9 November 1938

"There was a lot of glass on the streets. We lived in the West End, surrounded by shops, many of them Jewish. This was late at night and it was dark; but we had no trouble in picking out the Jewish shops. They had been looted, the windows had been smashed, and there were ashes, rubble and debris outside some of the shops. We had not seen how our fellow Jews had been treated: beaten, taken to prison, some of them never to return. But in our hiding place, listening to our friends, we heard more and more of the story of Kristallnacht."

Albert Friedlander

photograph by John Offenbach (series "Jew") via

Associations with African American Vernacular English

Abstract: The current study examines the effect of dialect for a Black speaker, paying particular attention to the implications for criminal justice processing. Participants in this study heard an audio clip of a Black man describing his weekend and were randomly assigned to hear the account spoken in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Mainstream American English (MAE). For half of each sample, the audio clip was described as an alibi. Participants then evaluated the speaker across dimensions related to character and criminality, as well as his race (sic), education, and socio-economic status. 

Results indicate that the speaker was viewed as having worse character and a greater criminal propensity if he spoke using the AAVE guise rather than the MAE guise. Additionally, participants perceived the AAVE speaker to be more stereotypically Black, less educated, and lower socio-economic status. These findings raise questions about contemporary forms of bias in criminal justice processing. (Dunbar, King & Vaughn, 2024)

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- Dunbar, King & Vaughn (2024). Dialect on Trial: An Experimental Examination of Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Character Judgments. Sage Journals, link

- photograph by John H. White via

The Holy Week Uprising

After Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in April 1968, riots erupted in nearly 200 US-American cities. During the days that followed his death, the U.S. experienced the greatest wave of social unrest after the Civil War (via). These riots were a direct reaction to King's assassination. His assassination is, however, not seen as "the" reason. Tensions had already been high before King's death. Segregation was officially over but still part of everyday life. Being Black meant discriminatory housing policies, income dispartities, poverty, and lacking job opportunities. Due to these conditions, Black US-Americans often had to move to (Black) low-income areas which were not only poorly maintained but also meant being hassled by local police (via)

(Above: "A crowd described as "militant, dancing and chanting" takes part in a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. in Garfield Park on April 7, 1968. This photo was published in the April 8, 1968, Milwaukee Sentinel. The banner depicts black activist H. Rap Brown, who famously said the previous summer, "Violence is as American as apple pie.") 

58,000 National Guardsmen and Army troops assisted law enforcement officers in handling the violence. 43 people were killed, around 3,500 were injured, 27,000 were arrested and 54 of the cities affected saw more than 100,000 dollars property damage, Washington D.C. experienced the most property damage. There, twelve days of unrest meant 1,200 fires and 24 million in insured property damage (174 million dollars in today's currency). It took decades for some neighbourhoods to fully recover. The fires had destroyed buildings, made thousands of people homeless and jobless, too many had died in burning buildings. In Baltimore, which came second to Washington in terms of damage, crowds first gathered peacefully to hold a memorial service. After a couple of small incidents, 6,000 National Guards arrived and protests erupted (via).

“If I were a kid in Harlem, I know what I’d be thinking right now. I’d be thinking that the whites have declared open season on my people, and they’re going to pick us off one by one unless I get a gun and pick them off first.”
President Johnson

"America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. (A riot) is the language of the unheard."
Martin Luther King

"For years, many white Americans mistakenly conceived of racism as a “Southern problem” and believed that Jim Crow only resided south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The racial violence of the 1960s throughout the country rudely awakened the nation to the speciousness of this belief. 

Yet no sooner had that belief been discarded than it was immediately replaced with a new and equally false one: that America’s race problems extended only to our large cities and their inner-city ghettos, but not beyond that. The terms that we used — and still use — contributed to the misunderstanding of what was taking place. By using the term “riots,” we reinforce the notion that these acts of “collective violence” were spontaneous and apolitical and that they were disconnected to the protests for civil rights in the South. But a closer examination of them, individually and collectively, proves otherwise. 

This flawed understanding had real consequences. Focused on large cities, the national media gave sparse coverage to the revolts in York and other midsize and small cities, despite the fact that the majority of them occurred in such places. In 1969 alone, revolts rocked midsized cities like Hartford, Conn., Harrisburg, Pa. and Fort Lauderdale, Fla."
Levy, Washington Post

photographs via and via and via and via and via and via 

Distraction

“The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”

Toni Morrison

photograph of Toni Morrison by Jill Krementz (1974) via

Bringing The Struggle Into Focus. By Peter McKenzie.

"We are people before we're photographers."

