A Bad Month. A Bad Year. A Bad History.
For most of the United States and much of the world, the last three weeks have created an opening into its soul. For Black America, the last three weeks have only been a spike in a continuum.
I am a child of the Civil Rights Movement. My dad took part in the March on Washington. I grew up in a neighborhood that was mixed when we moved in but all-black when I grew up and left. I remember Martin, Medgar, Malcolm, Huey, Angela, Ali; all the different ways they fought for the same end; and the prices each paid for that fight. I remember Birmingham, Detroit, Watts, Chicago, Harlem, Newark. I remember Wallace, Conner, Goldwater, Nixon, Johnson, Chisolm, the Kennedys, Jackson, Bond, etc. I remember demonstrating for local Black construction opportunities on a barely-integrated Ivy League campus that two years earlier was the site of an armed standoff between black students and white police, in a very segregated Northern town that didn’t want me there. I remember marching bare-headed in Albany, NY during a snowstorm for equal educational opportunity in the City University of New York. Yet in those days of youth, I remained optimistic that despite centuries of institutionalized oppression, and all the trials and tribulations of the current day, my own children and grandchildren would not face the struggles that my own parents had to overcome, and which their generation’s efforts had largely spared me.
I was wrong.
Only 12 years after electing an African-American president, “Say it loud!” has been replaced by “I can’t breathe!” National leadership is displaying alternating waves of indifference, incompetence, cruelty, and self-indulgence. People of color are being challenged, harassed, menaced, and killed just for living their everyday lives, or for exercising their legal and constitutional rights. And yet…
This time, it’s different. This time, everybody has a camera. Even kids. This time, there cannot be claims of “self-defense”, “resisting arrest”, or “threats to life and safety” when everyone can see clear and incontrovertible visual proof to the contrary on the Internet. This time, “The whole world is watching!” is more than a rallying cry. It’s literal fact because the world doesn’t have to wait for the evening news thanks to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and whatever new social media platform pops up. Across the United States and around the world, people are forced to look at themselves in real time and ask, “Is this the world I want? Is this what I believe in?” I see an international self-examination going on beyond anything in my experience, because America and the world have had their blinders ripped off like the Phantom of the Opera. Almost 50 years ago, Gil Scott-Heron recorded “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”. He was wrong. Not only is it being televised, it’s being live-streamed.
The struggle is real, and it will continue for a long time. I do not ignore it. As an African-American man, husband, and father, I live that struggle every single day. I remain, however, an optimist; and that is what will keep guiding my art and keep me level. There are many, many photographers who have dedicated their lives capturing moments like this, and are way better at it that I will ever be. My personal goal as an artist has always been to express my love of beauty, to examine my personal place in the world, to show the world’s wonders both grand and small. I’m going to keep doing so. I hope I can bring respite through my images to those seeking calm, because I need that calm myself. I will keep seeking and sharing the beautiful in the world, because that’s how I know it still exists.
