Category: visual organizing

Antifascist visual tactics

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date May 20, 2020

Fascism thrives on chaos, inserting itself into emerging fissures and faults. Not unlike a virus. There are plenty of people doing fascism right now in visual media. And during the pandemic, the social is media. What are the antifascist tactics to disrupt the online fascist wave? No reposting. Whiting out white supremacy. Undermining its claims. And imagining the future.

There’s no way to engage with fascism that has no risk. These are tactics. If they don’t work, then let’s drop them and find better ones. If they do, make them more effective. I’m just not happy seeing swastikas and racist imagery all over my social media.

Fascism is using public space to display its double accusation that stay-at-home policies are Nazism, whose implementation is communism. These small-scale actions have made for a chaos of meaning that has enabled the mass online circulation of everything from Confederate flags to armed takeovers of legislatures and Nazi imagery.

Don’t repost to show how horrified you are.

At a typical “protest” at Commack NY (in Suffolk County with over 40,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 1700 deaths), a small group of reopeners insulted and harassed a local TV news reporter Kevin Vessey. He posted a video to Twitter. Trump then reposted it–twice–with each post getting over 100,000 retweets. If you don’t think that matters, ask Hillary Clinton how she’s enjoyed the last four years.

Beyond the tactical, these images do harm by themselves. During the 2014-16 moment of Black Lives Matter, African American activists reached a point where they no longer wanted pictures of violence distributed. I’ve reached that point with the fascist protests in the US today. It’s just not necessary to see every swastika. It doesn’t help with analysis or resistance and it maintains the sense of chaos that the far-right want to engender.

2. White Out

I’m not advocating just ignoring the violent image. I want to disrupt the chaotic effect they’re intended to cause. Take that appalling image of a white woman standing outside a courthouse in Humboldt County CA, holding a sign that depicted an enslaved African wearing a metal muzzle across the mouth, and an iron collar with a spike. The text was just as bad: “Muzzles are for dogs and slaves. I am a free human being.”

I don’t want to post that picture unchanged. As a teacher, I’ve long realized that simply showing a racist image does immediate harm. Under the currently existing conditions of white supremacy, the image is downloaded and absorbed at once. To say nothing of the pain it causes. Setting an alternative context, teaching the history, making it look otherwise–that takes time and care.

My simple tactic is to “white out” that image. Whiting out white supremacy. It’s affiliated with other such tactics, like the practice of redaction advocated so beautifully by Christina Sharpe. I’m also thinking of the erasure of lynched African Americans from the photographs in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, as did Ken Gonzales-Day and Mary Coffey.

The last show I saw before everything shut down was the outstanding recent series of photographs by Nona Faustine entitled “My Country,” which feature a bar across American monuments. I am not equal to these distinguished sources, I am aware. This is simply a step to think through how a challenge to visual images claiming white supremacy might be made visually by a person identified as white

I also used all the photograph posted by Kym Kemp (May 16, 2020). You can see that the different protestors made different choices. To the left, a woman chose to use her own sign, not the printed ones handed out. To the right, the drama teacher who features in all the cropped images has folded up her sign and taken the home-made but printed sign. She now claims she was just holding it after somebody else gave it to her but falsely asserts: “I had no sign of my own.” Yes, you did, you just folded it up. It’s almost impossible to notice that when confronted with the violent image.

The point is to be able to create a context in which to see what’s happening and then, if others agree, introduce the context and show the content. But there’s no point in worrying about how the fascists will respond: we know how they will respond.

Should the text be whited out too? Then you get this:

It’s a little more surreal. It invites a caption. The original text reveals that white supremacy continues to believe that the enslaved were not human beings, any more than dogs. It rests on the polygenist “theory” that there are multiple species of humans with different capacities. Such ideas circulated widely in the 1850s and ’60s as a defense of slavery. Without the startling image, this nonsense can literally be seen for what it is.

