as a very young child, by his father to see a murdered gay man – to teach him the penalties of “unmanly” behavior.
BStu says,
“I know there was a time not long ago when such violent racism was conducted in the open.”
Reference the case of Abner Louima, New York, early 21st century.
Not so long ago, people.
The empathy studies sound interesting. Wonder if they work in the gendered as well as the racial context.
My mind doesn’t accept that photo. The body in the foreground with the family in the background, the two tones don’t mesh. It’s surreal.
Stef: I’m thrilled that some people are studying “how to improve people’s ability to feel empathy” from the point of view of psychology. I hope that the methods mentioned in Hogan and Netzger’s study turn out as effective as I’d like them to be.
The methods outlined are very like the methods of group process and worldwork as described by Arnold Mindell (see, for example, Sitting in the Fire or The Deep Democracy of Open Forums). Worldwork develops empathy, and one of its mainstays is what Feagin and Vera call approximating experiences. My own experience of worldwork and group process has been transformative. It is an extremely valuable approach to diversity and anti-racism work.
Rachel, thanks for posting the “empathy” stuff and the photo. I have never been able to go there in mind …to that dark place that exists for people who can do such things to other humans, or even animals for that matter.
The first time I ever saw those lynching photos that traveled around the country, I almost felt paralyzed with the horror of it. Not even so much the deaths but the lack of empathy in living who did these things. My mind still cannot even begin to comprehend it.
Empathy is something that is learned in childhood. I don’t even know if it is necessarily learned.
Empathy is something that is learned in childhood. I don’t even know if it is necessarily learned.
Definitely learned. Not sure if it can be learned after childhood; I would say that it can be, although I’m sure it’s harder. We’re emotionally flexible creatures, even if not quite as flexible as some of us would like.
There are a couple of things I find interesting about this conversation:
1. Robert’s desire to put racist lynchings as depicted in the photo Rachel posted in the context of the larger phenomenon of mob violence, which–despite the fact that he is probably factually correct–has the unintended result of erasing the specificity of the African-American experience of lynching. I do not think there is one group in the United States besides African-Americans that has a collective memory of lynching being used in the way that lynching was used against them, and it is crucial not to lose that specificity, because to do so is to falsify African-American experience in this country. This does not mean that Robert’s larger point is invalid, but there is a difference between talking about racist lynching as one component of mob violence–which is not what Rachel was doing–and talking about lynching as a form of racist violence, one with a very specific history and resonance, which is what she was talking about.
2. Discussion about whether the photo she used was gratuitous: given her story of the two kids who mock-lynched a doll–I was reminded of my peers teasing me when I was a teenager about gas ovens–the photo was not gratuitous. Showing it is both an appropriate response to such actions and an appropriate strategy in using that story to make the larger point Rachel wanted to make about empathy. How the photo is contextualized, however, is crucial, and I do think it could have been better contextualized within the post. Placing the photo at the beginning of the post rather than at the point where the story of the mock-lynching is told, and without the analysis that Rachel provides later in the post, does not direct the reader/viewer to pay attention to the white people’s reactions, which is where Rachel wants our eyes to go. Rather, it presents us with a horrible image of Black suffering, one that all too often directs white people’s eyes away from ourselves and from the development of empathy, towards sympathy for that suffering, and since Rachel’s post is, implicitly and explicity, an argument against sympathy as a sufficient response to racism, I can understand why people would respond to the photo, as used, as gratuitous.
This is not a purely theoretical point of rhetorical strategy; it goes to the question of audience and presentation. I don’t agree with the substance what TangoMan has said in this thread, but the point raised by what he says about audience and how one approaches different audiences with matierial like this is an important one.
Richard, I think both of your points are well taken. If I was a little more adept with computer programming I would have put the picture lower. However, I do direct people to what I want them to see with this quote, “In fact, I always show this picture above because it shows the White girl on the left smiling as if she is proudly posing with the victim.” Nevertheless, the placement is very important.
As for the first point, that is exactly why I didn’t engage with Robert. It is a distraction that intentionally or unintentionally invalidates the experiences of African Americans.
another reason that the photo needs to be seen is because of the huge influence of imagery on our ability to suppress compassion and empathy. the other side of that is the image of the dopey, happy, docile black man (the caricatured by comedians in blackface). if enough of those images are out there, it’s easier to imagine that most black people don’t suffer. american culture is so highly visual. so, an argument about why one image (the lynched black doll) is so harmful ought to be supported by other images to which it refers.
Actually, Rachel, the little girl’s facial expression is not discernible. She looks a bit like she is, because the poor resolution of the shot gives a (misleading) impression, but I took the photo and enlarged it and it’s pretty clear that (owng to what looks like a tear and repair on the photo) her mouth area is a washed out white rectangle. She could be smiling; she could be weeping. No way to tell.
Nobody in the photo has a positive emotion being shown; the man on the far left could be interpreted as showing grim satisfaction, but his arms are crossed; usually a sign of a man who is trying to control a negative emotion. Nobody else’s facial features are clear enough to show a clear feeling.
There’s no way to tell what her emotions are in the photo; you’re imputing to the photo what you wish to see.
Robert I have the book with an 8×10 photo, and she definitely is smiling.
