A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

The Breach disclaims that the following narrative, ripped from the WTF headlines, must be read as simple, novice fiction. There's no way the following story can be true...no way. Not after 30+ years of desegregation; not within 3+ months of the election of America's first Black president. No way a school administrator spent the balance of four days trying to pacify this scenario, a month before the first round of TAKS tests. No way this story happens in an urban American school in 2009. No way.

Whew! So here's the yarn: On a nondescript Friday morning, a school employee, along with several colleagues, was harmlessly reading the news on a computer homepage: msn.com. It was early in the morning, before school started - before duty or tutorials or classes began, so no foul so far. The msn page featured a story, complete with picture (pay attention now...this is important), of a dreadlocked African American man in an orange prison jumpsuit. For this story, his specific one is beside the point. Unless it, too, is the point.

Aside: The Breach would post the photo in this blog, but is not nearly as technologically sophisticated as our friend at .ross; hopefully, he'll give us some tutorials soon.

So this school employee (henceforth #1) notices that the dreadlocks in the photo resemble the dreadlocks on the head of another teacher (henceforth #2) at this school - a teacher who also happens to be an African American man (you don't get extra credit here for skipping ahead). #1 thinks the resemblance is hilarious. So funny, in fact, that it would be a great idea to email the picture to #2, and to the rest of the faculty as well. The caption included in the email? "Is there something you're not telling us?"

As you might guess (but #1, sadly, did not), #2 was far from amused. As though context were necessary to justify the offense taken, the fiction constructed here says that #2 grew up in a deep South state (one that figured prominently in the contests over desegregation in the 60s; one about which several important movies have been made), and was raised by college-educated parents to confront and overturn the most basic of racial stereotypes. #2 interpreted the picture and message as an inexplicable example of inexorable racism, appealing to one of the most insidious tropes about African Americans: the Black man in prison. Oh...and the explanations offered by #1? "I can't believe #2 doesn't have a sense of humor", "I spent 4 months in Africa on a mission trip; how could #2 think I'm racist?", and (you're gonna love this) "When I saw the picture, I didn't see a Black man or a prison uniform; all I saw was hair."


Seriously? Seriously.

Though of course there's no way we could know for sure, The Breach understands that, when confronted and asked to give a reckoning for the email, #1, rather than owning and renouncing the offense, offered a battery of defense for it. Of course, it's the very defense of such an email, the fact that #1 could not, after four days of reflection, come to an understanding of the marrow-deep offensiveness inherent in any comparison of an educated educator to a felon, on the basis of color and hair, that illustrates a degree of racism far more dangerous and damaging than inbred morons in sheets. It's the blithe assumption that such a heinous comparison is funny, that stuns one into paroxysm. It's the notion that ministering to Africans in the name of God for four months somehow buys the minister racial immunity, that drops one's jaw (has anyone read Heart of Darkness, Cry, the Beloved Country, The Poisonwood Bible, or...you know...the Bible?). It's the straight-faced and earnest insistence that the one who is offended by racial stereotypes somehow owns the responsibility for that offense, that makes one slap the head in disbelief.

Thankfully, this is a fiction. But in such a fiction, it's the oblivion on the one hand to the impact on the other that suggests an ethical and moral bankruptcy. It's the insistent innocence in the overt hypocrisy that makes The Breach ask: Have we learned or accomplished nothing in our cultural revolutions? Have we progressed socially only to the extent that the surface picture of our culture is more politely palatable than it once was? Have we moved no closer to Dr. King's dream of true racial equality? Despite the protestations to the contrary, it's the picture - and its comedic, irresponsible, and tragic deployment - that tells the real story of racial progress in America. For if American public schools do not offer a racial safe haven for the teachers in them, what hope is there for the rest of America, and what lesson does this story teach the students, who are enrolled both in those schools and in that America?

Fortunately, these questions are merely academic; this story and its implications just hypothetical fiction. The story did not - could not -really happen. Not now. Not today. Or...


...was this really my day? Is a picture really, really, worth more than all our words?