Duane Michael

"I am part of all that I have touched and that has touched me."

Thomas Wolfe

This is the basic promise that this paper will follow. I believe that if we are going to become part of the struggle through photographic communication we must examine and realise the undeniable responsibility of all photographers in South Africa to using the medium to establish a democratic Azania. Our photographic seeing is the direct result of the factors that contribute to our being here. Our day to day experiences and our degree of sensitivity to these will determine the are we isolate in our viewfinder, the moment in time that we freeze forever.

Photographic Communication and Culture

"Your child shares in your sense of indignity when you are stopped outside your yard and asked to produce your reference book. Your child shares in your sense of outrage and anger when people arrive in your house in the midle of th (sic) night and take you away, throw you into jail without trial, and for weeks, evven months, refuse your wife the right to see you.

As their cars drive off into the night with you, they leave behind seeds of hatred in the hearts of your small kids."

Percy Qoboza

This "way of seeing" referred to in the introduction, holds true for the viewer too. We therefore realize the importance of examining this relationship with our viewers so that they can understand, interpret and perceive the images that we transmit to them in the process of communication. Culture supplies this relationship. To demonstrate this we can compare photographic comunication to an iceberg where the tip of the iceberg represents the point and the submerge area the unstated unconscous cultural assumptions that make communications possible. Communication depends on the assumption that photographer and viewer share a common culture. 

Photographic communication is possible in our multicultural society because we are united under oppression. The chances of being morally affected by photographs is better than ever before in our struggle because of the level of consciousness and awareness of the people. Evidences of the last drawing together of the laager are so evident tha tthose who don't see them are those who choose to ignore them!

Because of the high level of awareness and frequent acts of resistance in this country we will regard our culture at this stage in our struggle as a resistance culture. (...)

The poor history of committed photography in South Africa will reflect the refusal of most photographers to accept their responsibility to participate in the struggle.

"Whether he likes it or not the photographer is in the business of communication and it is useless to retreat into the romanticism of self-expression and technology wizardy. Useless, because to communicate takes us purely beyond personal and technical concerns and into phenomena that the communicator and his audiences share."

Frank Webster

This shows the added responsibility of photographers in South Africa as oppression continually stifles the inherent creativity in us. No photographer can lay claim to any individual artistic merit in an oppressed society.

We must realize at this urgent stage of our struggle the importance of making a commitment to change through photographic communication. 

Once we realize the importance of our resistance culture in photographic communication it becomes clear that we can successfully communicate on a level that the people are perceptive to. 

(...)

Effects of uniqueness on photographic communication

Once we've understood the present feelings and sensitivities of our intended viewers we can become explicit and direct in our photographhic communication and the statements we make will be easily understood.

Lewis hine, a pioneer in social documentation, said: "There are two things I wanted to do with the camera, I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected, I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated." Social documentation can be regarded as having two aspects, negative aspects which we can call negative documentation and positive aspects or positive documentation. 

Negative documentation

This type of documentation is to show the effects of injustice. They show the shocking conditions that people are forced to cope with, they show the faces of those who have given up in the face of overwhelming odds. These images are meant to awaken the sleeping consciences of those who havent't yet realized their oppression and the danger of non-commitment to change. There are those of our brothers who are so blinded by crumbs from the master's table, who even develop a sense of pride over their false securities. Because of the realistic tangibility of photographs they can arrest the conscienne of those people and influence them into remedial action.

Positive documentation

We can see the danger of negative documentation. We could be seen as a pathetic and hopeless people. Nothing could be more misleading, our struggle has shown resolution, dignity and strength. We've got to show the hope and determination of all committed to freeom. 

The photographer must serve the needs of the struggle. He must share the day eperiences of the people in order to communicate truthfully. We must be invovled in the strikes, riots, boycotts, festivities, church activities and occurrences that affect our day to day living. We must identify with our subjects in order for our viewers to identify with them. Because of the realistice nature of photographs and the relationships built up around the camer and its images they can promote unity, increase awareness and inform. A society possessing these qualities is an easily mobilized one. We as photographers must also be questioning, socially consious and more aware than our predecessors. 

(...)

Two intentions are necessary for committed photography in South Africa:

1. We must be comitted to liberation.

2. We must prepare our people for a democratic Azania. 

Peter McKenzie, Botswana Cultural Festival, Gaborone, 1982

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photograph by Ernest Cole via

The Afrapix Collective

Afrapix was founded in South Africa in 1982 (and disbanded in 1991), a collective of photographers who documented and opposed Apartheid. According to Paul Weinberg, a cofounder, initially, there were two objectives: to found a cooperative not unlike Magnum Photos but also - or primarily - to stimulate social documentary photography and social change.

