Before reaching school age, I knew of only one family in our neighborhood that wasn’t brown. I was mostly shielded from even the idea of racism until yellow buses transported us out of brown stomping grounds and into school hallways that flowed mostly pink. It didn’t take long to recognize how we all were being primed to understand racial differences and unequal treatment. My rambunctiousness compared with that of pink classmates seemed to always bring much harsher reactions — teachers’ scolds from behind stern glares. I met with the principal’s paddle more than a few times. When I stopped giving him the tearful response he seemed to seek, he’d solitarily confine me all day in the office’s supply closet. The only light came from a sliver under the door that would allow my eyes to adjust from seeing total blackness to seeing the room as clear as day. Outside the door, chummy adult voices greeted one another as if there wasn’t a child locked away nearby.
I was still in elementary school and playing in the living room at the home of friends when their teenage brother popped from one of the back rooms wearing what must’ve been their father’s white Ku Klux Klan outfit. As my younger brother and I instinctively lurched back, he lifted the pointed hood to reveal his laughing face. Their father was also one of our peewee football coaches.
“Why are all the niggers in the back?” It was the first time, but not the last, I heard our high school football coach launch the n-bomb. It was during warm-ups, in front of all the players, in one of my first team practices after transferring to the school. When I found myself the only one openly protesting his racial slurs, the coach told me, “Son, I could make you a star. But I’m not.”
Trying to list every racist act I’ve shunned and overcome would be impossible. Instead, when presented with the challenge to visually depict how racism stymies the collective potential of black people, I decided to create a series of photos meant to be a “Whitest Hands” version of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” In that book, Pecola Breedlove — a young black girl — is convinced that her life would right itself if only she had long, blond hair, white skin and the bluest of eyes. The images here are intended to be sirens: startling alarms to wake us from internalizing the myth of white supremacy and the reality of racism, which has led us to blind, deafen, silence, even choke ourselves. To refrain from internalizing racism’s offerings is to give ourselves better chances of breaking the surface of racism’s murky depths, like lotus flowers blossoming skyward.
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photographs by Jahi Chikwendiu, Washington Post via
Deeply moving
ReplyDeleteIndeed, both text and photographs. And their combination.
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