Humane Insight Read online

  THE NEW BLACK STUDIES SERIES

  Edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Dwight A. McBride

  A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

  Humane Insight

  Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death

  COURTNEY R. BAKER

  UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

  Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

  An earlier version of chapter 3 was previously published as “Emmett Till, Justice, and the Task of Recognition,” Journal of American Culture 29, no. 2 (2006): 111–24.

  Reprinted by permission from Blackwell Publishing.

  © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  C 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baker, Courtney.

  Humane insight : looking at images of African American suffering and death / Courtney R. Baker.

  pages cm. — (The new Black studies series)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-252-03948-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-252-09759-1 (e-book)

  1. African Americans—Violence against—History—Pictorial works. 2. African Americans—Social conditions—Pictorial works. 3. Documentary photography—Social aspects—United States—History. 4. Photojournalism—Social aspects—United States—History. 5. Empathy—Social aspects—United States—History. 6. Racism—United States—History—20th century.

  I. Title.

  E185.61.B148 2015

  305.896'0730222—DC23 2015003808

  In Memory of Thomas Cary Saunders 1919–2008 and Dorothy Belle Ottley Saunders 1921–2013

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. Slavery's Suffering Brought to Light—New Orleans, 1834

  2. Framed and Shamed: Looking at the Lynched Body

  3. Emmett Till, Justice, and the Task of Recognition

  4. Civil Rights and Battered Bodies

  5. A Litany for New Orleans, 2005

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  In September 2001, I watched via television as a space that I had traversed and a place that I recognized became permanently disfigured. Since then, I have sought to understand what compelled me to watch those extraordinary images of people dying and, more, to appreciate what I learned from watching other human beings in despair and death. In terms of its sheer horror, 9/11 represented a scenario that has been repeated throughout time and throughout the world and one that will sadly but I fear inevitably be repeated in the future. No discussion of global capitalism, non-statist military syndicates, or mobilized rhetoric has enabled me to understand fully the extraordinary images of people of myriad races, ethnicities, and nationalities dying. I still struggle to understand the magnitude of 9/11 and of other events wherein humanity has been laid to waste. In the wake of that day, it was the image and the word—a specific image and particular words, actually—through which I came to recognize the struggle for comprehension to be itself a worthy object of study.

  A few months after the destruction of the World Trade Center, I revisited the first words of Michel de Certeau's essay “Walking in the City”: “Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center.”1 As it happened, I had seen the city from the point of view that Certeau described, but I now knew, as the text certainly did not or could not, that this point of view could never now be replicated. The tense of the verb seeing now signaled to me a remarkable lack of hubris. Did the destruction of the location invalidate the knowledge Certeau was imparting? To speak metaphorically, did the sermon die when the mount crumbled?

  On the contrary: Certeau's observations on visual knowledge and hubris became more poignant through the destruction of his former observation post. For indeed, in the book in which the essay appears, The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau questions the security, stability, and “voluptuous pleasure” of the God's-eye view of the modern city, asking, “To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong?”2 To aspire to such heights of knowledge at such a vast remove from the object of knowledge itself—the city—is truly to mimic Icarus and delight in “the fiction of knowledge…[as] a viewpoint and nothing more.”3 And so, Certeau predicts from his post on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center an uninvested view of humanity that would precipitate the inevitable “Icarian fall.”4

  The current project finds enormous wisdom in this hubristic resistance to such an uninvested view of humanity. The encounter with human beings and embeddedness in the world are what educates us in the humanity of ourselves and of others. Certainly, Mamie Till-Mobley understood this innately. As she looked upon the destruction wrought by white racists upon the now-dead, now-deformed body of her son Emmett in a Chicago mortuary in 1955, Till-Mobley recognized—and then mobilized—the entwined knowledge of her suffering and that of her son. Until I understood this, looking at Emmett Till's photo was something that I sought to avoid with precisely placed Post-it notes in my books. And yet the photographs were created so that I would have to look and to reckon with the way the image unsettled me. The visual encounter with the image of death and suffering, it appeared, brought on the crucial education about the self and of what it means to be human. It is an education founded upon hubris and vulnerability. The current study identifies in the visual encounter a collapsing, a falling of the self into the reality of the other. It is a reality that is only made legible through the discourse of humanity. I could not have achieved this education alone. I thank Certeau and Till-Mobley for starting it.

  There are many more to thank for helping me narrate the intellectual journey contained in these pages. This book would never have encountered its readers without the perseverance of my editor at the University of Illinois Press, Dawn Durante, and the faith of acquisitions editor Larin MacLaughlin and the New Black Studies series editors Darlene Clark Hine and Dwight A. McBride. My anonymous readers were diligent, providing me with wonderful insights and the best gift for which a scholar could wish: to be taken seriously.