(...) the Afrapix photographers’ mandate was to be participants in action, aligned with the politics and principles of the anti-apartheid movement. Their work was grounded in the belief that exposure and visibility were not the end goal; rather, the objective was ‘preconditions for an empathetic and humanistic reaction that would prompt international political action.’ (via)

The more influential Afrapix became, the more challenges the photographers had to face. Apartheid security forces harrassed the photographers, their office was raided, then the building (which also housed other anti-apartheid groups) was bombed. There were police surveillance, spies, and direct threats. Laws became more restrictive, designed to fight "the public relations nightmare the apartheid government was experiencing overseas, namely, images of white police officers brutalising unarmed black civilians". The mainstream press avoided running stories that seemed to be opposing the government policy and censored itself to survive since their revenue came from the white readership that was already complaining about boring and annoying headlines "about the experiences of Black South Africans". These experiences were not appealing to advertisers, either (via).

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photograph (COSATU Cultural Day 1987, (c) Anna Zieminski) via

Trabold, Bryan. 2018. Rhetorics of Resistance: Opposition Journalism in Apartheid South Africa. 23. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh.

Trabold, Bryan. 2018. Rhetorics of Resistance: Opposition Journalism in Apartheid South Africa. 43. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh.

Trabold, Bryan. 2018. Rhetorics of Resistance: Opposition Journalism in Apartheid South Africa. 43. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh.

The Dearborn Independent

Henry Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent and published it from 1919 to 1927. The weekly, widely distributed paper (circulation reached at least 900,000 by 1926) covered business and economic news as well as world events. It also became a source of antisemitism. The front page read "The International Jew: The World's Problems", each week, the paper published antisemitic articles. It also republished The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. While The Dearborn Independent did condemn violence, it also blamed Jews for provoking the violence. 

Ford's antisemitism provoked protests and a boycott of his automobiles in the 1920s. The Anti Defamation League launched a campaign to oppose Ford. In 1927, a lawsuit was brought against Ford. As a consequence, the paper shut down, Ford apologised, his apology was received with skepticism. In 1931, Hitler gave an interview saying "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration" (via and via and via).

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photograph (Ford Levacar, 1959) via

Tyler Mitchell's Sense of His Own Historical Moment

Tyler Mitchell's photographs are "a counterpart to the pernicious stereotypes that have long dominated visual culture" by showing Black people in different ways they might "look, dress and act", for instance, enjoying leisure time. Probably due to their soft light, pastel colours, and settings, Mitchell's photographs do not look politicial at first glance (via).

Mitchell was born in Atlanta in 1995. Skateboarding led him to photography, he then studied film and television at New York University and, in 2015, self-published a book about skaters in Havana. Three years later, aged 23, he was commissioned to photograph Beyonce for a Vogue issue. He became the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue (via).

This idea of my community and my friends, young black men and women, being able to enjoy pleasure, or leisure time — that’s revolutionary. I think about the pleasures and the freedoms we’ve been denied historically — or the way that free time and leisure time, for us, have been framed as something potentially violent.
Tyler Mitchell

Mitchell seems to have "a clear sense of his own historical moment". He believes that being a Black photographer carries a different weight since just a short while ago Black people could not afford cameras (via).

I’m indulging myself in the way that making pictures for me is a form of protection. I’m able to create and live out these little moments or small figments of dreams in which Black people exist within the space of a frame where they are unencumbered. They’re not having to be hypervigilant about social and political dangers, the hypothetical threat of a white gallery space, or any of these things that remind them to get out and stay out.
Tyler Mitchell 

Mitchell's work was partly inspired by Tumblr where he noticed that most of the images of free and sensual young people showed whites. He uses the documentary approach to capture Black identity "in an equally close and vulnerable light" (via).

People like Ryan McGinley and Larry Clark were just two examples of images that seem to proliferate the most on those types of platforms. They seem to get the most re-blogs or people would always repost them. Their most iconic images would usually be white youths, very sensuous and beautiful, enjoying life in groups in Paris or on road trips, you know So I’m thinking about my experiences and trying to make art about my experiences in the South. Being black and middle class, I think about the self-policing that has to happen within our community here. It’s baked into our psyche that we’re maybe not allowed to, or that we’re not supposed to, behave in those ways outwardly in society or perform those sentiments of joy… Obviously, we do enjoy leisure time, that’s a global thing. But my work is about bringing forward these ideas of leisure and play as radical things, because we’ve societally, politically, and within ourselves—in our psyche—been prevented from enjoying those freedoms. Utopia, by definition, isn’t achievable. Photography, by definition, is about constructing an image and framing an image and a point of view on the world. I’m playing with these ideas, the fantasy of things that are not real, or that I would want to be real.
Tyler Mitchell

I think the images suggest [a] core fundamental resilience, radiance and full human agency that Black folks command, even in environments that tell them otherwise.
Tyler Mitchell 

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photographs by Tyler Mitchell via and via and via and via and via and via

Borrowed Time. Photographs by Dennis Darling.

