Frederick Douglass, photography, and the image of dignity

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“He wrote essays on the photograph and its majesty, posed for hundreds of different portraits, many of them endlessly copied and distributed around the United States. He was a theorist of the technology and a student of its social impact, one of the first to consider the fixed image as a public relations instrument. Indeed, the determined abolitionist believed fervently that he could represent the dignity of his race, inspiring others, and expanding the visual vocabulary of mass culture. ”

Images and resources I'm working through

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As a Filipino American who is grateful for the life and good fortune I’ve enjoyed in America, I’ve been inspired by others who are challenging themselves, their friends, and their families to take stock of their values and how they choose—every single day—to enact them. Through them and others, I’m beginning to recognizing how my largely silent, passive non-racist attitude/outlook—which I understood as positive, or at least not harmful—has made me complicit in supporting a status quo that continues to damage the lives of Black individuals, families, and communities in this country.

Since high school I’ve always held in high esteem the idea I first learned from reading Emerson: that personal reform is social reform. I still draw strength and inspiration from that conviction, which is why I’m showing these images and linking to these resources. But it is frighteningly clear that such a romantic commitment—so heavily weighted towards the poetic burden of transformative private acts by the individual—can be both indulgent and self satisfying. It is also not social reform. Rather, I’m drawn today to the more direct and still poetic idea attributed to Dr. Cornel West, one that’s finding new life and meaning on and off the Internet:

“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”

Finding common cause in collective action and standing alongside others is how laws and systems of oppression are changed. That’s the direct—and public—path to protecting and supporting Black lives.

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It should be summer Olympic time, but it’s not. This now powerful and iconic image (of a peaceful protest that was reviled at the time, and for some time afterwards) taken by John Dominis is absolutely and firmly about the courage and achievement of American gold and bronze medalist sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Mexico games in 1967. But because the subject of this post is about committing to help, I’d like to share a link to the story about Peter Norman, the Australian silver medalist sprinter who stood with them on the podium. From the article:

“Smith and Carlos had already decided to make a statement on the podium. They were to wear black gloves. But Carlos left his at the Olympic village. It was Norman who suggested they should wear one each on alternate hands. Yet Norman had no means of making a protest of his own. So he asked a member of the U.S. rowing team for his “Olympic Project for Human Rights” badge, so that he could show solidarity.”

If you continue to read the article, you will learn that Peter Norman was shunned publicly and largely forgotten for this act of solidarity upon his return to Australia.

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So here are some resources and googledocs I am reading and working through as an individual. They were shared to me by others, and offered with the hope that individual listening, learning, and working for change can be a transformative social good.