Race.

[jtk]

This is a photographers Forum. That's why my OT addresses the way some of us actually see. Rationality is irrelevant in the face of photographs.

I hope everybody here has adequate devices as well as enough curiosity to take a little time to view all the images in as quiet a way as they can manage, attempting to shut out the blinders of "opinions". I find that easy with some, very difficult with others.

 

[Vaughn]

It speaks of privilege to ask to be able to enjoy public sports without the social justice stuff that's been kept in the closets for centuries being brought forward in a simple and elegant way (kneeling). It also speaks of privilege to suggest a racially oppressed people behave according to the oppressors' concept of 'rational'.

^ Let us just enjoy a sport that 70% of its players are Afro-American and that only recently and still relunctantly acknowledges the dangers and lasting effects of concussions. The Games must go on...some Roman must have said awhile back. ^

I have read and looked at the images a few times through. I do not understand the words and images, I cannot understand them. I have always been a middle class white male. Even my years living in what some would consider poverty (it wasn't), I was still middle class because I always had the power and privilege to earn more if I wanted to play that game. But I can still be moved, still hear a message no matter how much I'll garble it. My earlier quote from the article was the one that happened to resonate the deepest in me and my life -- for far different reasons than the words' author, of course, but there was a feeling of empathy...imagined or otherwise.

 

[jtk]

Imagining is where photography begins.