In 2012, Dennis Darling started photographing the ageing population of Holocaust survivors of Terezin, once a holiday resort for the nobility, then turned into a ghetto, then concentration camp. Officially, Terezin had not been an extermination camp. However, about 33,000 people died there due to malnutrition, disease and other reasons. From there, about 88,000 were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. 

Above: Andula Lorencova née Weinsteinova, b. 1927, Prague, 2012

When the war ended, there were only 17,247 survivors. Dennis Darling made more than 150 portraits of survivors in seven countries. Many of the survivors are photographed within personal spaces (via).

In late 1943 an inspection of Terezin was demanded by Christian X, king of Denmark, to determine the condition of 466 Danish Jews sent there in October of that year. The review panel was to include two Swiss delegates from the International Red Cross and two representatives of the government of Denmark. The Nazis permitted these representatives to visit Terezin in order to dispel rumors about the extermination camps.

The Germans immediately engaged in an infamous beautification program – “Operation Embellishment,” a ruse intended to mollify the king’s concerns. Weeks of preparation preceded the visit. The area was cleaned up, and the Nazis deported many Jews to Auschwitz to minimize the appearance of overcrowding in Terezin. Also deported in these actions were most of the Czechoslovak workers assigned to "Operation Embellishment". The Nazis directed the building of fake shops and cafés to imply that the Jews lived in relative comfort.

 

The inspection was held on June 23, 1944 (...).

The Danish Jews whom the Red Cross visited lived in freshly painted rooms, not more than three in a room. (...)

As part of the charade the Nazis compelled Schächter to give a performance of the Requiem. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Red Cross issued “a bland report about the visit, indicating that the representatives were taken in by the elaborate fiction.” Eichmann was later quoted as having said, “Those crazy Jews—singing their own requiem.” Rafael Schächter was deported to Auschwitz on October 16, 1944, and died the following day in the gas chamber.

Following the successful use of Terezin as a supposed model internment camp during the Red Cross visit, the Nazis decided to make a propaganda film there. It was directed by Jewish prisoner Kurt Gerron, an experienced director and actor. Shooting took eleven days, starting September 1, 1944. After the film was completed, most of the cast and the director were deported to Auschwitz. Gerron was murdered by gas chamber on October 28, 1944. (via)

Above: Otto Greenfield, North Yorkshire, England

Above:Raja Zadnikova, Prague

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photographs by Dennis Darling via and via and via

Santu Mofokeng: Testing How Many Eccentricities a Picture Can Tolerate before it Breaks apart

Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020) was a South African photographer and member of the Afrapix collective. He started working under the sign of David Goldblatt, his teacher, but showed a different approach. While Goldblatt's photographs were rather careful, precise, "pointed and outwardly political", Mofokeng's work was marked by feelings of alienation testing "how many eccentricities a picture can tolerate before it breaks apart". Mofokeng, according to an article, "portrayed the feelings of black South Africans, and in doing so examined their country's collective subconscious" (via).

photograph (16 June Commemoration, Regina Mundi, Soweto, 1986) by Santu Mofokeng via

Township Billboards. By Santu Mofokeng.

"(I should preface by saying the work in this show is seminal. It is the beginning of my investigation of the visual history of township billboards.) 

Perhaps the title should read Township and Billboard. Billboards have been the medium of communication between the rulers and the denizens of townships since the beginning of the township. The billboard is a fact and feature of township landscape. It is a relic from the times when Africans were subjects of power and the township was a restricted area; subject to laws, municipality by-laws and ordinances regulating people's movements and governing who may or may not enter the township. It is without irony when I say that billboards can be used as reference points when plotting the history and development of the township. Billboards capture and encapsulate ideology, the social, economic and political climate at any given time. They retain their appeal for social engineering.

