Carrie Mae Weems
The Louvre, 2006
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
THE VISION AND JUSTICE PROJECT
SARAH E. LEWIS
What is it like to teach history when whiteness is not centered in the classroom?
This question about race and space was not what I imagined would be on my mind later that morning as I walked across Harvard’s central campus to teach the first day of my class “Vision and Justice: The Art of Citizenship.” At that time, I was just wondering how many students might show up. The class was assigned to a large auditorium, one that holds nearly three hundred. The year before, I had guest edited the “Vision and Justice” issue of Aperture, the journal of photography. It took conceptual inspiration from Frederick Douglass’s Civil War speech “Pictures and Progress,” about the power of pictures to create a new vision for the nation. This course considers how images have enlarged our definition of American citizenship and belonging. The classroom was full. I adjusted the microphone to start the lecture and then stopped. I was stunned by what I saw—the sea of Harvard students seemed to have no racial majority. It looked to be nearly equal parts Black, White, Latinx, and Asian. It felt as if the future had rushed into the room.
Carrie Mae Weems
The Louvre, 2006
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
My mind reeled back to my grandfather in the eleventh grade in a New York City public high school in 1926. He had asked where African Americans, Latinx, Native Americans, and Asian Americans were in the history books. He wanted to know why there was no space to document their achievements. The teacher had told him that African Americans in particular had done nothing to merit inclusion. He was expelled for refusing to accept that answer, for his so-called impertinence. His pride was so wounded that he never went back to high school. Instead, he went on to become a jazz musician and a painter, inserting images of African Americans where he thought they should—and knew they did—exist.
Two generations later, I stood in a classroom not only teaching the very topics that my grandfather was expelled for asking about that day, but faced with a classroom of students like him who wanted to see themselves in this national story, to have it told more fully.
That’s when I jotted down the note before I started the lecture: What does it mean to teach history if Whiteness is not centralized in the classroom? The concept of space itself has been historically defined by the idea of Whiteness in the United States. The Naturalization Act of 1790 defined American citizens as those who were White, male, and able to hold property. Being a professor focused on the intersection of culture and justice means that I can update my syllabus on how culture has challenged the residue of this relationship between space, rights, and race nearly every week. We see it now with the legacy of racial profiling and instances of “White caller crime” where the police are called in about a Black person having lunch, napping, selling lemonade—taking up space where they are not seen by someone to belong. Is the journey from 1790 to the current day simply a legal narrative, or is it also a cultural one?
The endeavor to affirm the dignity of human life cannot be waged without pictures, without representational justice. This my grandfather knew. Photography and pictures are of vital importance for documenting injustices of all kinds. The opposite is also true. Securing civil rights has required pictures, required the catalytic work that only culture can perform. One of the main roles of culture—images, performance, music—in civic society is not just to illustrate what we know, but to do the most difficult thing of all: to teach us what we don’t know that we don’t know. In this way, images have a catalytic function in society. They create the narratives that serve to legitimate exclusionary practices and challenge us to imagine more liberatory ones.
Carrie Mae Weems
The British Museum, 2006
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
I was teaching that first iteration of the Vision and Justice course at Harvard in the midst of the 2016 American presidential election. The relationship between images, race, and rights had become urgent, so I started teaching civic versions at public libraries around the United States in my nonexistent free time. The pilot program began at the Brooklyn Public Library. Citizens applied to have a three-part course on Friday nights in Brooklyn. I traveled to speak about this material from Brooklyn to Jackson, Mississippi, to Kansas City, Missouri.
As I traveled, I began to consider the need to create an institute that focuses on the power of culture in expanding our notion of who counts. I want students beyond those at Harvard to be able to learn about this material. There are resources that a historian focused on art and visual culture can bring to bear not just for the present moment, but for future generations. Teaching is a way of speaking faith over the future. The Vision and Justice institute is an extension of this belief.
What does it mean to construct a Vision and Justice institute? On one level, I could explain it by stating the mission—to develop a national understanding of the crucial function of visual literacy for justice in American and, in particular, African American civic life. But what that requires is less a declaration than a process of asking the question: Whose narrative has historically been centered in space and why? And by space, I mean who is allowed to “take up space.” When do we have the audacity to state that the narratives that represent your life, that of your ancestors, deserve and should be considered valuable enough to spread out a bit more, to take up a few more rows of stacks in the library, seats in the auditorium, spots on the rosters of speakers? When do we see the ways that images have been used strategically throughout history to normalize, to denigrate, to honor, to frame who has been allowed to take up space on this soil?
We construct just space when we consider aesthetics and vision. In much the same way that the Black aesthetics of the Black power movement were about a kind of world-making, as Margo Crawford reminds us, the converse is also true—any consideration of Black space, of a political world-making, requires considering how we live in the narratives set up through images.
Frederick Douglass in his “Pictures and Progress” Civil War speech said that it might take more than one hundred and fifty years for us to understand what he meant about the importance of pictures for justice. I believe that a scholar and photographer like Dr. Deborah Willis is who he had in mind, whose work is an ethos, a perspective on life that is worth adopting as a model: that we are all worthy of beauty, and that beauty is a kind of representational justice. I believe that a photographer and oracle like Carrie Mae Weems is who he hoped would come.
How many people know about the work that image-makers did to create an affirmative place for the narratives about Black life? How many people know that the hierarchy of races depended upon caricatures? Or that the inhumane practice of Japanese internment was so unjust that photographs of the process by Dorothea Lange were impounded by the government for decades? What images of Latinx identity were required to secure the border between the United States and Mexico and how are we challenging those images today? We live in a media saturated world, yet these stories are still not told.
The Vision and Justice initiative is inspired by my grandfather Shadrach Emmanuel Lee for daring to ask the question we still need to answer.
It is dedicated to the image-makers who have dared to take up space to make a place for us all.
It is devoted to students of all kinds, who represent the future that has rushed in as the present and will not wait.
LEWIS