Rachel,
I meant my admittedly (now that I’ve read it through again) sort of nit-picky-sounding critique of how the photo is placed in your post more as a question about how one thinks about audience and all of that than as a critique of your post in particular. So, I am curious about how you contextualize things like this for your students. My own experience is that it takes a lot of planning for such teaching to work and a great deal of in-class preparation, in the sense of giving students a vocabulary and an understanding of social/cultural perspective and, most importantly, in the sense of creating the classroom as a safe enough environment where they are willing to take the risks associated with the kind of work you are talking about.
I don’t care whether the photo in the introduction is gratuitous or not. This type of photo is commonplace and meaningful as it is an emblem of a shameful time in the past. This does not mean that its message can be transposed to the present. If you show a picture of a Nazi gas chamber does that mean today’s Germans are just like they were 60 years ago? There has been a progressive softening of the attitudes that gave rise to these racial atrocities.
What I would like to know is how people of that time justified their behavior? Since they are mostly all dead, we can’t know. I believe that they were ashamed which would explain the progressive decrease in the incidence of such things. It would be smug to think we are better than them. We probably do things that will appall future generations. Lynching black people isn’t one of them.
It is important for black people to eventually move on to an accurate appraisal of current reality in order to know what do in the real world. I do know that every time a black person hangs himself there are still always rumors of Klansmen coming out from under the rug. Please excuse me if I am skeptical of the credibility of these rumors.
I don’t think the photo is gratuitous, and I don’t doubt that the intentions in posting it were good or that the heart was right, but I do think posting it was and is really wrong, and I think it should come severely down. This is why: that photo doesn’t belong to white people for us to post it. It belongs to American black people. We are all complicit in racism if we are white. Not a one of us has hands which are clean. White people posting that kind of photo is comparable with men who have behaved in misogynist ways (as all men on the planet have) posting hideous, gruesome photos of butchered rape victims with men and boys gloating over them, smiling at them. That man in the photo was a real, living, breathing human being. He probably has descendants living today, he is someone’s great grandfather, grandfather; he was somebody’s son and grandson. Do his descendants want white people posting photos of their murdered grandfather? What right do we, as white people, have to post any such photo to the internet? Among the many destructive consequences of posting it which I envision, one is foremost in my mind: white racists, white supremacists, will come here to enjoy the view and will invite their friends to enjoy it as well. Just as rapists and male perpetrators and violators of all and every kind would enjoy viewing a real live (0r dead) butchered, raped woman and would invite their friends to enjoy the view. In the meantime, someone’s mother, daughter, sister, friend and all who loved her are violated over and over again everytime someone looks at that photo. What was not posted gratuitously by intention will be used and disseminated gratuitously, in other words, for the viewing pleasure of haters everywhere in this goddess-forsaken, racist, sexist culture where nothing at all is sacred. Posting that photo is like white colonialists posting photos of massacred First Nations/indigenous people. It’s like homophobes posting photos of the mutilated body of Matthew Shepard. Posting photos like this is more likely, in my view, to dull and deaden white supremacists in their racism than to broaden or deepen their empathy and compassion. If we are really interested in confronting racism, I think we should write passionately and persuasively about it, confronting racists while acknowledging our own complicity, and then directing readers to the books and materials these photos are taken from. Those who really do care and are paying attention will go, will get the materials, will read them. Those who don’t care? They will walk away from seeing these photos more dispassionate and dead to compassion or human decency than they were before they came, all the while white supremacists of all stripes are rejoicing over the these great photos of a lynched black man posted over at Alas.
Please. Take that photo down.
Heart
Heart: It’s Rachel’s decision. However, I wonder if this means you also feel that the exhibit of photos this one was taken from (which is online) should also be taken down? Or that Rachel shouldn’t be using this image in her classes?
Should any historic hate-motivated murder be discussed in a forum like “alas”? I mean, if I post a description of the lynching of Leo Frank, it is possible that anti-Semites might link to read the description and gloat. I am leery of the policy of allowing what is or isn’t posted here to be determined by what bigots think. It’s not as if those descriptions and photos aren’t readily available to bigots if they want to find them, after all.
However, one difference pointed out in your post is that I am Jewish, so in a way Leo Frank’s murder “belongs” to me in a way that a lynching of a black person does not. I will have to think about that.
Dave wrote:
This sounds like you’re saying that you think that black people have a less accurate appraisal of current reality than white people. Is that an accurate description of your view?
While of course there are individual exceptions, I think just the opposite is true. Many things that most white people don’t notice – specifically, a lot of racism that passes below white people’s radars – is noticed by many black people. So on the whole, black people have a more accurate view of current reality.
It’s like homophobes posting photos of the mutilated body of Matthew Shepard.
If Rachel or Amp were posting that photo to gloat about the lynching, it would be. Are you really trying to suggest that Rachel or Amp’s motivation was to celebrate this lynching, or do you mean that all white people hate blacks? If not, why did you make such an offensive analogy?
The discussion isn’t just about the horrors of lynching, it’s about the white people in the photo. This isn’t a picture of shocked and appalled white people staring at the results of a lynching. Using the sensibilities of black people as an excuse to put away an image that is uncomfortable to whites is, well, an excuse.
I think I agree with Heart on this one. Or maybe post links to the photos and resources. I think she raised good points. For some folks, that picture could cause emotional and visceral pain, different from the shock that some people might feel to be exposed to something they didn’t know about, or the glee that White Supremacists will no doubt feel, as Heart mentioned. They do get their rocks off on tragedies like this, unfortunately.