Apartheid billboards were very austere, and were chiefly concerned with the 'sanitation syndrome'. The economic boom of the sixties introduced American style highway advertising billboards thus rendering Apartheid ideology anonymous and opaque. In the politically turbulent period of the '70s and '80 the overtly political billboards made their return. This time the struggle was for the hearts and minds of the populace. Recently, with the liberalization of politics the billboard is chiefly used to address the rising consumer culture and the anxiety caused by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This last is a campaign partly financed by government.

 
I read somewhere that ads create a sense of participating in the utopia of beauty: Life as it should be. A drive from the city into Soweto will quickly dispel this notion as misguided. Billboards line the freeway on both sides. In the name of freedom of speech one's cultural sensibility is assaulted by textual and visual messages. The trip can hardly be described as boring. Nobody ever complains of the visual pollution. At the high speed of a minibus taxi, the billboards roll by like flipping pages in a book. The retina registers arcane and inane messages about sex and cell-phones, mostly sex and cell-phones. Perhaps this is a coincidence. I wonder."

Santu Mofokeng

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photographs by Santu Mofokeng via 

Dancing between Spectacular and Ordinary. By Paul Weinberg.

I remember a seminal moment during the turbulent 1980s, when David Goldblatt confided in me. At the time, I was part of a collective of photographers, called Afrapix, that I had co-founded. Without trying, we were at the center of the storm: We photographed the ongoing violence against ordinary black South Africans, who had prepared themselves for continued resistance to the apartheid state. We called ourselves the “Taking Sides” generation and were unashamedly partisan as we recorded the aberrations of South African society and the events as they unfolded.

David’s disclosure was simple and to the point: despite his considerable reputation as a photographer, he felt his work—at that point in history—was meaningless and of no value. He thought our photographs, on the frontline of political struggle, were more important than his work, which he felt was peripheral. At the time, photojournalism had a particular gravitas. Images were circulated into the national and international news media and, in our case, mainly the alternative press. Njabulo Ndebele, one of South Africa’s finest writers, described David’s paradigm somewhat differently; he saw an evolving tension between the spectacular and the ordinary. The pervasiveness of apartheid, in all its ugly and grotesque manifestations, consumed us. Ndebele pleaded for preserving the sanctity of ordinary people caught up in historical events—who had names, hopes, and dreams—rather than simply reducing them to statistics, lost in the amorphous atrocity.

This ambivalence was not unfamiliar to me. While the frontline was where the camera gravitated, as lines of battle were demarcated in a time of civil war, I was a reluctant war photographer. Like my colleagues in Afrapix, I believed that every image that revealed what was happening was a victory against the system, against myopia, and against national amnesia.

Ndebele alluded to the invisible landscape that ran through the country. David, a self-described “failed newspaper photographer,” had dedicated his photography to working beyond the headlines, to explore and elevate the lives of ordinary people. David’s confession was also part of my existential dilemna; I too was drawn to this invisible world. As a young photographer, I had spent many years walking the streets of Johannesburg, visiting townships, and celebrating the ordinary. The camera was a way to understand my country and to learn about the world around me, which was cut off by the visible and invisible divides of apartheid. Some of my pursuits crisscrossed, unknowingly, with David’s. We both had photographed in Fietas, a mainly Indian community in the center of Johannesburg that faced displacement because of the Group Areas Act. At first my connection with Fietas was not photographic. I was part of cricket team based there, in a non-racially-specific league. I watched with alarm as my teammates and families lost their houses and were relocated thirty kilometers from the center of the city. I shot photographs and made a documentary film about what was happening. Nearly forty years later, my work sits alongside David’s concerted and thorough work in the Museum in Action, established by Salma Patel in Fietas for the memory of the community.

Ironically, my journey into the invisible landscape continued at the height of the struggle against apartheid. I worked in rural areas for human-rights organizations that were doing their best to find legal loopholes to stave off displacements and to support communities. My camera took me to places like Mogopa, two hundred kilometers from Johannesburg, where I witnessed the drama of a once-vibrant farming community, documenting its desperate attempts to stay, its removal to a desolate homeland, and then its post-apartheid return.

When I began working with Africa’s first people, the San, I was working against the tide. The San, despite centuries of genocide and dispossession, were presented as people living in some kind of stone-age bliss, in “primitive affluence,” as if time had stood still. Films like The Gods Must be Crazy, numerous advertisements and commercials, and feature stories in magazines perpetuated what renowned the filmmaker John Marshall called “Death by Myth.” The truth was that the San were marginalized and badly treated by white and black farmers alike; even more catastrophic and disruptive was that they had been drafted into the South African army and the Namibian civil war. For thirty years I journeyed with communities throughout southern Africa who struggled to hold onto their lands and a hunter-gatherer way of life, in the rare circumstances in which they could.

