It is often said that the reason history repeats itself is because we never learn from it. During the period of May 31st and June 1st of 1921, the Tulsa Race Massacre happened in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. According to Scott Ellsworth, who wrote on the Tulsa Race Riot in the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History, "it was the single worst incident of racial violence in American History. The incident destroyed the wealthiest black community in the United States called "Black Wall Street".
So often when I listen to different programs and people talk, I often hear a form of the words, "I did not see people like me growing up". When we look around, we can see people that are well educated African-American and Latino people who are well educated that look like us. I think the problem is that we "discount" those people as being born with a "silver spoon" in their mouth.
Personally, I think of people like James Brown from CBS Sports and moderator of the NFL Today, yes he went to Harvard, but he got there through basketball. Loretta Lynch who became the Attorney General under former President Obama between 2015 to 2017, she graduated from Harvard Law School, but according to Wikipedia, her grandfather was a sharecropper who helped people move to the north to escape racial persecution. Lonnie Bunch, who is the head of the Smithsonian Institution on Racial Tensions, his family was the only African Americans in their community of Belleview, New Jersey, his grandfather was a sharecropper who moved to Belleview, New Jersey and became on of the first black dentist in the region (according to Wikipedia) and since this blog is about photography, we can't forget about Ibarionex Perello, a photographer who is from the Dominican Republic and has been a photographer for over 25 years and is host of The Candid Frame. There are others like Joseph Rosendo, who does the PBS show Travelscope, who is a Cuban immigrant, but became a travel journalist. R C Concepcion, an Adobe certified instructor in Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.
All of these people worked their way up to the point that they are through education, either through school or being shown "The ropes". Joseph Rosendo ends every show he does on Travelscope with a quote from Mark Twain, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness". Many will tell you that it takes money to travel and the way that we obtain money in our lives is through education. A person who has been well educated is easy to pick up, they speak differently. You can tell their manner of speaking when they speak.
Lonnie Bunch was on The CBS Evening News with Nora O'Donnell on June 1, 2020 and he made several statements that really caught my attention. He quoted Ella Baker, who was an African American Civil Rights Activist who said, "Until the killing of a black mother's son is considered as important as a white mother's son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest".
This blog post is not only a call for better education of black and brown people but better education of everyone. Look at the difference between what happened in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and what happened in Flint, Michigan where Chris Swanson, the Sheriff of Genesee County in Michigan when he laid down is baton and riot gear and walked with the people. In Minneapolis, entire blocks were burned down, even an African American family who had invested their entire life savings had their store looted, burned down and people came in to take the money that was in the safe. Yet, in Flint, they had a parade and not a single thing was damaged. This was not the only incident that I saw on the news, their were stories in New York, Houston, Texas and other cities of the United States where officers took a knee with the protestors and calmed things down considerably. Perhaps our police departments in this country can take a lesson from these people.
We need to educate our lawyers, our judges and all the way up the system including our legislature and our President.
The President even berated the nation's governors saying that if they were soft, they would be taken as jerks and people would get away with what they were doing. Really? Look what happened in Flint Michigan. Nothing happened there. Putting people in jail, does nothing. If anything, it hampers people from obtaining an education.
One of the things that I would think would be part of that education system is to give people something to get excited about. Besides being a photographer, I have also taught people about photography taking them all the way from informing them about what camera to buy, leaving it up to them to make a decision about what camera that they should buy, all the way to how to process their photographs that they take.
I will admit that not everyone gets excited about photography, but everyone has something that they can get excited about if you find out what excites them. The key is that we need to find out what it is that gets them excited. It might be a flower, helping them to get their hands dirty transplanting flowers from one place to another can help. Teaching them what happens from a seed to the bloom of the flower might excite them. You just never know what it might be that excites them. It has been said, "An idol mind is the Devil's workshop". If we can make people's minds less idol, they will be consumed, they will have something to do and they will be off of the streets because they are doing something productive. Perhaps, it will even stimulate our economy.
I have seen this in my classes that I teach. I can show someone how to take a photograph and they will often say, "I wonder what would happen if I . . . (and you can fill in the blank)". For me, that makes me very proud because my teaching is starting to sink in. What helped? Education, in my mind anyway.
Lonnie Bunch made a statement at the end of the interview with Nora O'Donnell on the CBS Evening News that was very pungent to me hearing it. He said but I want to expand it some , "As a black or latino man in America, you are still breathing, but as a black or latino man in America, I wonder how long?" My response to Mr. Bunch is, when everyone receives a quality education. We need to elevate our education in our poorer neighborhoods to the elevation of the education in our more influential neighborhoods and find people who are willing to mentor and coach those in the more disadvantaged neighborhoods just like the people who are in the more advantaged neighborhoods.