I do feel that photographs like this can have great value as teaching tools, but great sensitivity still should be shown because they effect people in different ways.
I have seen this photo and others of lynchings and have talked to people who have lived in cities and towns where they’ve taken place.
As far as the past being the past, that’s hardly ever true. If a Black person is still found hanging from a tree or another location even today, there is still great fear that a lynching was involved. If it were a White man, it would be assumed to be a suicide. You can be skeptical of the “rumors” if you want to, but even if they are just rumors, where do you think they came from ? Out of the sky? No, the fear exists because of the horrific practice of lynching and it maybe one of its enduring legacies.
Dave, Dave, Dave.
Remember James Byrd? Murdered by being dragged by a pickup truck by three White men with connections to a White Supremacist prison gang.
The fact that the Aryan Brotherhood which kills and beats Black inmates in our prison systems and county jails(where in L.A. deputies have engaged in cross burnings), is the most feared and dangerous prison gang in the country.
NYPD and FDNY employees who entered a racist float in a parade.
NYPD officer defends racist float
The KKK is not the terrorist force that it was in the 1920s-1970s. But what exists now is still a serious problem. Western Hammarskins, NLRs, ABs, WAR and other gangs. Having seen the confiscated arsenal of local racist skinheads along with their assorted racist propaganda, it was truly chilling.
The one thing you wrote that I agreed with, was that it would definitely be smug to think that we are better than them. “Softening” racist expression and practices doesn’t really deal with it, especially on a institutional level.
It’s funny that David brings up the Nazis, given the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Europe, including Germany, today.
Not to mention here in the U.S. what with the guys walking around with the twin lightning bolt tattoos.
Absolutely not. I don’t believe that was what Heart said at all. I’m surprised to see that supposition being raised here. That if you disagree with what someone does, you’re labeling them racist and equating them to the White people in the lynching photo.
I’m not thinking about sensibilities, I’m thinking of feelings. That picture means many different things to different people. That’s why White people should also be very careful when they say or write out the n-word, no matter what the context is, or their intentions are, because the word by itself can sting, can cause pain, can hurt. This is not to say whether the photo should stay up or not, because I can see the arguments as to why it should and I realize the intentions are to educate, and also why it should not. Just that there’s more to posting it, than just trying to shock Whites out of their complacency on racism or trying to challenge their comfort level.
I think that Heart’s point was that Whites aren’t the only ones who would feel uncomfortable looking at this photo and she explained why. Just something to think about.
I do agree that the discussion is about the White people in the photo.
I don’t believe that was what Heart said at all.
Heart compared Rachel’s posting the photo to a homophobe posting a photo of Matthew Shepard’s corpse. How am I misinterpreting this?
I absolutely agree that we should think about how people of color look at that photo. I don’t think that means it should be taken down because, apparently, Rachel being white means she has the same evil motivations in posting this photo as a homophobe would have in posting a photo of a gay man murdered by other homophobes.
Having had similar discussions with Heart in other places in the past, I think I understand some sense of where she’s coming from on this issue and it’s not from a malicious place or even a judgemental place.
Please read her post in its entirity again, before you cast judgement on her for asking for the photo’s removal because she thinks people at Alas have evil intentions when it comes to posting it. She most definitely did NOT say that.
Heart also said this, in fact she began her post with this statement:
She also mentioned this when she made her analogies. I don’t think she was including Rachel at all and I don’t think that was where Rachel is coming from at all. She’s a woman who is making an honest attempt to grapple an issue most White people, including liberals and progressives won’t touch with a ten-foot pole (while waxing on about how nonracist they are every other chance they get). Her threads here are definitely worth reading and provide a lot of food for thought.
Heart didn’t make it personal, but was directing her comments at the action and how it’s been done by others in the past and present. She just provided her opinion from a different perspective, to give people at least something to think about. I don’t believe that she was labeling anyone racist or comparing them to racist people at a lynching. I’m a bit surprised and frankly, disappointed to see her accused of that here.
i find that photo, and others like it, helpful.
full disclosure: i’m a white male, currently living in america. i’m not complicit in any lynchings, though, not even by proxy. (heart’s generalization may be statistically valid enough, given that i’m in a tiny minority — first-generation immigrants — but it still mildly annoyed me; it just sounded like careless use of language.)
of the many things i’ve had to grapple with, immigrating here, american politics and especially american racial politics are perhaps the most bewildering. i do not understand racism here, but it’s plainly clear to me there’s lots of it. i do not understand the people in those photos — any of them — but they’re such recent pictures that i at least understand i will have to deal with the legacy of those lynchings.
the children and grandchildren of those people still live on, as heart pointed out. so too do their opinions and worldviews, if hopefully slightly muted. but only slightly — large societies can’t change very quickly, so a lot of that hatred logically must still be active today, and a quick look at the sociopolitical reality here assures me that it is.
that’s something i find very hard to intellectually fathom. the emotional punch that picture delivers helps me to get a better (if still very shaky) grip on just how twisted opinions and politics in this country i’m considering adopting still are. i may never be able to figure out any way to help straighten them out more, but at least i might find a way to survive them without twisting my own mind to match. kindly let that picture stay up; i find it more useful to speak an ugly truth plainly than to politely refuse to discuss such a crucial flaw of american nature.
