Private Pain Silent Struggle

Tieshka here.

I wanted to take a moment to address the issue of context from my perspective of interacting with real people whose lived experience motivates me to use photography to explore the tough questions of race and class in Germantown.

I understand that my perspective is not very popular or does not sit comfortably with certain individuals, but I’m not here to convince anyone in these camps.  I’m here to amplify the voices of those whose lived experiences reside outside of the realities of people who tend to be either very critical or very clueless about these realities, and to situate the experiences of my subjects/collaborators in a way that encourages conversation.  I’m not here because I have the answers (be afraid of anyone who claims to have the answers).  I’m an artist, and my job is to hold up a mirror to society and to say, here, take a look at this.  What’s really going on here?  

I have been photographing people in Germantown for over four years, now, and there are two things that have troubled me over the course of my time here. One is the idea that the views and priorites of the minority are those that are held by everyone.   Let’s not get it twisted. Black people are the majority.  They comprise over 80% of the population in Germantown.  Despite this, only a select few of this 80% have voices that are taken seriously in the spaces where decisions are getting made about the future of our community.  I recognize that mines is one of these voices, and I take that responsibility seriously and try to use it to point the mainstream gaze back to the lived experiences of people who are not in the line of their gaze.  It’s easy to see and not see, but I see that as a big part of the problem in this community.

The other thing thing that troubles me is this:  Roughly one out of three Black people in Germantown are living below the poverty line.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what this looks like.  Look at my friend Howard in the accompanying photos.  He is a prime example of what poverty looks like in this community.  He has shown me in no uncertain terms that when you are mired in deep poverty, your main concern is surviving and it becomes a matter of life or death.  What that leads to is not just the the usual litany of outcomes:  Crime, violence, lack of education, etc.  Poverty forces you to focus your priorities on meeting your most basic needs:  Think Maslow’s hiearchy of needs and those that reside at the base of that pyramid - getting food and shelter.  And when you run into barriers, obstacles, it can literally make you sick from the inside out.  It means that you don’t have the luxury of time to consider what happens to this or that park, or this or that garden, or this or that historic building.   And if you don’t have the time to do that, imagine what else gets neglected? Take a good long look at Howard and you’ll find some of the answers to my question.  

Okay, you ask, what does this have to do with this project, Tieshka?  Good question.  

First, let’s shift our gaze from the racism that we know:  Those bad people doing bad things to people of color (think burning crosses, shooting up people in churches, burning down churches, lynching, etc.)  Yes, it’s easy to point the finger at them for whatever reason, but what is equally, if not more devastating is this:  Racism has morphed into the systemic neglect and disregard for certain groups of people on the basis of skin color, and then couching that neglect and disregard as the right to choose to do so because it’s justified.   It’s the attitude of, well, Black people are criminals, or loud, or angry or dressed funny or drunk and choose to be that way, so I will just ignore them.   I will oppose Obamacare because they don’t pay taxes at all, so they don’t deserve it. I will not get involved in the conversations about public education because, well, my children attend private school and if those “ghetto” kids really valued education, they would go to school, not drop out, not this, not that (and completely ignoring the fact that public education is a joke mainly because the system is broken - which, by the way, is not the fault of students, it’s the fault of adults who are supposed to be stewards of the system).  It’s ignoring my assessment of a situation and then accepting and embracing the same assessment of the same situation because it comes from a white person.  It’s the act of prejudging and then deciding to do absolutely nothing, instead of deciding to channel the discomfort and fear in more violent ways.  Because as we all know, violence is so passe and so 20th century.

Yeah, right.

I signed on to this project because I saw a powerful opportunity to address the “dis-ease” of people of color in this community, right now, whose lived experience is been defined by marginalization.   I argue from the perspective of seeing firsthand in my work that the “dis-ease” experienced by people of color can be definitely linked to the “dis-ease” of 21st century racism (think microaggressions, not KKK type behavior) enacted by whites (and some blacks).  It’s complicated, for sure, but I think it’s something worth having a conversation about and seeing how lived experience not only lines up with the existing research, but offers the chance for us to open the doors, together, to new areas of thinking, exploration and practice.  

Additional thoughts about my friend Howard 

(photographed by Tieshka Smith, June 30, 2015)

I wrote about Howard on the Facebook page the other day, but I wanted to repost my latest picture of him here to show in no uncertain terms what happens when we make a conscious decision to transcend racial fear and loathing.  

One man’s influence on Howard was so profound that he decided to shave, clean himself up, put the alcohol down, and look to religion for healing, structure and purpose in his life. Sometimes religion can be a negative influence, and surely it was used as a way to subjugate people of color, but in other instances, it can be a healing and grounding influence.  

Racism is an illness,  but can we conjure up the collective will to heal ourselves?  

Will time run out before that happens?

Never heard of a black person shooting up a elementary school

Never heard of a black person shooting up a temple

Never heard of a black person shooting up a navy yard

Never heard of a black person shooting up a mall