The dawn of the new South Africa, liberated from the manacles of apartheid, elicited new ways of seeing. I reveled in the new freedom to travel, to make visible the invisible landscape: to tell muted, hidden, and personal stories. I spent a decade on a project called Moving Spirit. In a time of national healing, I explored diverse practices of spirituality. I wrote in the project’s book: “I, too, with or without my camera, am part of a country trying to heal. In this journey I join millions of South Africans continuously on a pilgrimage beyond politics and platitudes…in search of the transcendent spirit.”

I composed a series of images that had been buried in my archive; Travelling Light; a celebration of earlier photographs that I excavated from the past, that I had put to the side during the dark days of apartheid, when the spectacular overwhelmed the ordinary. Apartheid shadowed me on all these journeys; it was always there, whether I was conscious of it or not. But between the cracks, life continued, with its pain and joy. The ordinary was mirrored in the lines of people’s faces or in the fascist bravado of military parades. I watched how people reflected themselves, how I absorbed their reflections, how they danced with reality, how they made light in a dark space, and how they embraced each other at great risk.

As we gear up to celebrate twenty-five years of our new democracy, there is much to reflect on, for photographers and for society as a whole. The ordinary continues to be the metaphor for the country’s soul. Apartheid has officially disappeared, but its aftereffects and those of the colonial past, remain. Our liberation-movement government has failed and forsaken its people. It is a far cry from the moment of joy and optimism that I experienced when I photographed Nelson Mandela as he voted for the first time, in 1994. Now, thirty percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and many estimate that forty percent is unemployed. We watch one commission after another reveal unbounded corruption, nepotism, and national neglect. But, to guide us in this difficult time, we should hold onto David Goldblatt’s words, from an interview we shared, on a project called Then and Now, reflecting on our work during and after apartheid. They are as relevant and inspirational now as they were during the turbulent 1980s, when he made his confession to me: “During the apartheid years, my primary concern was with values: what our values were, how we had arrived at them, and particularly how we expressed them. And once you start with that line of thinking, there is no break: there is a continuation. I am still concerned with what our values are and how we are expressing them.”

Paul Weinberg

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photographs by Paul Weinberg via and via and via and via

Different Ethnicities and the Gaze of Infants

Abstract: Differential experience leads infants to have perceptual processing advantages for own- over other-race faces, but whether this experience has downstream consequences is unknown. Three experiments examined whether 7-month-olds (range = 5.9–8.5 months; N = 96) use gaze from own- versus other-race adults to anticipate events. 

When gaze predicted an event's occurrence with 100% reliability, 7-month-olds followed both adults equally; with 25% (chance) reliability, neither was followed. However, with 50% (uncertain) reliability, infants followed own- over other-race gaze. Differential face race experience may thus affect how infants use social cues from own- versus other-race adults for learning. Such findings suggest that infants integrate online statistical reliability information with prior knowledge of own versus other race to guide social interaction and learning. (Xiao et al., 2017)

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- Xiao, N. G., Wu, R., Quinn, P. C., Liu, S., Tummeltshammer, K. S., Kirkham, N. Z., Ge, L., Pascalis, O. & Lee, K. (2017). Infants Rely More on Gaze Cues From Own-Race Than Othr-Race Adults for Learning Under Uncertainty, link

- photograph via Design Mom

Babies Associating Ethnicities with Different Music and Emotions

Abstract: We used a novel intermodal association task to examine whether infants associate own- and other-race faces with music of different emotional valences. Three- to 9-month-olds saw a series of neutral own- or other-race faces paired with happy or sad musical excerpts. Three- to 6-month-olds did not show any specific association between face race and music. At 9 months, however, infants looked longer at own-race faces paired with happy music than at own-race faces paired with sad music. 

Nine-month-olds also looked longer at other-race faces paired with sad music than at other-race faces paired with happy music. These results indicate that infants with nearly exclusive own-race face experience develop associations between face race and music emotional valence in the first year of life. The potential implications of such associations for developing racial biases in early childhood are discussed. (Xiao et al., 2017)

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- Xiao, N. G., Quinn P. C., Liu, S, Ge, L. Pascalis, O. & Lee, K. (2017). Older but not younger infants associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces with sad music; link

- photograph by William Eggleston via

Identity Politics and Vaccine Distribution

"For me, the most important and the most shocking was the way in which the United States rolled out vaccines in 2021. We had these amazing life-saving vaccines, but there were too few of them, so what were we going to do? Virtually every country in the world did it by age. But the key advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control, called ACIP, said that even though that course of action is much easier to implement, we're not going to do that. It would, they said, be unethical because a disproportionate number of older Americans are white. Even though, according to their own causal models, adopting a different rule would increase the number of deaths by between 0.5 and 6.5%, could lead to thousands more people dying, simply prioritizing older people would be the ethically wrong thing to do. 

