The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

Lewis (African and African American studies, Harvard Univ.; The Rise) investigates how images shaped American perceptions of race from the Civil War to the Jim Crow era. Narrating her own work, Lewis describes how the rise of photography facilitated racializing and cataloguing people’s physical features, which made it easier to discriminate between people based on their appearance. By looking closely at positive and negative representations of Black and white people, Lewis shows that images can be analyzed for what is present as much as what is absent or even fictionalized. In today’s current climate, this suggests that knocking down physical representations just scratches the surface of racism, but perhaps a deeper dialogue about racial propaganda can help all Americans better understand what willful ignorance can do to a nation.