I’ll never forget the day I saw a book of postcards of lynchings – people would literally send “wish you were here” messages back to family in other parts of the country with a picture of themselves at a lynching on the front. And there were none too few pictures of white people posing with hanging bodies and smiling. People of all ages. Often, mothers and fathers holding up their children so they could have a clearer view.
Shannon, I am really glad you mentioned Abu Ghraib because I think this speaks to the importance of these bits of hateful imagery being viewed. Also because I think that, in both cases, the spectacle, the performance of hate (with the viewing through non-empathy) is part of what makes oppression so profoundly difficult to shake. I don’t strictly mean “mob mentality” but also the sadistic performance, the importance of the camera and the notion of audience to this acting out. I think there is something about performance which distances the players from their actions and the audience from what their viewing. I don’t know how to say this with any clarity, but I find this in pop culture a lot. More than I hear and see blatant racial, sexual, ethnic slurs in daily life, I see a sort of spilling over of these emotions into a performative space – reality television, movies, pop music, etc. Even when we’re dealing with “real” stuff, we hyper-realize it in order to suspend empathy.
I’m still not all the way clear on what I’m thinking, but I found this post very thought-provoking.
To empathize with another person’s oppression, you have to first, believe that they are a person like you are. This basic belief system is often lacking. Police officers who beat or kill African-Americans and other people of color often refer to them as “NHIs”, meaning “no human involved” or other derogatory remarks. African-Americans may be referred to as animals(i.e. animal by itself, or more specifically as several species in the primate family). The dehumanization of Black people that goes all the way back to slavery is still a problem today.
Radfem,
This basic belief system is often lacking. Police officers who beat or kill African-Americans
You raise an interesting point here. I knew an ex-cop who was attending grad school and we got into a similar discussion and his perspective was that the cops didn’t come into the job lacking this belief system, in fact, it was what they witnessed and endured on the job that led to the retrenchment of the belief system. He pointed out a simple truth – he was dealing with the worst behaviors of humanity on a daily basis. This was one of the reasons he left the force.
What he said made sense to me, so I’m curious about the assumptions you hold when you make a statement like the one above.
Like Radfem, I think that Heart wasn’t saying that Rachel is like the homophobes in Heart’s example.
With all due respect (and I think Radfem and Mythago both know I respect them a lot), unless Rachel herself comes in and says she’d like to pursue this particular question further, perhaps we should drop it?
* * *
TangoMan, cops don’t just see the worse in Blacks while also seeing nothing but saintly Whites. Pretty much everyone cops deal with on a day-to-day basis (other than Radfem, of course), regardless of color, are people at their worst.
But there’s clearly, among some cops, a specific lack of empathy for Black and Latino folks. That can’t be explained just by saying cops “with the worst behaviors of humanity on a daily basis.”
Everything that radfem said– thanks, radfem, especially for pointing out that in my first sentence I said I don’t think anybody had anything but good intentions. When I made reference to homophobes displaying a picture of Matthew Shepard’s mutilated body, I was speaking of homophobia in the sense that all heterosexual people are complicit with homophobia, just as racism is something all white people are complicit in just as misogyny is something all men are complicit in, even when they don’t choose or want to be. That’s the way privilege works; it’s something we enjoy because of the rung we occupy on the ladder that dominance heirarchies are. Het men, for example, displaying a photo of Matthew Shepard’s mutilated body, might have the best of intentions, but we all know that it is *very* unlikely that those men have not benefitted from the fact that they are het, at the very least, have not used homophobic language sometime or behaved homophobically in some way, or have just been silent when other men were being actively homophobic. So it seems to me that any display of images of Shepard’s murder belong to gay men and to Shepard’s family, iow, those most deeply impacted and harmed by the homophobia that took Shepard’s life.
My concerns are not only about what bigots might do, Amp, although I am concerned about that. My concerns also go, as I said, to who the photos “belong” to, thinking now about the ongoing attempt to right the wrongs of history. For example, I also don’t think it’s *ever* right for white people to display certain art from slavery days, mammies, butlers, “picaninnies,” etc. Those artifacts don’t belong to white people. They commemorate and memorialize a time of intense suffering for black people at the hands of white people, and as such, they can never be just art or even artifacts. They have tremendous meaning and significance. They can still be, and still are, used to perpetuate the racism of the times in which they were created. Maybe it’s like the way a Star of David worn by a Jewish person during Hitler’s rise to power would be offensive, could never just be art or even just history, if it were displayed in a non-Jewish person’s home. Not to mention the significance of an anti-Semitic person displaying such an artifact, or a white racist displaying lynching postcards, say.
Then, I think context is crucial. I think it’s okay for Rachel to use those photos in her class because students come to her class specifically (at least in part) to learn about racism. I would say the same thing about exhibits. Presumably anybody who takes the time and makes the effort to attend a class or to visit an anti-racist exhibit is interested in learning more about this horrific part of our nation’s history. I think it’s also fair to assume that any sort of exhibit or textbook used in high schools and colleges has gone through the equivalent of some sort of peer review process; i.e., in some way, the black community has endorsed the project or the book. But it’s not that way online. Here online, it’s anarchy. We know that people don’t only come to Alas or to progressive websites because they want to be educated or to leave their privilege or blind spots behind; they come because they want to defend their privilege and blind spots. They come because they enjoy their privilege and don’t think they have any blind spots.