Instead, they recommended putting essential workers, who supposedly are more diverse, first. A couple of things happened because of that. One is that it's really hard to communicate who's an essential worker. And immediately the politicking started about being included as essential workers: Film crews were essential workers. Finance executives were essential workers. I was an essential worker, as a college professor in Maryland, at a time when I was not allowed to teach classes in person…

Then what happened is that you had way too many people eligible for the vaccine at a time when there were barely any appointments. So who got the appointments? The people who were able to refresh the websites for hours a day, or who could write computer programs to find eligible spots, or who were able to drive hours out of town in order to get to some rural pharmacy that had more capacity for some reason. They were the ones to get it. In other words, more privileged people who were probably at slightly less risk of death. AI suspect that this policy even killed more non-white people, because if you give a vaccine to two 25-year-old black Uber drivers, rather than one 80-year-old black retiree, more black people are going to die.

So here's a policy that is a life or death question; is capable of inspiring just the worst kind of zero-sum racial competition in our politics; and can easily be exploited by the political right (...)"

Yasha Mounk

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- photograph by Dennis Feldman (1969-1972, Hollywood) via

- Yasha Mounk, full interview: link

The Coded Gaze

"You've likely heard of the 'male gaze' or the 'white gaze. This is a cousin concept really, about who has the power to shape technology and whose preferences and priorities are baked in — as well as also, sometimes, whose prejudices are baked in.“

Joy Buolamwini

"The goal of AJL is to create a world with more inclusive technology by fighting “the coded gaze”, my term for bias in artificial intelligence that can lead to exclusionary experiences or discriminatory practices. The coded gaze is a view that posits any technology created by humans will reflect individual or collective values, priorities and if unchecked, prejudices. To address bias, the coded gaze must be acknowledged. Exploring the coded gaze can inform ways to make artificial intelligence more inclusive. AJL fights the coded gaze through a bias-busting strategy that (1) highlights bias by raising public awareness on the shortcomings of artificial intelligence through media production, public talks, and exhibitions, (2) identifies bias by conducting research and building tools that practitioners and researchers can use to check datasets and algorithms for demographic and phenotypic bias, and (3) mitigates bias by providing inclusive benchmarks and best practices to create more inclusive artificial intelligence." (Buolamwini, 2017)

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- Buolamwini, J. (2017). Gender Shades: Intersectional Phenotypic and Demographic Evaluation of Face Datasets and Gender Classifiers. MIT: MA Thesis.

- photograph by Vivian Maier via

Analysing 3,000 AI-Generated Images, Finding (Almost) As Many Ethnic Stereotypes

Last year, Rest of World analysed 3,000 images created by AI and came to the conclusion that the images created were highly stereotypical.

Using Midjourney, we chose five prompts, based on the generic concepts of “a person,” “a woman,” “a house,” “a street,” and “a plate of food.” We then adapted them for different countries: China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria. We also included the U.S. in the survey for comparison, given Midjourney (like most of the biggest generative AI companies) is based in the country. For each prompt and country combination (e.g., “an Indian person,” “a house in Mexico,” “a plate of Nigerian food”), we generated 100 images, resulting in a data set of 3,000 images.

When prompting Midjourney to create "an Indian person", 99 out of 100 images depicted a man, almost all of them clearly aged over 60 with grey or white hair. 92 of the subjects wore a traditional type of turban, a great many of them resembled a spiritual guru. Similarly, "a Mexican person" was - in 99 out of 100 cases - a person wearing a sombrero. 

When creating "an American person", national identity was portrayed by showing the US-American flag in 100 out of 100 images, while "none of the queries for the other nationalities came up with any flags at all". Across all countries, there was a gender bias with "a person" mostly being a man - with one exception. Interestingly, the results for "an American person" included 94 young women, five men and one masked individual (see image in this posting). The reason for the overrepresentation of women when creating "an American person" could be the overrepresentaion of young women in US media which again build the basis for the AI's training data (via).

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image (AI) via

The Battle of Lewisham

The National Front (NF), a far-right British party, reached the height of electoral support in the mid-1970s. In 1977, they announced the organisation of a so-called "Anti-Mugging March" from New Cross to Catford, passing through multicultural Lewisham. The march was announced after the arrest of Black people in Lewisham whose homes had been raided by the police in connection with a series of muggings over the months before. 