In a classroom, I would work back from the fully whited-out sign to the text and then take a vote as to whether the image should be shown. Then the picture could be introduced as an illustration to the Memoirs of a Blind Man by Jacques Arago (1839), written when the author was in fact blind so could not check the image for accuracy. Then the history of Escrava Anastasia, the woman depicted, who was resistance leader among the Brazilian enslaved, could be shared. Only then would I show the engraving.

3. Undermining

One thing fascists hate is to be made to look ridiculous or to have their claims to power undermined. Montage works wonders at ridiculing the pompous. Most of us can’t be John Heartfield. But deploying memory and simple tools, you can make mash-ups that mock the would-be saviors.

In my example, Mike Pence is visiting the Mayo Clinic. As it’s a medical facility, everyone is wearing masks but not Pence. He’s too powerful to get infected, too masculine for a girly mask, and too divine to need its protection. Photographer Jim Mone depicted him in a gesture of apparent benediction or healing. Most of Mone’s shoot was generic but this photo evoked to me a painting from an older epidemic.

Gros, *Napoleon in the Plague House*. With VP Pence at Mayo Clinic (Jim Mone/AP).

Baron Gros’ immense oil painting showed Napoleon in a plague house in Jaffa, Palestine. While his officer covers his face to ward off infection, Napoleon reaches out to touch an infected man. The gesture echoed that of the French kings, who would use their touch to heal scrofula, a form of tuberculosis.

It’s good to be a king, in the administration’s mind. But they’re not supposed to make it so clear in what remains nominally a republic. Bonapartism is notorious for appearing first as tragedy, the second time as farce. Pence is a farce and the montage makes that apparent even if you don’t know what the painting is.

Too complicated? Try this. In Texas, some businesses are reopened but not bars. A bar in Odessa TX reopened with some gun-carrying men claiming to “protect” it. When the New York Times ran the story, it led with a photo of a wanna-be tough guy with a tattoo, a bandanna and an AR-15. All the usual “we’re willing to die” rhetoric. This is what actually happened.

Not so “willing to die” in fact. Photo: Eli Hartman, Odessa Advertiser/AP

The original story in the Odessa Advertiser made it clear that this was all an effort to profit and get publicity. No one, in deep Texas, was trying to take their guns. But for all bluster, these liberators were all hat and no cattle.

4. Reclaim The Future

The swastika, MAGA crowd are all about the past. Going back has become code for “go back to militarized white supremacy.” Last time this crowd showed themselves openly at Charlottesville, they were comprehensively defeated but it came at a heavy price: the murder of Heather Heyer. That’s why there are Confederate flags at all the Astroturf protests. They know it’s the second round. They’ll lose again but the cost of human life may be much greater.

That’s why it’s also important to reclaim the future. Mutual aid has been a key part of getting through this first wave, as Rebecca Solnit has chronicled. Since the emergence of the Zapatistas in 1994, an alternative agenda has been clear, including respect for the Indigenous; direct democracy; sustainable economies for human and other-than-human life; health care and other forms of care as the key around which to organize society; production for need not profit; and an end to violence.

The pandemic highlights in bold why we need all this as matters of life and death. Who are we? Pan demos. All the people. The future is pandemocracy. All colonial thought and practice imagines democracy–opposed to the republic–as pandemonium, literally the presence of all demons, and figuratively as a cacophony in which no sense can be made. For the pandemocracy, learning to speak, to connect the visible and the sayable, articulating “that-which-must-be-made-sense-of” (Pasolini) is the work that is collectively at hand.

Tags antifascism; visual culture; visual organizing; COVID-19; media

pandemic visual organizing white supremacy whiteness

Whiteness, Visuality and the Virus

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date April 21, 2020

Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colorado, U.S. April 19, 2020. REUTERS/Alyson McClaran MANDATORY CREDIT. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

The corona virus was supposed to be the great equalizer, a leveler of the divides of race, class and gender. Instead, the invisible pathogen has not only made existing inequalities palpably visible, it has weaponized them. The far-right, last seen at Charlottesville, is back with a new claim: the right (for you) to die. The old settler-colonial slogan “Liberty or Death” has been revamped: “my (white) Liberty in exchange for your Death.” In one week in April, the virus has become racialized.