One thing to think about: I haven’t ever seen photos like this posted to blogs or websites created or maintained by black people, *except* as part of carefully-crafted historical presentations. In other words, I haven’t seen black people use these photos to “teach” white people something– even something good, like compassion. Those photos don’t exist for the purpose of teaching white people what white people need to know, you know? Those photos incriminate white people. They condemn white people and memorialize genocide. And you know, that’s the thing about privilege– it doesn’t get it that *everything* is not about privileged me. I think one good thing to do before ever putting anything like this photo up on the internet might be simply to solicit the opinions of the people to whom the photos really do belong, in this case, black people.
Heart
Amp, I’m not pushing it either way. I just understood where Heart came from, and Q Grrl earlier and they raised excellent points. And I saw what was said to Heart in response and it struck me as this assumption that she wanted the picture removed so that Whites could avoid feeling guilty about it, when her perspective clearly was much, much different than that. That’s not the only reason why someone may not want that picture there.
Well, having had people identify themselves as officers make racist comments to me and then defending themselves when their behavior came to light is raised about it by using the same defense your classmate raised(and likely they’ll use the defense that the NYPD officer used in the float case). The exact same defense was used by one self-identified officer to defend the actions of himself or others who referred to Black people in particularly in very derogatory ways, even comparing them to animals.
I learned then(again) that some cops at least are very quick to refer to Blacks and Latinos as criminal stereotypes. Not as individuals, but as a race. OTOH, even though the individuals who are Black and Latino and criminals prey on victims who are primarily of those racial groups, these same folks did not assign let alone quickly assign racial definitions to them as victims. The victims were raceless. The criminals are Black and Latino. These cops can only see them in one group, not the other.
Often that basic belief system is lacking. Many police officers are hired from neighborhoods, towns, rural areas and cities where they have little or no contact with people of color. Too often, their first contacts with them are as criminals, just like they interface with White criminals. The difference is that White criminals are bad individuals, almost treated as Whites who deviate from the norm. That’s not the case with Black and Latino criminals. They are glossed over into the racial groups they belong to, which is how society views race as a whole. Part of the racial privilage enjoyed by Whites, is that they have the right to be individuals. Plus, it’s difficult to hate a race that you yourself belong to.
White officers tend to live and hang out with other White officers. Often Black and Latino officers do like. They say, it’s because they don’t want to be recognized by some Black or Latino person they arrested(again, the assumption that Black and Latino populations in places they don’t even work, are going to have criminals they arrested)
Not all cops are racist, or use racist remarks. Many don’t. Yet they face the same dangers and circumstances that your classmate and the other cops do and managed to do it without resorting to racist behavior. Maybe, however, they have had life experiences with Black people and Latinos that are positive or at least varied, and not based solely on what they watch or read in the media. Maybe they learned more about the different cultures, communication styles, and other parts of their lives in the neighborhoods they went to, or the colleges they attended(one reason why more recruitment is being done at colleges and universities). If there’s enough positive contacts to balance out the negative contacts, then there’s some perspective that it’s individuals of all races who might engage in criminal behavior not racial groups as a whole.
While I appreciate the sentiments behind the posters who would like to have the picture taken down, I think the larger lesson of the post merits the picture. Unfortunately for some, the lesson may get lost in the discussion about whether or not the picture is appropriate. Initially, I cropped the picture to exclude the the man’s face, but the picture lost it’s power. The girl is smiling and you don’t know why.
I also feel that it is important to note the endorsement of the larger exhibit by many prominent African American Civil Rights leaders and organizations. The forward is written by John Lewis. Moreover, I have never had a Black student in my classes object to the showing of the photos. The students most uncomfortable are Whites. (However, since I am their instructor students may be hesistant to question me or challenge me.)
I think if those White kids who laughed at the doll they put a noose on saw this picture, it would help them to see the gravity of racism. I think if I wrote the same thing without the picture the larger point about the savageness of American racism would not be conveyed.
The question of whom this picture “belongs to” is a very interesting one. Clearly, and most obviously, it belongs to African-Americans, in the sense that Heart talks about. Does it, however, “belong” in the same way to Hatians who came here, say, just five years ago and who have, in their own country, a very different relationship to slavery and white racism than African-Americans do here? Also, why is it not the case that, since white racism is part of who I am as a white man, who I cannot help but be in this culture, that picture–to the degree that it depicts a part of my cultural heritage that I need to come to terms with and take responsibility for and, ultimately, to change–why is it not the case that the picture also belongs to me?
I am not asking this question to nitpick intellectual niceties in terms of what Heart has to say, but the question of who images “belong to,” who has the right to use them, etc. is very, very important. This picture is not like racist paraphernalia because the picture, unlike most of the objects of racist paraphernalia that I have seen, includes white people. This does not mean that white people don’t have a particular responsibility in terms of how we might use the picture, and this does not mean that Heart’s points about the difference between using the picture in a classroom and posting it on this blog are not important ones to talk about. (I, in fact, made what I hope was a similar, if less thoroughly thought through version of the same point.) It’s just that I also think it’s very important to think through what we mean when we say that certain historical objects or representations of history or whatever “belong to” any one group represented by or in those objects/images/whatever.
The students most uncomfortable are Whites.
How unsurprising.
I keep thinking of Charles Murray and his little teenage prank of burning a cross on a black family’s lawn. But to this day he insists that at the time, he had no idea of the racist connotations. By the way, The Bell Curve isn’t racist either.
