Dr. Lenore Daniels, PhD

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.

The more I studied the situation,” Ida B. writes, “the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income.”

The corporate bosses as well as the corporate advertisers are kept happy. Keep the American public sedated with the image of the “bad guy” within. It’s all so personal - Bourdain’s “demons,” his “dark side.” This justification of why he committed suicide plays well with commentators (and their corporate bosses) and guest appearance of experts on mental health (often linked with Big Pharma)