  I am grateful daily for the opportunity for graduate study in the Literature program at Duke University. Learning amid friends and fellow students turned colleagues—among them Erica Edwards, Rebecca Wanzo—and the faculty turned colleagues and friends—Ian Baucom, Grant Farred, Jane Gaines, Avery Gordon, Wahneema Lubiano, Negar Mottahedeh, Richard Powell, Jan Radway, Maurice Wallace, Susan Willis—seems truly Edenic to me now. The connections from that place and time have served me well, leading my writing into the able editorial hands of Erika Stevens who often steered me straight as I edited this manuscript. Duke also introduced me to the generous and dear friend, colleague, mentor, and super-scholar-hero Leigh Raiford who has come to my aid and inspired me too many times to mention.

  Simon Hay helped me cross the bridge from graduate student life to tenure-track faculty life by being present in both places. I simply cannot imagine my first years at Connecticut College without the love of him and Cybèle Locke and their amazing sons, Gabriel and Fred. I am grateful for the support I received for this work from Connecticut College in the form of funding (from the R. F. Johnson Faculty Development Fund, the Hodgkins Untenured Faculty Development Fund, and the Research Matters award) and in the shape of colleagues like Blanche Boyd, Jim Downs, Leo Garofola, David Kim, Nina Martin, Julie Rivkin, Mab Segrest, Chris Steiner, and Lina Wilder. The college's Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity continues to provide the ballast for my scholarship. Film Studies and my home department of English have provided me with the space to explore topics of interest and to indulge my expertise. My former students Kolton Harris and Will Shadbolt conducted excellent research for parts of this book, and I am thankful for their careful work.

  I and this project have happily found intellectual sustenance beyond the boundaries of my home institution. The New Orleans Historical Society helped me answer questions I did not think possible to resolve. My year in the English Department at Denison University, supported by the Consortium for a Strong Minority Presence at Liberal Arts Colleges, allowed me to make great strides and to explore my project in a classroom with wonderful, eager students. I am especially grateful to Linda Krumholz for nurturing me during my time there. I thank, too, the Yale colleagues—Jacqueline Goldsby, John Mackay, Caleb Smith, and Laura Wexler—who have kindly opened their minds, homes, and hearts to me. Koritha Mitchell continues to inspire me with her intellect and her long-distance running skills. Michael Gillespie fulfills my desperate need to discuss black film. Michael Belleisles is a fearless and righteous scholar who pulled from nowhere the time to help me get my history right. Daphne Brooks, fearless in her own way, has helped me more than she knows. Those who I know only through their work (and on Facebook) bear acknowledging here as well for their great contributions to academia and to my own scholarship: Maurice Berger, Farah Jasmine Griffith, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling, Elaine Scarry, and Shawn Michelle Smith.

  Friends and family have sustained me through this (sometimes hair-pulling) process. Lucky for me, some of these important folks are also colleagues and are identified above. I would be nowhere (or maybe someplace crying) without the affection and fine-feeling of Jennifer Mellon and Elise Dunphe. Jarita Davis thoughtfully invited me to speak in her lovely corner of the Northeast. Lucr
etia Baskin has listened to me grumble during the hard parts of my trek into academia and consistently offered sound advice and a willing ear. Andrew Benner, with his genius and kindness and care, has made the last part of this book process and everything else in my life immeasurably better.

  I lost two very important members of my family in the process of writing the book. My grandparents, Thomas Saunders and Dorothy Ottley Saunders, were intoxicatingly beautiful blends of kindness, strength, and the purest love. I miss them both, tremendously. The journey was improved, however, by the addition of my nephew Noah Baker and the willingness of his parents, Gregory Baker and Jenelle DeCoteau, to share his joyfulness with me. My parents, Howard Baker and Carolyn Saunders Baker, have put such faith in me and celebrated me that “thank you” seems not quite to cover it.

  It seems to me that a book about suffering and death would be lacking if it did not contain an acknowledgment of the reality of suffering and death. To all who are in this book, to all who are connected to someone or to some event in this book, to those who have survived and those who have fallen: May your suffering not be in vain. May it lead us toward knowledge for better lives to come.

  Introduction

  Those of us who have witnessed in person or at a distance even a few of the cruel scenarios of famine, disaster, and bloodshed have likely questioned what we are to “do” with what we have seen. Most of us have at some time questioned our permission to look at another person's pain. Some of us have looked and then dedicated ourselves to ensuring that such scenes will not appear again. Others have rushed into the very scenes that initially shocked us and worked hand in hand with the people whose suffering moved us. Still others of us have looked away, too horrified by the pain and suffering on display to bear in our minds these awful images. And of course there are those who endured the suffering themselves, who testified to their personal knowledge of its horror and threat to their very existence. And there are those, too, who could not testify at all, but whose bodies are nevertheless called upon to tell the tale of their demise and to move those who did survive toward justice.