Ampersand: “This sounds like you’re saying that you think that black people have a less accurate appraisal of current reality than white people. Is that an accurate description of your view? Many things that most white people don’t notice – specifically, a lot of racism that passes below white people’s radars – is noticed by many black people. So on the whole, black people have a more accurate view of current reality. “
This is a tough question. Admittedly whites don’t get dinged by racist incidents but they still encounter non- racist jerks. So if a black person encounters an equal opportunity jerk an incident may happen which may be interpreted as racial. Since there are good people and jerks on every block, how do you evaluate these things?
I believe that there is still much racism but it is more akin to social snobbery rather than being life threatening most of the time. Nor do I deny that this is harmful but what can you do about it other than as an individual?
Sure we should alert for abuse such as police brutality, and job discrimination but even if this were fully eliminated there would still be problems such as under qualification for good paying jobs. In my office we only have three black people in the hi- tech jobs and two of them are from Jamaica.
In my town it is real easy to get a crowd of 50 people to demonstrate against any possible instance of police brutality but when a local predominantly black middle school invited parents to a symposium on how to help their children academically only four parents showed up.
Actually, when I first saw the photograph, I was thinking of how the women in my office might react. That first split-second visceral reaction before the reason for stating why the picture is posted is understood. The realization that that poor man could have been a relative, either by blood or by shared history. Even though the book with pictures of that is on a table in the office. Even though there are depictions of the racist stereotypical advertising Heart wrote about, on the wall beside one of the doors, because one of the women is an avid student of her own history. If she were White and displaying those objects, the entire context changes.
Of course he does, the little liar. If that were true, he never would have done the “prank” in the first place. And how many photographs of burning crosses and how many stories of burning crosses from past and present are out there? It doesn’t make a lick of difference though, because people will still do racist acts, whether they are children or adults. Ignorance isn’t just a state of being, it’s a choice. White people, by virtue of racial privilage have and often exercise that choice.
I think if one has been raised in a racist society from the cradle that one would be able to acertain racism when they see it, hear it and experience it. Far better than would a White person who would try to decide that for them, based on no experience. The best way for a White person to “evaluate” it might be to listen to what the person of color is saying rather than rush to judgement that an experience, incident or words is not racist.
Ooops, don’t know what happened there. Inside the big white box, the first paragraph is a quote, the second is mine, the little box is another quote, the next paragraph is mine.
sorry about that, don’t know what I did, lol.
[You forgot to close the first blockquote. No biggie; it’s fixed now. –Amp]
ooops, thanks. I did not want to go down in history as the person who sunk Alas, by pushing the wrong buttons. :o
I didn’t know about the Charles Murray cross burning, but after reading the Bell Curve. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Dave:
All the people who protest police brutality are POC ? Does your town’s population total 75, and thus we are to be impressed that 5o people could make it to a protest ?
All the academically troubled kids were Black ? What about the teachers ? Any Blacks there ? When and how often were the symposiums held ? Was there a fee ? A schedule that would be reasonable for working parents ? Childcare ? What did the pitch look like ? Did it place all the onus on parents or did it acknowledge that the issues might be more complicated than parents being clueless as to how to get their kids to perform better in school.
Look, Dave: I too can trot out personal anecdotes when I think it suits the discussion. However, this particular annecdote of yours is so vaguely worded as to be pretty much useless– even by the standards of personal annecdotes.
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I think the lynching photo could work with some kids along with asking them questions to get them to think critically about it and being led to imagine what it might feel like. I was thinking that if you take a movie which people can empathize with and use it to discuss racism, it might help them to empathize with experiences of African Americans. I wrote about one I thought would work on my site which I’ve provided a link to (just click on my name).
“Walking Across Egypt” is a movie that might build empathy for the African American experience today even though it’s not about African Americans or racism and all the images of African Americans are pretty respectful. I do think that people would need to know something in order for a good discussion to happen, but I think most people do know some things about the desparity, they just never think about it, especially in a way that might lead to empathy.
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I’ve come to this discussion late (just this morning), and it’s an interesting read, all the different reactions. Reading along, nothing really stood out to me (many excellent comments, of course, but nothing shocking or anything) until I got to Heart’s post about the photo, and how black people owned it.
I’m afraid my first reaction was “What!? Oh no…. no you don’t” . Of course, reading through her comment, I realized what she meant, so I went away and thought about it a bit, and looked at things from that point of view – and maybe I didn’t think things through well enough (coffee pot is not empty yet) – but I came back to my first conclusion… no, no how, no way do Black Americans own those photos.
Possibly we are speaking of different types of ownership, but in my mind Black people are the memory keepers of these events, the caretakers of things such as this photo, in some ways the conscience of America’s racial past and present… but the actual ownership of this photo and others rests squarely with White America. Same with Holocoast photos and Germans past and present.
Also, the ‘n’ word… I know with rappers and others using it (or variations) every other word, the intent is to take ownership of it or lessen the impact or something like that, but I’m not sure how one can do that with a word one has never owned in the first place. No matter how many times a Black person calls another Black person that, let a White person do it and all bets are off. Anyway, that’s for another discussion.