The far-right activism has followed from a perverse and reverse act of self-recognition. Those white people inclined to an overt declaration of white supremacy became aware that Black, brown and Indigenous people were being disproportionately affected. Hearing this, they concluded that they are immune.

Or more exactly, when “protestors” were asked if they thought the epidemic was real, they agreed that it was but claimed that they were protected by a “higher power.” This phrase comes from the rhetorics of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step groups rather than Christianity. It was used to carry a double meaning in the familiar dog-whistle locutions of US white supremacy: the higher power is God, manifested as whiteness.

Learning to see in reverse

Let’s track how the “invisible enemy” constantly evoked by Trump became visibly non-white people. In a ten day span, the virus became racialized domestically, congruent with the ongoing xenophobia attached to the disease as being “Chinese.”

It had been predicted in March that minorities would suffer economically. But it was not until early April that media began to report on the disproportionate rates of death and infection in these communities. A wave of reports began in national media around April 7, 2020. By April 17, the Center for Disease Control was reporting that of those cases where racial and ethnic identity was known, 30% of COVID-19 patients were African American and 18% were “Hispanic/Latino.”

A week after this media wave broke, the first “protest” against stay-at-home measures happened in Michigan on April 15. Organized by Trump front groups like the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC), the event was quickly co-opted by the far-right. The MCC called for people to stay in their cars. Instead, rifle-carrying men in combat gear posed on the steps of the Capitol. While police might have intervened–imagine this with protestors from the Nation of Islam–this unpermitted, armed action was allowed to continue and garner wall-to-wall media coverage.

It was right after a Fox News segment on April 17 covered the event that Trump sent out his “LIBERATE” tweets. As at Charlottesville, the far-right received presidential endorsement, even as the MCC now urges its followers not to attend follow-up Operation Gridlock events later this month. But the Betsy Devos-funded Michigan Freedom Fund, a co-organizer of the event, is still all in, calling the stay at home order “arbitrary and capricious.” The president and a leading cabinet member are conspiring against their own policies in other words.

If Michigan saw assault rifles, two days later on April 17, Denver saw a white woman in a top-end Dodge RAM 1500 tell a medical worker to “go back to China.” Not because he was Chinese, but because social distancing is communism, and the virus “is” Chinese. So it makes “sense.”

You just know this woman has 5,000 rolls of toilet paper in her McMansion alongside a freezer or two full of food. While she feels herself to be a brave anti-Communist, she did not in fact dare to walk the streets. The next day in Kentucky the all-white “protestors” chanted “Facts Not Fear,” a Fox News slogan, even as cases peaked in the state.

There is, then, a range of class and political positions among the white activists. What they share is a fear that whiteness is being dissolved in the emergency created by the pandemic. When they say–as they all do–that they would rather work than receive a government handout, it expresses the long-standing belief that welfare is only for people of color and so-called “white trash.” Being required to stay home and receive government funds provokes a furious–if small in number–backlash at being reframed as a dependent person, understood by them to mean a person of color, rather than a “free” person, meaning white. Slavery is never far away in the US.

It has all had an effect. On April 9, 81% of Americans supported stay at home policies, including 68% of Republicans (Quinnipiac). A week later (April 16), Pew Research found 66% concerned that the country would reopen too quickly. By April 19, that support had dropped to 58%, with less than 40% of Republicans in support (NBC News/WSJ). Other polls are close to that number with some as high as 64%. Polls are fickle, and biased, yes. But let’s not presume that a handful of activists can’t change minds, just because we intensely disagree with them.

