Category: Represent Our Resistance

The media is still the “enemy of the people.” Today. No criticism of violent policies or violent regimes is acceptable! Beat journalists up or kill them. The killing of criticism directed at the powerful isn’t news in the world, particularly not news in the US.

Few are reading black feminist writers today. Most students in high school and college must content with faculty who play it safe by steering discussing focus on the superficial rather than substantive discussions of the role race, gender, sexual orientation, class, disability, for example, play in our lives. How is it that in the year 2018 we have witnessed the take over of the majority by the few? Who are those few? What groups make up the majority?

I’m not comfortable agreeing with others who think women have come a distance since 1991. We live in a world where the young “nephews” are men like Ted Cruz, Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Brett Kavanaugh. Men in power. Men who take issue with women demanding to be recognized as human beings. Men for whom us people of color and our children need to be in the bedroom, behind walls, or bars.

It’s in the American culture: this bowing of the unfree to the Master’s perspective. And you think it’s only sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue. That guy is not alone because he has his cabal of Wall Street cutthroats and white supremacist ideologues.

I wanted to shoot images that were not quite typical of the black photography I had seen up to then. To be the photographer and not the object of the image - that in itself would be different! To show that black women see too!

I’m used to Americans patting themselves on the back whenever the nation is fighting the “enemy,” and, having come through the “Cold War” era, I know America always has an “enemy” or two. And the “enemies” in turn, and there are too many to list here, are not to be congratulated as people fighting for their lives under a dictatorship or fighting their own civil war.

We can’t manage capitalism. Capitalism manages us. It’s profit-driven disregard of the evidence of climate change has humanity on the brink of toppling. No artist will be around to re-assemble the pieces. No griot of the canvas to help us see. We will be no longer.

It currently seems as if the George Wallace of his prime years as the Democratic Governor of Alabama has not only returned but has taken over the White House, appointing to advisory positions and offices and even the Supreme Court, any and all who will shout with him unabashedly, “Segregation now, segregation forever!” No longer is he or his supporters limited to standing at the front door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama.

Jackboots have been coming when institutions clamp down on democracy while emboldening religious fanaticism and white supremacy. Jackboots have been coming when Americans voice a belief in a flat Earth and Mexicans rapists. They’ve been coming when another black youth falls dead to police bullets.

We should be moving toward no borders. No walls. But America, now is a country where Trump supporters sit praying and waiting, banking on Trump to build walls and reinforce borders - and establish, in the process, totalitarianism as the norm.