Twelve years ago (2009) on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it was one day before the inauguration of Barack Obama, and a Washington, D.C.-area photographer named Matt Mendelsohn spent the golden hour that morning and the next day photographing regular people who were excited about the inauguration. Today he shared some of his photos on Facebook. I can't figure out how to link directly to his post, but if you go to his wall and scroll a bit you will find the full post. I'm including several of them here.
This is what he wrote:
It's MLK Day. Except that the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is closed today, thanks to the white supremacist insurrectionists who tried to take over our Capitol last week. But we are not deterred. As we look forward to Wednesday, I thought I would honor today's holiday with some photos that you've never seen.
Twelve years ago, I went outside at sunrise and photographed the unbelievable sense of excitement at the dawning of the Obama era. It was inauguration morning. And remember, despite what has been denied to us by our seditionist countrymen, an inauguration is supposed to be a joyous event. It's a celebration of democracy, not a wake for democracy.
It was a frigid morning, 1/20/09. If you weren't there I can't describe how bitter cold that air was that day. (Also of note: this wasn’t even INSIDE the security zone; these were folks waiting to get IN the security zone!) And yet there was only pride and jubilation on the street. Excitement and hope for the future. A feeling that maybe we were finally changing as a nation.
Over the years, I've published the photo of the little boy with the Obama hat several times. (Some day I might even find him!) But nothing else. It all just sits on a hard drive. When I heard the MLK Memorial was closed today, I figured we all need a little lift. I went back to the original 2009 inauguration folder to see what else I could show you. The terrorists can try and ruin a holiday, and they can try and ruin an inauguration, but they will never, ever succeed. Good always triumphs.
When I saw these images on Facebook today, I think they had the effect on me that Mendelsohn intended, but they also made me remember something I read just the night before in Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
In the chapter called "Cortisol, Telomeres, and the Lethality of Caste," she describes the utterly depressing research that finds white Americans who score high on a measure of automatic prejudice have a physical reaction when shown photos of Black people. Their brains perceive threat and their bodies arm themselves "for vigilance within 30 milliseconds of exposure, the blink of an eye, the researchers have found" (pages 304–305).
The next section in Wilkerson's book is called "Backlash," and it's about what has come since Obama's presidency. It's been clear since the Tea Party, no matter how much denial we hear. Many Black writers and thinkers have said the same thing, and the Trump years have driven it home even more.
So when I see Mendelsohn's beautiful photos, I also feel sad, knowing that they trigger the opposite effect in some white people and there's nothing I or anyone can do about that. A photographer sets out to document the world, but also to make it a better place. At least I know that this photographer has that purpose.
This is why everyone hates social scientists: because they report what they find. How could anyone come away from looking at these images — which show emotional, real people — feeling fear and animosity toward the people, instead of empathizing with them and seeing that we are all one?
But that's what the data shows.
And some of these photos also showed that a Black man (no matter how "light, bright, and damn near white," as they used to say) was going to be president. And then he was president, and I'll be, he was a much better president than all of the white guys in recent years! It was just too much for a lot of white people.
So here we are, cresting the second wave of our first Civil War.
(I'm not quite finished with Caste yet, by the way, but I highly recommend it.)
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