Every year, Saint Xavier University’s Philosophy and Religious Studies Department sponsors the John Ziegler Memorial Lecture Series, and for this year’s lecture, SXU intvited Northwestern University’s Dr. José Medina.
Medina is a professor of Philosophy at Northwestern, whose main focuses are on critical race theory, gender/queer theory, and political philosophy.
At his discussion at Saint Xavier, Medina focused on employing his work in critical race theory to discuss racial violence against African-American and Black men through the use of lynch photography.
Lynch photography, Medina explained, are photos that showed Black lynching victims. These photos were then used in family photos, party pictures, and postcards.
Medina used three examples of lynching photography to show how responsibility for racial violence applies to not only the perpetrators themselves who carry out the violence, but also to the communities as people pose with the victims. The responsibility lies with the community as the violence is normalized.
Medina explained that racial violence is multifaceted, and is grounded in complicity. This complicity is seen in active ignorance, apathy, and even in bystanders.
According to Medina, lynching photography stems from the racist imagination that continues to permeate American culture.
“These images are spectacles, and we must be careful when viewing them, even for critical purposes,” Medina said. “These are spectacles that even if you wish to destroy it, they are still circulating.”
“What I want to suggest,” Medina continued, “is that the core of the analysis and the claims that I am making, is that the very practice of taking pictures, posing with the victim of lynching, the very practise of sharing those pictures, that is a way of participating in racial violence. Even if you didn’t kill anybody, even if you didn’t say anything, it was a way of participating and contributing to the perpetuation of this pattern.”
“I want to say that that picture taken is a form of violence,” Medina added. “The camera becomes a weapon of sublimated murder. Notice how we talk about cameras, and about taking pictures: capturing the subject; shooting at the subject.”
Although there is a desire to get rid of the photos that show lynchings, and many have in fact been destroyed, Medina believes that by using lynching photographs properly, communities can resist the racial violence and even racism itself.
“Ida B. Wells was one of the first people within the anti-lynching movement who said that all we were doing was destroying these images. We are trying to acquire as many images as possible to destroy them.”
“But,” Medina continued, “Ida said, “I do not want to destroy these spectacles, because they are still there. I want to control it. I want to keep the images for historical purposes.” And, moreover, she said, “I want to share the images.”’
The lynching photographs were not meant for the Black Americans; they were meant for White Americans. But, Medina said that Wells used the images to confront White audiences by showing the images. More specifically, Wells wanted to show what she saw in the images.
Medina calls Wells’ actions epistemic resistance, or using a way of inhabiting a space, or in this case, a visual space, as a way of resisting the imagination that was being shaped.
This epistemic resistance is still employed by the NAACP today with their flag that reads “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday;” there have been artists who have taken the lynching photographs and edited them, taking the victim out of the photo and only showing spectators. Each of these different forms of action, Medina says, is a way of resisting the racist imagination.
In closing, Dr. Medina said, “Racist imagination is still alive and we must continue using photography to express and fight it.”
For more information on Dr. Medina and a list of his published works, visit: http://www.philosophy.northwestern.edu/people/continuing-faculty/medina-jos%C3%A9.html
Cheyanne Daniels
News Editor