The American Way

Joe Brady

2-27-09

            For this essay I have chosen to look at two different photographs to analyze what they say about what it means to be “American” and how race effects what that means.  The United States of America has a long history of racial bias, often hateful, cruel and violent.  However, that is not a part of American history that is often recognized or talked about openly.  I will attempt to further examine how race has effected what being an American means.

            When looking at the picture At The Time of The Louisville Flood (Margaret Bourke-White, 1937) we see a group of African Americans standing in a line, some holding baskets or buckets.  From the titled of the photograph we can infer that the flood has affected these people and potentially left them homeless.  We may first assume that they are standing in a bread line, collecting food for themselves and their families.  The looks on their faces are sad, some almost angry, as they stand single file lining an urban street.  What is most striking however is the billboard that decorates the wall directly behind this line of people.  The billboard shows a white family driving in a car through an idyllic countryside, nicely dressed, broad smiles on their faces, and the proclamation “There’s no way like the American Way”.  And the banner across the top of the billboard proudly claims for us “The Worlds Highest Standard of Living”.  That is where the disconnect lies, between the image on the billboard and the people in front of it.  There is an obvious separation between the world portrayed in the billboard and the real world in which these people live.  Richard Dyer writes, “Racial imagery is central to the organization of the modern world.”(1).  From this we can see how the white racial imagery of the billboard pronounces prosperity and happiness, championing the “American” way of life.  But the photograph itself is a portrayal of the opposite.  It show’s the bias of the “American Dream” as it were.  Theses African Americans have been displaced by natural disaster and driven to poverty in the face of an already bigoted society, one that tells of a high standard of living that they do not personally enjoy.

            The second image is a still form History and Memory  (Rea Tajiri, 1991) that show a nicely dressed Asian American couple posed in front of an American flag.  The solemn looks on the couple’s faces along with the title “History and Memory” lead you to think of the ways that Asian Americans have been discriminated against throughout American history.  America has a way of teaching and remembering it’s own history that often involves overlooking it’s numerous ugly parts.  The American flag is the symbol that our country gathers behind to celebrate freedom, liberty, justice, and equality, and in this photograph it still represents those things.  However, it has been used to fuel cruelty, hatred and racist tendencies throughout much of this country’s history, especially in the scope of WWII.  When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor the government, in an act of paranoia and discrimination, placed many Americans of Japanese decent into internment camps.  We locked up our own citizens, taking from them the rights that we were fighting to protect. 

“The media, politics, education, are still in the hands of white people, still speak for whites while claiming- and sometimes sincerely aiming- to speak for humanity.”(1)

Our country is largely run by older, wealthy, white men with no perspective

other than their own who convince themselves that they are acting in accordance with the best interest of all Americans, while often not only neglecting, but also specifically discriminating against others whose rights are no less equal than that of their own.

 

 

 

Works Cited

(1) Richard Dyer, “On the Matter of Whiteness”, Only Skin Deep, 1997 pgs. 301-304