On the ownership of these photos (and events), I understand the view that this man was someone’s son, grandson, father, and so on, and the pain that any relatives might feel when seeing things like this should of course be taken into account. In my opinion, though, one of the greater pains in this photo, and why it should be shown, is that to the people there… and others around the country (and world), this man simply was not a person. Not an individual with a life and loves, a family, a history… his being murdered was considered a source of entertainment, a family outing. Like a bullfight or a bear baiting or something.
So, why show this, or assign ownership? Mostly because it happens again and again and again… one just has to change the characters and much of our society is willing to fall right into the same sort of thinking. Oh, not with lynching and so on… maybe this time it’s putting an entire population in concentration camps (or interning them, as they say), or creating a climate of fear to the point where people who wear head scarves or turbans feel under a constant, low level threat. Or maybe it’s convincing a nation that certain groups of people, not just their actions, are “illegal”… another dehumanizing term.
I am not putting this well, am under time constraints, but while I don’t particularly like the term “White Guilt” (I don’t think guilt is an especially constructive feeling), I do think we need something like White Awareness… or maybe just Western Awareness, as nowadays the entire soggy, racist, xenophobic American mess includes other cultures as well.
Anyway, back to the photo… it as much a part white history as black history, and it needs to be owned as such. There is, or should be, pain on both sides… the pain of this man’s family, or just a random Black person seeing this, and the result of the dehumanizing of a people… and the pain of the White people’s families, or just a random White person seeing this and the result of not only the dehumanizing of a people, but having forebears who were part of the dehumanization.
To be very clear, my objection to posting the photo was that it was posted by white people *for* white people’s use, as though that horrendous photo should be used to “help” white people overcome their racism or something like that. If the photo was posted on the (amazing) Black Commentator site or Freedom Rider some similar site or blog, I would view the posting completely differently for reasons I’ve already written about (thought there is much more to be said). When I say black people “own” that photo and similar photos, I mean that they ought to be viewed as the custodians of the photo, as most vested in the consequences of posting them, i.e., having the most to lose if the photos are published, viewed as being the last word as to whether or not the photos are posted. Just as I would object to Amp attempting to inspire empathy in men by posting photos of raped, brutalized women on Alas, I similarly object to white people attempting to inspire empathy in white people by posting photos of lynchings on a blog operated by white people. I think women own photos of brutalized, raped women, are most vested in the consequences of their being posted, have the most to lose– not that our ownership of such photos is, or would ever be, acknowledged or honored, but that’s another subject for another day.
Heart
And of course, one huge reason I’d object to posting photos of raped, brutalized women on Alas is that they would NOT inspire empathy or compassion. How much empathy did the posting of this photo inspire in that pathetic excuse for a racist-ass human being who wrote the e-mail Amp posted today in response to the DNA results?
Heart
Heart, thanks for answering.
First, I want to emphasize that I understand exactly what you are saying, and where you are coming from. I’m sorry if I left the impression that I didn’t, or that I thought you had some sort of ulterior or wacky motives. That’s not the case. I think your view of this, and your concern for the uses of images like this, is admirable and definitely something to be considered. I think I agree with much of it, while also disagreeing in some ways. I’ll try to explain how.
If the photo was posted on the (amazing) Black Commentator site or Freedom Rider some similar site or blog, I would view the posting completely differently for reasons I’ve already written about
Posting it on BC or like sites would elicit different reactions and responses from many, I’m pretty sure. I know that would be the case for me.
When I’ve encountered photos such as this on primarily black sites, I immediately look at and wonder about the black person in the photo. Who was he? Who was his mom, his dad, by what road did he (or, sometimes, she) get travel to get to this point he is hanging from a tree, or over a bridge? It’s possible that the comments and discussions would also focus more on who the person was, what were things like in this particular place at that particular time, sorrow over such a tragic past, and a tragic end for this person, and so on. Perhaps I feel a sense of standing in their space, in the photo. If I identify with anyone in pictures such as these, then it would be them.
So, in that you are probably right when you say that posting the photo for the purposes of inspiring empathy for the murdered person, or for the victims of racism and so on, it would be better posted at a site like BC.
BUT… that sense of standing in their space carries over…when I scrolled through alas this morning and came across this photo, knowing this was a majority white site (having visited alas a couple of times a week for years, but probably only commented 5 times), my eyes glided right over the face of the hanged man, to focus on the faces of the white people in the photo. Standing in the space of the black person in the photo and looking outward.
Again questions… who are these people? Where are those smiling children now? Would their children also smile? What roads did all of them travel to get to this point where they are participating with glee in the murder of another human being, that they don’t acknowledge as being human… and how do we blow that road up so they can never travel it again?
The dynamics (for me, at least) are different. A discussion at BC or a site such as that would be once again black people discussing white actions/racism/history as well as black. The reactions of the white people in the discussion would also be different, I believe… ranging from greater empathy with the victim to greater resistance to yet another discussion of race and so on.
Hmmm, I am way too long winded, but I guess I am trying to show why I believe that photos such as this are a good thing to have on sites such as these (depending on context, of course)… and why the ownership, so to speak, does not and should not rest (only) in the hands of black people. There are many individuals in that photo, only one of them black (and he is dead). I’m sure there is value in inspiring empathy for the victim, but I think there is greater value in inspiring… well, I guess inspiring and empathy aren’t the best words for this, but in engendering an understanding of what allowed the rest of the people in the photo to become so debased that they would consider this event some sort of entertainment (or cause for indifference), and how to not wind up in that place again.
