Kenyans are quite proud of Obama. It's both comical and suspicious to see hats, shirts, and posters celebrating the son of Kenya who has become the leader of the free world. My personal opinion is that the election of our first African-American president represents precisely the opposite of the milestone it supposedly marks. Personally, I don't think Obama was elected in spite of his race, but rather, I think he was elected because of it. I don't see him as one who had loosed the surly bonds of racial discrimination, but I think that he was simply a well-qualified black man poised for office during a time when so many voters were so eager to assert their racial colorblindness. Race was not an obstacle, but an advantage. I remember a poster featuring photoshopped likenesses of a black McCain and a white Obama with a slogan reading "let the issues be the issue", obviously insinuating that race was a major factor in the election. I recall thinking to myself how ludicrous that was when in the weeks leading up to the election, race was almost never mentioned when compared to the innumerable discussions on education, healthcare, foreign policy, and the economy. And I am almost certain that if McCain and Obama really did switch races, we would have seen a very different result to the election. It was indeed a momentous occasion when we elected our first African-American president, and I don't intend to cheapen that. It truly is proof of how far we've come since the days when such terrible atrocities were done to black people in America, stretching from the middle of the 20th century all the way back to the colonial era before our country even existed. Race is an issue older than our nation, and indeed, older than any nation, so of course we have not reached an ultimate solution, but we can be proud of the strides we have made. Strides that have taken us to a moment in history when I am convinced ANY non-white candidate with similar qualifications would have been elected.
So it's quite interesting to be tasked with documenting an experience in an African culture on the morn of our first African-American president, and more interesting still to be in the country of his ancestry. But I can only relay this experience to you through the eye of a camera, and that is a filter in and of itself. The camera sees like cyclops Homer's Odyssey. It sees only a singular thing without depth. A photograph, whether printed or on screen, is a flat plane. The depth we see in a photograph is entirely up to our interpretation (I mean BOTH physical depth of field - distinguishing between what is close and what is far away, AND artistic depth - finding gravitas and emotional weight in what an image represents). The camera doesn't know how to interpret what it sees. I have to choose my subject, and I have to tell the camera what to focus on. Your responsibility in viewing an image is to judge it's artistic value and respond emotionally to whatever connotations might exist within the frame. So it is with race.
It's interesting to note that the camera does see a difference between black skin and white skin. It knows whether my subject is dark-skinned or pale. I am far more accustomed to having light-skinned subjects, and I have to adjust to working in a place where the overwhelming majority of people are quite dark-skinned. The camera's settings want to even out the lighting in an image, and so with darker-skinned people, it wants to set the exposure several stops lighter than it should, because the camera only knows that there are dark things in the frame. So I have to tell it to expose darker than it wants to. There's no denying that we are different. We live in a culture that is doing everything it can to prove just how colorblind it is. Americans will often go out of their way to express that they don't even notice a difference between themselves and those of other races. I've seen white 'bros' surround themselves with African-American friends, almost exclusively to project an image of being cross-cultural and accepting. And white people everywhere tried to do the same with their ballots, as if voting for a black man somehow makes them 'citizens of the world' who don't recognize race as a distinguishing factor. Yet even an impersonal piece of machinery like my camera can tell the difference between light and dark skin. That does not mean that we aren't all in the image of God. In fact, I think that embracing our differences is actually a form of praise. In doing so, we recognize what a diverse and immense God we serve, and we open ourselves to His desire to broaden our own perspectives.
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