Facts really don’t have much to do with this. Whiteness connects by emotional cathexis. White supremacy contains a volatile mix of anger, resentment and fear of failure, which is then combined with violence, especially against women. “Lock Her Up,” a slogan again in use at the Michigan protest, remains its watchword. Guns are its iconographic form. Its vocabulary is selectively drawn from the 1776 settler-colonial uprising in defense of slavery, also known as the American Revolution

Breaking the frame of whiteness

What’s at stake now is whether the far-right variant of white supremacy becomes hegemonic over the new conjuncture. Or if something entirely new can be imagined, as thinkers from Gramsci to Grace Lee Boggs, Stuart Hall, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have long exhorted us to do. It will take what Hall called “a profound cultural transformation” to undehumanize the settler-colony and imagine something different.

Whiteness “works” as an ideology because it provides a frame to sustain contradiction, or as Hall put it:

it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference
Hall, “Gramsci and Us”

Its goal is to make xenophobic white supremacy the ‘common sense’ (which is not to say ‘good sense’) not of politics as a whole but of the right. And, as Hall put it, they have ‘totally dominated that idiom, while the Left forlornly tries to drag the conversation round to “our policies.”‘

To break the frame offered by white supremacy will have create what Arundhati Roy calls “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” It will be both digital and material. A portal is not quite a frame. It that may have edges but not borders. It creates a sense of relation not of exclusion. The intensity of white reaction responds to their sense that that gateway is, paradoxically, now more visible than it has been for some time. How this plays out depends on how the several waves of Covid-19 infection are imagined and configured. I really don’t know what will happen.

abolition decolonial gender lynching race visual organizing

Monuments, Looking, Lynching and Gender

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date August 22, 2017

Caddo Parish Confederate Monument, where three people were lynched in 1903

In the past week, the ubiquitous Confederate monuments have suddenly become visible (to non-Confederate sympathizing white people) as monuments to genocide and white supremacy. It’s important to continue to show their systemic role in making and sustaining white supremacy. In particular, the monuments form a network that connects seeing, unseeing, lynching and gender in ways that I for one had not previously fully understood.

seeing and unseeing

The sheer numbers are astonishing. Over 13,000 Civil War memorials. 700 Confederate monuments on public land, including Arlington National Cemetery and the US Capitol. Statues of Robert E. Lee at universities like City College, New York, and Duke. That’s a system, an infrastructure of white supremacy that has been hiding in plain sight across the US. Now begins the process of learning to unsee the unseeing of them.

But the statues were always watching. In the Vice documentary on Charlottesville, one African American woman comments that the statue of Robert E. Lee seemed to watch her wherever she went. The monuments are racialized CCTV, placing those designated “not white” on notice that white supremacy is watching. They materialize the mystical power of “oversight,” once embodied in the plantation overseer, and now part of segregated public space.

material mourning

Ad for the McNeel Marble Company in 1913, peak of the monument boom

The monuments convey that power not by artistic skill or visual creativity but by sheer mass. These were mass-produced objects, made by companies like McNeel Marble. They had massive height and weight. When Louisville, Kentucky, decided to take down its monument, nearby Brandenburg put it back up. It’s 70 feet tall, 100 tons of granite and now re-mounted on 80 tons of concrete. In and of itself, this materiality dominates. By its simple presence it makes a statement as to who “counts” in America, who is grievable, and who is not.

Via the monument, the materialized power of (over)sight forms specific sites within the matrix of white supremacy. Take the thirty-four foot high monument in Pensacola, Florida, paid for by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1891. At the time, the city was majority African American. It had been been captured from Native Americans and free Africans by Andrew Jackson in 1817.

The monument dominated the local landscape when first installed (as in the 1907 postcard above). A year later, Leander Shaw, an African American man accused of assaulting a white woman, was lynched nearby. Over 2000 bullets riddled his corpse, after he was hanged from an electric pole (yes, there’s a picture; no, I’m not posting it). When the local high school was “integrated” in 1975, a race riot ensued and attracted a major KKK rally to the monument.

In the past week, the mayor has called for it to come down, only to meet determined opposition from the local Republican congressman and a 5000-signature petition. Which in turn generated 2300 signatures supporting removal (possibly to a nearby cemetery). Now a weekend rally has been called in support of the monument.

