Images — and by extension art and culture — serve as a measure of  “who counts” in society, according to Vision & Justice founder Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. As a scholar and historian, her work focuses on the intersection of visual representation, racial justice, and democracy in the United States. Her book, “The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery” and her popular TED Talk, “How Images Shape Our Understanding of Justice,” have earned her broad audiences. In her latest book, “The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America,” Lewis examines images that shaped Americans’ perceptions of race, and interrogates the formation of a racial hierarchy kept in place by visual stereotypes and narratives that served as a precursor to today’s racial profiling.

In a world where art can shift people’s entire lives, Lewis implores us to pay attention to her new project, the Vision & Justice Book Series. The first book in the series, “Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images,” is a collection of essays by cultural historian, curator, and writer, Maurice Berger. His work explores the way images have been catalysts to change as well as strategies for representation, and how photography have shaped narratives in the United States. 

According to the publisher’s website, the Vision & Justice series is “designed to address past omissions and contribute to the ongoing work of building a richer, more racially inclusive story of lens-based practices. The series extends the work of the award-winning 2016 ‘Vision & Justice’ issue of Aperture magazine, guest edited by Lewis, which sparked a national conversation on the role of images in constructions of citizenship, race, and justice.”

Frederick Douglass saw photography as a social equalizer, and one could see his powerful lecture “Pictures and Progress” as a precursor to Lewis’ work today. Lewis truly believes in the power of images to facilitate change. 

In a conversation with The Emancipator, Lewis discusses “Race Stories,” her latest book “The Unseen Truth,” and how images can shift racial narratives, and perhaps the racial hierarchy. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

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Keishel Williams: Why did you start the Vision & Justice Book Series with Maurice Berger’s work, “Race Stories”? 

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis: Maurice Berger authored a series of essays in the Lens blog of The New York Times called “Race Stories,” which offers a blueprint for understanding the transformational role of visual culture in shaping ideas and attitudes about race, justice, and belonging in the United States. Unfortunately, he passed [away] early in the pandemic due to complications from COVID-19 and his loss is, in itself, an injustice for our field. So we created this book as a primer. It is a compendium, an anthology of the text from The New York Times column. He understood that we all are conditioned to see the world through pictures. He understood the singular power of the photograph to shape narratives that construct how we understand who counts and who belongs in the United States.

How do images shape our understanding of justice?

We often rob ourselves of the understanding we need about how we’ve arrived where we are, by not looking at the work of the image, by not looking at the role of monuments, and by not looking at culture. The reason why images and culture matter so much in the United States is because we have a civic foundation that’s built on an unspeakable tension in ideals — a tension between the extraordinary, noble ideals of liberty and equality, and the bedrock foundation of slavery and injustice. That tension forces our representational democracy to rely on visual representation that doesn’t speak, and that can create narratives through other means. Frederick Douglass spoke about the power of the image during the Civil War. He saw the use of the image and he decided to create, through his own image, a counternarrative of a dignified, self-possessed African American man to challenge a sea of denigrating stereotypes.

How can the arts help create a just society? 

One question I’ve been thinking of lately is, “why don’t we see the arts as a public good”? What culture does and what the arts do is allow us to see what we don’t know about ourselves and each other. That’s one of the reasons that during times of strife, war, and injustice, people seek out the arts, and the makers and artists go to work. 

The work of the arts is left out of the story of justice in the United States. Charles Black Jr., one of the lawyers of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education case, was animated to focus on law and justice because of the power of Louis Armstrong, for example. He saw Armstrong performing in 1931 in Austin, Texas, and there realized that segregation was wrong — because of the power of the artistry coming out of Louis Armstrong’s horn. Armstrong wasn’t delivering a sermon about injustice. He was playing music and in that moment of understanding that power and mastery and genius, Charles Black Jr.’s perspective was shifted. 

Robert Flora’s photo of Malcolm X reading LIFE magazine was instrumental in how African Americans came to view him and the Nation of Islam going forward. Can you talk to us about the role of the media in shaping culture through images?

We don’t emerge able to read the racial narratives in the United States when we arrive as infants. Right? We’re taught. And the role of the media is vital in this work. We are just emerging from a presidential campaign that offered a cautionary tale and a masterclass on the function of the media in shaping narratives.

The Malcolm X example that you raised is such a powerful one. It’s a reminder of the responsibility of both the text and really the image in either confirming a bias or challenging it. And the counternarrative that the media — because of distribution and scale of an audience — can wield over cultural and racial narratives, has been underestimated for decades. So “Race Stories” as the first book [in the series] is a chance to salute the work of the media and question whether we’ve understood its significance enough. 

What did you mean when you wrote in your recent book “The Unseen Truth” “that whiteness was once seen as a myth, but willful ignorance over more than a century turned it into a ‘fact.’”

What we understand as Whiteness is based on a fiction that was exposed but maintained through tactics we still use today to justify racial hierarchy. There’s a moment the book addresses when you can see this pivot in American life. It occurs during the American Civil War. At the same time something was happening across the Atlantic Ocean, on the Black Sea, called the Caucasian War. And the American public was fixated on this war. Why? Because that was the site of the so-called homeland of Whiteness. 

This war ended in 1864 with a genocide of the people in the caucus region, and reports that came out showed there’s no such thing as what [we] understand to be Whiteness there at all. It was startling because a whole system of hierarchy was based on that fact.

One of the reasons that the racial regime is so brutal is because it rests on this lie. There’s no basis for stating that anyone is better than anyone else. We know this instinctively. But the Caucasian War in 1864 was this definitive proof for the United States. 

What are some of the ways American culture has kept people in the dark about this truth in order to sustain racial hierarchies in this country?

The two main tactics [put in place to perpetuate that lie about Whiteness being a better race] are racial detailing and negative assembly — we now see it as so-called censorship.

Racial detailing is the precursor to racial profiling. It’s a means of taking the very small details of a bureaucracy and making the micro matter a policy. An example is the way segregation happened in the federal government. It was constructed through detail.

You can see it in the diaries of the leaders of the different administrations. In the letters of Charles Hamlin, who was the assistant secretary of the Treasury, the instructions he received was to not let a so-called colored person sit in his office if they came. Or to not address them in correspondence with Mr. or Mrs. All these intentional details. 

The negative assembly piece is critical to understand as well, given where we are with our curricular reform and censorship debates. As a case study, look at how Americans taught students to see the world over the various centuries. In a simple textbook, or an Atlas, which is used to teach history from the beginning of the 19th century, you see this deliberate subtraction of any evidence that would inspire a student to question racial hierarchy. 

Year to year, decade to decade, after this fiction of Whiteness, of White racial supremacy is exposed, the instructional textbooks change but do not offer any indication of that fact. That tactic of negative assembly, of cohering a world regime through subtraction, is the precursor and the scaffolding to understanding the censorship debates today. 

How do you feel as a Black woman in America right now, especially one who is fighting to show how American culture shapes justice? 

Thank you for that question. It’s a time for many Black women, where we need to call upon all of the inner resources we have to remain encouraged and inspired. I myself am feeling ready, and actually I’m prepared. I am a deep optimist and wanted very much for [Kamala Harris] to be president, but I am also a historian. So I prepared for [Donald] Trump to be president again. And that preparation allows me to say to you, I feel ready. And I think the reason why I’m encouraged and ready is because, as I discuss in “The Unseen Truth,” there’s a blueprint for what’s happening now. As a historian, I see it. As a scholar, I can point you to where to go to look for it. And it created out of the work a civic service for others. 

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