Oh, and as for your other points about the raped, brutalized women and the posting of photos to illustrate points (no matter how sympathetic) and also your point above about the racists getting pleasure from photos such as the lynching one….
Yeah, am not sure what to do about that. I am not sure that one can be responsible for the reactions of others, racists or pedophiles, or women haters (I don’t see any good reason at all for posting photos of brutalized women, by the way) .
I do think, however, that racists would get wayyyyy more enjoyment out of photos like this posted on a black site than on a white one. That’s just the nature of their particular beast that they would feel that with their enjoyment they are not only rejoicing over the death of a person, but pushing the faces of the living ones they hate into that same cesspool.
There are folks who ask themselves that question when they see the photo no matter where it’s posted. It literally could be one of their ancestors, either in that moment caught in time, or in another act of terrorism. They don’t have that choice of feeling one way if it’s posted on one site, another if it’s posted some place else. White people will for the most part have that sense of detachment from it so that they can use qualifiers to establish how they will feel about it, see it or read it depending on its location. I think that it’s folks who don’t share that privilage that Heart was talking about in part.
Their pain is a high cost to teach Whites how not to be racist or overcome racism, but then despite the talk about how hard it is for Whites to overcome or work through racism, White guilt or discomfort, it’s most often those who aren’t who feel it worse or pay a higher emotional price for that lesson to be taught. There’s a lot of point of views out there on this issue, and Heart had one. Everyone else here has one, and others not expressing views or even lurking here have opinions as well. I think I understand hers best, but I’m still not sure others do at all. I don’t know what that says about me, or what kind of person I am, but hers spoke to me in a way that other people have shared with me.
I think White Supremacists get their rocks off from the photograph itself, not necessarily where it’s posted unless they intend to taunt the site where it’s posted or engage in racist rhetoric on the site for an extra thrill. They do other things like place racist tracts inside Black-owned publications, especially Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance that are somewhat confrontational but still allow them relative anonymity. They can pretty much do whatever they want to do because society still views them as social groups rather than as gangs even though they fit the legal definition of gangs.
Mythago:
I hadn’t heard the Charles Murray/cross-burning story before, so I looked it up. The accounts I saw said that it was in front of a police station. Are you sure it was on a black family’s lawn?
Radfem, I’m sorry that I failed to make it clear in any of my previous comments that I am black, not white. Which, I think, probably accounts for my response to photos such as these, depending on where they are posted. This doesn’t in any way take away from your and Heart’s points about the pain that some might feel seeing this photo on this site, in this context, and having it be a possible ancestor. I’m sure there very well might be that reaction from some, and I think it is commendable that Heart’s first thought was to worry about that.
My point was a bit different, and am not sure if I can explain it well, but I’ll try.
Most, or at least many, non-white people live in at least two different worlds as a matter of course. Not always by choice, but there you go… life in the US, and all that. If I am in a majority black group of people, and viewing a photo such as this, the dynamics are just different. There may be stories told of uncles and grandfathers, brothers, sisters and mothers who were hunted down like game and killed, or terrorized. Past, and not so far past, histories of the dehumanization of the storytellers themselves, of being non persons with no name, just a label or a substitute, like all the Pullman car attendants being referred to as “George”. Most likely there will also be a sense of anger and continued frustration, but still… even if no one knows the names of the people in the photos, there is a sense of knowing the person, the shared history… empathy with the victim, because any one of us could have been him.
The thing is, and this was what I was trying to say about viewing the photos on sites that are not majority black… there are other people in the photo. And they too are possibly someone’s grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles, sisters, aunts and so on. And it’s what I meant by white America owning the photo… I think black people are the custodians, and possibly the conscience, but in the photo the only black person is dead. Victim of terrorism, as you say… but not terrorism that acted in the shadows, or that operated in secret… these people were making this murder an entertainment event, or at least a family outing… secure in their hideous self-righteousness, and also secure enough in the acceptance of their actions to send pictures like these out as postcards.
This sort of feeling, this self-righteous security in the acceptance of appalling actions and words, is very far from dead. You can see it (on many sides of the political/ideological spectrum) in the immigration debate, the dehumanization of latinos and muslims, (not to mention gays and women, also in terrible jeopardy) as well as all the other usual suspects – it’s very worrisome.
I probably shouldn’t have commented on the photo at all, bringing with me as I was a measure of the building frustration I have been feeling with (mostly white) liberals and conservatives of any color, and having it all sort of coalesce around that photo (and Heart’s words about ownership – not in the context of what she was saying, but what it brought to my mind in general).
Still, I think when a photo like that is on sites like this that there is value in trying to inspire empathy with the victim, but an even greater value in the observation that there are other people in the photo, who got to that point somehow, and who felt proud enough of their actions to record them for posterity. Their actions were terrorist actions, but remember, at that time, the terrorists were just ordinary folks going about their ordinary business, with full consent of the populace and (apparently) the law.
It behooves all of us to be able to recognize this in whatever form it raises its head next… because I have noticed (especially lately) that sometimes all you have to do is change the target and some who would be suitably outraged at the events in pictures such as these, are not able to recognize themselves in any part of the photo when cast of characters is changed and the focus is on a seemingly unrelated (except by virtue of being hated) target.
Gah! long-winded again. Sorry.
To Robert.
No. It’s rather simple, really. They were committing savage murder, bottomline.