Here, then, is a metonymy of what these monuments stand for: the conquest of Indigenous populations; the subjugation of African Americans; white supremacy and the myth of white womanhood; the former Republican “Southern strategy” of electoral domination; and now the metonymic conflict over the monument.

the site and sight of lynching

In other cases, as in Brooksville, Florida, and Hot Springs, Arkansas , lynchings actually took place at the site of the Confederate monument. Take the case of Caddo Parish, Louisiana. It was the second largest site of lynchings nationwide. In 1903, the UDC put up a Confederate monument. Six months later, three people were lynched at the site on November 30, 1903, from the tree visible in the photograph below.

Caddo Parish Confederate Monument. Three men were lynched here in 1903 from the tree.

A typical “Silent Sentinel” monument, the Caddo Parish example is thirty feet tall, dominating its locale. The woman in front represents Clio, the muse of history and the inscription reads “Lest We Forget.” The site could better serve as a memorial to Phil Davis, Walter Carter, and Clint Thomas, the lynched men.

In general, it’s noticeable that there is a rough correlation in the incidence of lynchings and the numbers of Confederate monuments.

Tuskegee Institute table of lynchings per year.

SPLC chart of Confederate monuments per year

Both “peak” in the decade after 1890, as Jim Crow became fully established in the South, with an upturn again in the 1920s with the revival of the KKK. I do not think that the monuments “caused” lynchings or vice-versa. Rather, both were interactive instruments of violence in instituting and sustaining white supremacy.

This interaction can be called the “sight of lynching.” As in the case of Leander Shaw, many lynchings resulted from the testimony of white women, often without other evidence. In the common instance of “reckless eyeballing,” (which I’ve written about here) the accusation was that an African American person had looked at a white woman with sexual intent, as in the case of Emmett Till.

There is, then, a relay to be explored between the oversight materialized in the Confederate monument; and lynchings based on embodied perceptions of being looked at. The white gaze was at once surrogated through the monument and expressed as the power to remain unseen (in the case of the monument) and unseeable (in that of white women).

What was both seen and unseen was the spectacular and appalling violence of lynching. In 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative will open the Memorial to Peace and Justice, the first prominent memorial to the 4000 victims of lynching. Yet as many exhibitions and publications have shown since the groundbreaking Without Sanctuary exhibit (2001) [caution: very distressing images], lynching itself was intensely mediated. There were postcards, photographs, newspaper stories and public events. Nonetheless, only one white man was convicted of lynching in its eighty-year heyday.

white mythology

Further, the Confederate monuments were, as has been widely noted, often paid for by the UDC or other Confederate women’s organizations. Fundraising for the Pensacola monument was failing until the UDC became involved. Perhaps unexpectedly, white women’s activism made the network of monuments possible. Women are even active in today’s white supremacy movement, despite its visible misogyny.

In her 1952 memoir, UDC leader, Dolly Blount Lamar claimed that the monuments expressed:

in permanent physical form the historical truth and spiritual and political ideals that we would perpetuate.

This “truth” was very specific. When a historian at the University of Florida expressed the view in 1911 that

the North was relatively in the right, while the South was relatively in the wrong

members of the UDC drove him out of his job. When we hear the call to respect “history” on all sides, it is such falsified and white supremacist history that is at stake.

segregation forever

These monuments remain active today. One instance of the work they do for white supremacy is to act as “border” markers in segregated cities. It’s not just in the former Confederacy that this happens. The statue of the appalling J. Marion Sims, who performed medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthetic, does this work in New York City today.

To the North of Sims is so-called “Spanish” Harlem, a diverse area of Black and brown people, dotted with housing projects and schools offering free meals to anyone under 18. South is Central Park and Museum Mile, where white people play whiffle ball and look at the monuments of white “civilization.”

anti-antiblackness

I have not been to the mountain top. I do not know what comes after white supremacy. I continue to be engaged in the work of anti-antiblackness which means negating the regime of white supremacy by making the monuments and the work that they do visible: and thereby removable.