(IN)VISIBLE PORTRAITS: REWRITING OUR CULTURAL CODE

Jun 26

Jun 26 (IN)VISIBLE PORTRAITS: REWRITING OUR CULTURAL CODE

OP-ED BY Ruha Benjamin

What a gift to be alive at a time when the lights are turned all the way on! What do we see? Health policies making people sick. Educational policies breeding ignorance. Labor policies producing disposable people. Housing policies manufacturing scarcity. Environmental policies ensuring our extinction. Not by accident. By design.

The lights are on and many people are also reckoning with the fact that the default settings of modern society are antiblack. (In)Visible Portraits by Oge Egbuonu is more than a film. It is part of a larger movement to rewrite our cultural code, starting with the default settings that distort how so many people see Black women. My good friend, emerging media researcher and artist Kamal Sinclair, put it like this:

“Story and narrative are the code for humanity’s operating system. We have used stories to communicate knowledge, prescribe behavior, and imagine our futures since our earliest days. Story and narrative inform how we design everything from technology to social systems. They shape the norms in which we perform our identities, even perhaps the mutations of our DNA and perceptions of reality. Stories are the first step in the process of how we imagine our reality; they literally make our reality.”

But too often the stories that dominate are those that purport to rise above genre becoming the story of reality because it presents itself as universal, neutral, and objective, thereby trumping all other accounts. Even when it comes to photography and film, it turns out antiblackness is built into the design.

As the work of my colleague Lorna Roth demonstrates, whiteness was built into photography in the form of Shirley Cards produced by Kodak from the 1950 to 1990s. The cards were an integral part of film exposure methods, using the image of a white woman to standardize the exposure process. Since the model’s skin was set as the norm, darker skinned people in photographs would be routinely underexposed. According to Roth, skin tone biases were embedded in the “actual apparatuses of visual reproduction.” As one photographer recently put it, “It turns out, film stock’s failures to capture dark skin aren’t a technical issue, they’re a choice.” Which also implies we can choose otherwise.

Shirley Card, 1978.Credit...Courtesy of Hermann Zschiegner

One of the major shifts that propelled changes in the industry was when U.S. public schools began desegregating and students of different skin tones were photographed for yearbooks in the same frame. The technical fixes that could be employed when a Black child was photographed alone were no longer fit for this new context. Black parents objected to the fact that their children’s facial features were rendered blurry, demanded higher-quality images. But the photographic industry did not fully take notice until companies that manufactured brown products like chocolate and wooden furniture began complaining that photographs did not depict their goods with enough subtlety, showcasing the varieties of chocolate and of grains in wood. But surely, you must be asking, this is no longer an issue?

In 2009, Hewlett Packard’s webcam demonstrated how the camera would pan to follow a white face but would stop when individuals with dark skin entered the frame. And as my colleagues Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru have demonstrated, not only do most facial recognition systems fail to detect people with darker skin tones, but they routinely mis-gender Black women. So what are we to make of such enduring invisibility? If we are surprised that new tools encode old biases it is because we are taught to equate technological innovation with social progress. The popular trope that technology is always one step ahead of society is not only misleading but incorrect, especially when understood from the perspective of Black women whose images are routinely distorted by design.

When I first started teaching at Princeton in 2014, a smart phone app, Yik Yak, was still popular among my students. It was founded in 2013 and allowed users to post anonymously while voting “up” and voting “down” others’ posts, and was designed to be used by people within a five-mile radius. It was especially popular on college campuses and, like other social media sites, the app reinforced and exposed racism and antiblack hatred among young people.

As in Internet comments sections more broadly, people often say on Yik Yak what they would not say in person, and so all pretense of racial progress is washed away by spending just five minutes perusing the posts. But the difference from other virtual encounters is that users know that the racist views on Yik Yak are held by people in close proximity – those you pass in the dorm, make small talk with in the dining hall, work with on a class project. I logged on to see what my students were dealing with, but quickly found the toxicity to consist overwhelmingly of… racist intellectualism, false equivalences, elite entitlement, and just plain old ignorance in peak form. White supremacy upvoted by a new generation… truly demoralizing for a teacher. So, I had to log off.

Racism, I often say, is a form of theft. Yes, it has justified the theft of land, labor, and life throughout the centuries. But racism also robs us of our relationships, stealing our capacity to trust one another, ripping away the social fabric, every anonymous post pilfering our ability to build community. I knew that such direct exposure to this kind of unadulterated racism among people whom I encounter every day would quickly steal my enthusiasm for teaching. The fact is, I do not need to be constantly exposed to it to understand that we have a serious problem. My experience with Yik Yak reminded me that we are not going to simply “age out of” white supremacy, because the bigoted baton has been passed and a new generation is even more adept at rationalizing racism.

Yik Yak eventually went out of business in 2017, but NextGen Racism is still very much in business… more racially coded than we typically find in anonymous posts. Coded speech, as we have seen, reflects particular power dynamics that allow some people to impose their values and interests upon others. As one of my white male students wrote – in solidarity with the Black Justice League, a student group that was receiving hateful backlash on social media after campus protests:

To change Yik Yak, we will have to change the people using it. To change those people, we will have to change the culture in which they – and we – live. To change that culture, we’ll have to work tirelessly and relentlessly towards a radical rethinking of the way we live – and that rethinking will eventually need to involve all of us.

I see this as a call to rewrite dominant cultural codes rather than simply to code-switch. It is a call to embed new values and new social relations into the world. Whereas code-switching is about fitting in and “leaning in” to play a game created by others, what we need more of is to stretch out the arenas in which we live and work to become more inclusive and just.

(In)Visible Portraits is not only a gift to Black women, as Oge envisioned it, but a gift to everyone who wants to rewrite our deadly cultural codes – a system that would allow police officers to storm into Breonna Taylor’s apartment in the middle of the night and shoot her dead or to kneel on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes until he suffocated. The lights are all the way on and this film helps us look squarely at the deadly default settings that we have inherited. The incredible portraits in this film inspire all of us to contribute to a new narrative and a new possibility for a nation that has relied for too long on the distortion and vilification of Black women. That day is done.