  We who look from a safe distance at the pain and death of others have been challenged by the motivations and exploitations that are involved in this peculiar visual dynamic. There are troubling consequences set up by this looking scenario in which a spectator seems to hold power over an exposed victim. Scholars in fields of visual analysis—art, photography, film—have identified these power games of the ocular kind as invoking imperialist and imperious attitudes. The term gaze has come to name the dangerous look that targets and immobilizes its human objects in webs of racism, sexism, and other debilitating beliefs. But not all looks are gazes. Looking is a more variegated practice and even bears the potential for positive change. Our discussions of the look as opposed to the gaze have been stymied by the look's flexibility—an inconsistency that has been and can continue to be a principle for more ethical human interactions.

  The act of looking at the pain of another has by turns been accused of violence and aligned with bravery. One of the most significant questioners of the ethics of beholding atrocity has been Susan Sontag who, in two volumes—the landmark On Photography (1977) and her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)—elaborates on her discomfort with the recurrent spectacle of pain and suffering made possible by the photographic medium. In the latter work, Sontag speculates that “[p]erhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it…or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”1 This seems to be a shockingly restrictive gesture in its evocation of exclusive rights and its alignment of “the rest of us” with the denigrated class of voyeurs. In day-to-day experience, by contrast, looking is far more promiscuous than depicted here, and looking at suffering does not result in being measured by its returns, however valuable and idealized the function of alleviating of pain might be. Yet learning from looking, despite the rather short shrift it is given in Sontag's passage, has and continues to be a compelling project for the eradication of injustice worldwide. As Sharon Sliwinski has offered in a useful counter to Sontag's estimation, “[t]he history of human rights—and the history of their abuse—is a richly illustrated one” attended by spectators in whose minds “the ideal of a shared humanity literally comes into view.”2 Although one can, as Sontag maintains, look at suffering and see nothing of note, a more favorable response and certainly one worth noting is one in which the look moves and instructs the viewer on humanity's greatest lesson—the value of human life.

  To the extent that vision is a key sense through which human beings come to understand and appreciate the existence of other human subjects, we can reasonably and responsibly discuss how multiple media forms attempt to approximate this primary and immediate encounter between looking subjects and visible bodies. Certainly, the intervention of specific techniques (such as painting) and technologies (such as photography) into what I am characterizing as a sort of primal scene of intersubjective encounter recommends acknowledgment of the specific contours of mediated visual encounter. Nonetheless, to the extent that this project is concerned with the core scenario in which a subject's vision inspires awareness of another's subjectivity, the current book insists upon a transmedia discussion of the look that underwrites all mediated encounters. What proceeds from this investment and follows in these pages is therefore a preference for a phenomenological rather than a materialist assessment of the look. In other words, lest it be mistaken, this study's interrogations of visual encounters with the Other through drawings and films, as well as in the flesh, should not be read as avoiding the nuances of these myriad mediations, but instead as a much-needed return to the fundamental sensation—sight—and the core belief—that the self is not the only conscious subject—upon which all visual innovations are based.

  The worries expressed by Sontag and her followers about the effects of beholding visualizations of violence and destruction are premised, after all, not on the particular medium, but on the human capacity of visual apprehension. Furthermore, we need not, I insist, assume that “[t]o photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.”3 This claim of Sontag's from her earlier work on photography rather overstates the case, locating in a particular medium rather than in the act of intersubjective looking itself a potentially violent discursive gesture. Indeed, is not the risk of an ossifying imperialist look—the gaze, in other words—precisely what haunts psychoanalyst and race theorist Frantz Fanon in the echoing phrase “Look, a Negro!”—a declaration uttered in his presence, not with respect to a photograph? This key phrase that underscores vision's vexed contributions to Fanon's interest in the “Fact of Blackness” is sharpened to its most harmful point when the young white French girl embellishes this observation and cries in Fanon's presence, “Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!”4 It is by restoring the problem of visualizing the Other to the human body and its sense of sight that we might fulfill Fanon's poignant prayer—“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”5

  Moments in which this questioning is foreclosed and interest in the livelihood and dignity of the Other is absent are important ideological moments to which we must attend. African Americanist historian Saidiya Hartman addresses these resistant looks in her examination of the spectacle of enslaved blacks and the white audiences that looked upon them. The enslaved black body was made to dehumanize itself not only through the denial of pain but also through performances of pleasure. Expressions of pain were either ignored or dismissed as deceptive simulacra by those who held the power to transform those conditions. If the slave is not human, the logic runs, he cannot experience pain as a human, thereby eliminating the need or responsibility of onlookers to recognize those bodies as like their own. Underwriting the resistance to the perception of the black slave's humanity is the fact that “pain provides the common language of humanity; it extends humanity to the dispossessed and, in turn, remedies the indifference of the callous.”6 Pain, then, can enable the materialization of an immaterial humanity that lies beyond linguistic representation. Viewed in this way, pain becomes the currency of black liberation from injustice and state-sanctioned violence. One sees here the logic that motivated the writing of several sentimental slave narratives: if only my pain is recognized by my oppressors, then I will be free.