Last week a lot of terrible things happened that showed just how little progress we have made towards racial equality. Barack Obama lost in Pennsylvania, Sean Bell's murderers were acquitted, and Seal Press released a book with terribly racist illustrations depicting a white woman escaping black "primitive" tribesman. You can see the images and read about it here and read more about it here. I couldn't believe it. I thought Seal Press could be trusted. How could this have happened? How could a publisher that so many women trust disseminate such damaging, violently racist illustrations. How can a whole publishing house of progressive people be so unaware and uncritical as to let these images slide into popular circulation- as if there aren't enough controlling images of people of color everywhere we look. And why, after the press has apologized, why can we still buy these books on Amazon? Why haven't they been recalled? If Seal Press "accidentally" overlooked images of underage girls being forced to suck dick, they would have recalled the books containing those images quicker than lightning. The problem is, no one would have even imagined publishing such pictures because they would have been immediately recognized as fucked up. Maybe that's an unfair comparison. Maybe the images of a classic white heroine escaping the dangerous black men aren't as overtly violent and damaging as images of raped white women. Or are they?
In November of 2006, a young black man was shot with 50 bullets by racist cops in New York City. What was he guilty of? Being black. That's about it. Of course the media tried to play up the case for white America by making sure to include his whereabouts in every article and television program concerning the murder. Sean Bell was shot outside of a strip club after his bachelor party. This is an important fact because, you know, "seedy" strip clubs are dens of iniquity and any black person that goes to a strip club is obviously a criminal that deserves to get shot. Let's not mention the millions of white men who can safely frequent strip clubs. Let's not ever mention the white businessmen who use high dollar whores, the white college boys who rape strippers, the white men who have strippers at their bachelors parties. The media is always spinning things in the direction that means more power and privilege for the white west elite.
Sean Bell was murdered because we live in a society where the young black male is perceived as always inherently dangerous and criminal. When his murderers saw him, they didn't see anything human. Like the black men in the Seal Press illustrations, Sean Bell was seen as and portrayed as dangerous, criminal, and cannibalistic. His murderers were acquitted last week. Is it synchronicity that these events happened within weeks of each other, that Seal Press reinforced white supremacy and Sean Bell's family received no justice? No, it's society. There's nothing cosmic about it. It's not coincidental. It's conscious and deliberate.
Seal Press must be boycotted until they recall these books containing these images. Images like these perpetuate ideas and prejudices that lead to murders of innocent black men with families. These phenomenon are connected and anyone who knowingly spreads hate images like these has blood on their hands. These images weren't deconstructed within the text. They were used to illustrate the whiteness of the author and most feminists.
A few months ago in a history class called "American Photography/ American History," we analyzed images from the Without Sanctuary archives of lynching photographs from the turn of the century. These photographs were mass-distributed, mass consumed tools of hatred that white people spread in the form of post-cards. These images were used to create an atmosphere of fear and panic in order to keep black people "in their place." These were tools of real, actual terrorism. To think that not even one hundred years ago these images could be so casually circulated through the seemingly innocent form of postcards. Many of these images were confiscated from white family albums! The white kids in the class expressed relief that we, as a society, have come such a long way from those terrible times. The white kids, having never experienced racism in any tangible way, were sure that this was a horror safely in the distant past.
I said that was bullshit. I said we still love to consume our hate images. We watch shows like cops where white police are always busting and violently assaulting people of color. Police brutality is a huge problem. I brought up Amadou Diallo as an example. The kids were like, "Ama-who?" The reason these kids, like most middle class white people, believe these things are in the past is because they, by merit of their white privilege, live completely disconnected from what's really happening in the world. If you bring it up and if, god forbid, you're angry- you get called a racist. You get called a troublemaker. We are only allowed to be angry when white people aren't included. We aren't angry when people of color are murdered by the state. We aren't angry when our friends make racist jokes and if one of our friends gets angry, we tell them they are too sensitive.
The Seal Press images exist as a small part in a continuum of image wars. Images can be and often are used as tools of violence. In our image immersed society, images reinforce conditioned responses. The only way this doesn't matter to you is if you are protected from the ramifications of this violence by merit of your white privilege.
Sean Bell was murdered.
"His life is so incomplete
and nothing
and no one
can replace it." - Lauryn Hill
Why aren't we angry?
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