As a reaction, the All Lewisham Campaign Against Racsm and Fascism organised counter-demonstrations for the same day since all attempts to have the march banned had failed. 

On 13 August 1977, hundreds of NF members assembled, so did thousands of local people and community leaders to hold a peaceful counter-march. The police tried to reroute the NF but faced forceful opposition. Counter-demonstrators clashed with police and it was the first time that the Metropolitan Police employed riot shields in mainland Britain (via and via and via).

Photographer Syd Shelton documented the events. He is also happens to be the photographer who documented the Rock Against Racism movement

It was about intimidating and frightening people just as the Nazis had done in the streets of Germany in the 1930s.
Syd Shelton

 

"Police motorbikes were set on fire and the police responded with truncheons. There’s one photograph where the horses are coming towards me – I was knocked over to the ground but still had the camera in my hand so I kept going."
Syd Shelton

"It was a violent day, but there was also a degree of triumph because the people were not going to take it anymore. More than 200 people were arrested but nobody really cared because they felt like they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. It’s the most incredibly empowering feeling to come together in huge numbers and feel you can actually change the world — because if you don’t things can do in the opposite direction."
Syd Shelton

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photographs by Syd Shelton  (of Darcus Howe) via and via and by Chris Schwartz via and by John Hodder via and by Syd Shelton again via

The Martial Race Ideology

Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote a discourse celebrating what he called the most natural state of man. He believed that in this state of nature, man was ultimately good and not inherently evil. As the stages of nature progress, Rousseau continued, the decadent society corrupts man by making him weak and unable to defend himself. He praised the primitive man's "military virtue", the "noble savage" rather untouched by civilisation, not polluted and weakened by modern society, hence perfect soldiering material (Spivey, 2017). 

One logical extension of his argument is that the “civilized” and “sophisticated” English would be forced to rely upon so-called “lesser” people for protection. (Spivey, 2017:16)

These ideas had an impact on the British Army and played a factor after the Indian Mutiny or First War of Independence, an unsuccessful rebellion against British rule in India from 1857 to 1859. After this war, the British Army introduced the classification of "martial" and "non-martial" groups in their armed forces. According to the Peel Commission Report (1859), the revolt began with Bengal Army filled with Brahmins (via). The British reacted to the report and the Martial Races Theory became part of their reorganisation strategy. They preferably recruited Sikhs and Gurkhas from the northwest frontier, but also Marathas and Rajputs and avoided Bengali who they thought had become weak and effeminate through the growing urbanisation. High-caste Brahmins were regarded as dishonest, disloyal and scheming. Later, the notion of martial and non-martial cultures or ethnicities was transferred to other contexts, such as the British Isles. There, the Highland Scots became the most desired soldiers while the Irish - Celt, Catholic, peasant - were seen differently. Scientific racism helped to keep this view unchallenged (Spivey, 2017). Quoting Darwin:

The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts-and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of the Saxons that remained. (cited in Spivey, 2017:14)

Gurkha also played a role in the Falkland War when the 7th Duke of Edinburgh's Own Gurkha Rifles Regiment - part of the British task force- was sent to fight Argentina on the Falkland Islands.

The Brigade of Gurkhas, composed of more than 3,000 soldiers of Nepalese descent, who traditionally served in the British Indian Army before India became independent in 1947. (via)

The image of the Gurkha - a born soldier turned into a killing machine - survived the British departure from India in the 1940s (Barua 1995).

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- Barua, P. (1995). Inventing Race: The British and India's Martial Races. The Historian, 58(1), link
- Spivey, A. (2017). Friend or Foe? Martial Race Ideology and the Experience of Highland Scottish and Irish Regiments in Mid-Victorian Conflichts, 1853-1870, Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Paper 3216, East Tennessee State University
- photograph (by Masterji of Kelly, a bus conductor, 1950s) via

Fugitive Feminism. By Akwugo Emejulu.

"Fugitive feminism is a doorway through which I imagine Black women leading the way into the non-human, or perhaps, a beyond-human, future. Fugitive feminism is both the promise and the act of self-rebirthing, into a different reality, where we no longer are circumscribed by the assumptions of humanity that have shaped our liberations struggles by turning our backs on the very thing for which we have struggled for generations - inclusion in womanhood and humanity."
Emejulu (2022:31)

::: Related posting: Fleeing Humanity

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- Emejulu, A. (2022). Fugitive Feminism. Silver Press.
- photograph via