Without Sanctuary

2006-02-20T17:51:00.000-08:00

Studying these photos has engendered in me a deep mistrust of the human psyche and its capability to assign malicious and undue superiority. Every satisfied white face photographed in Without Sanctuary is an example of the self-designated dominance exhibited by whites, and every crooked head and pair of swinging feet represents the hopelessness of a race pitted against them. Each victim, every hanged Bennie Simmons or burnt John Richards, is a testament to the disease of superiority-driven violence that has plagued generation after generation of Americans for hundreds of years. When victims were strung up on trees, beaten, or burned alive, they paid not only for the "crimes" which had been assigned to them, but for existing, for being the object of a cruel and violent generation's desire to control.

There is a distinct difference between seeing images and reading literary representations of lynching. By all measures, we should be able to visualize the cruelty of such acts when reading texts by gifted authors such as Toni Morrison and Richard Wright. But the effects of seeing a circle of white men surrounding a black man's torso as it blisters from the heat of a lynch fire are undeniably powerful. The pictures give the lynching a visual tangibility that cannot be expressed through words. Words, however, provide a physical and emotional backdrop for such brutality. Langston Hughes' emotionally detached description of a lynching in Silhouette and the panic-filled inner narrative of a fearful Bigger Thomas are alternating examples of literature's ability to piece together physical acts of violence and the emotional reactions of those faced with it.

It is only when we take into consideration all aspects of violence, whether it be fictional in text or photographed in history, that we may be able to properly examine its lasting effects in today's society. Superiority between races still exists in the 21st century, as do atrocious acts of violence. There is no clearer exhibition of the link between the two than in these photographs and works of literature.

2006-02-19T11:03:00.000-08:00

Test y'all.

EMILY OUZTS

Without Sanctuary