Stereotypical Stigma

An image on the cover of National Geographic in a shop here in Minsk caught my eye today. It was of a young Masai woman, with her breast exposed. This in a town where soft porn is not on the shelves.

And another image, sent electronically by Reuters is really haunting me today. It’s of a black woman in Sao Paolo smoking crack. She’s hugely pregnant, surrounded by other users, sprawled on the ground, mouth open, belly out, legs akimbo.

Later in the series we see a pic of the photographer, secreted away in an overlooking building, working under a black cape that hides him and the camera.

The series of photos told me crack is a problem for black people, and if you want to film them you’d better make sure they don’t catch you.

But hang on. There’s no attempt to hide these people’s identity. They are committing a crime and their faces are revealed. They have not given any consent to be filmed. And their addiction is treated as grubby, filthy, scary.

They are portrayed as somehow sub-human. Slumped against the wall, eyes rolled back, crashed out on the manky pavement.

Sure, the life of a crack addict is a vile, miserable one. I think we know that. But I don’t think any young black Brazilians seeing this will say “that’s it. No crack for me thanks”. Worse, white Brazilian kids may  say “I can smoke a rock or two. It’s only the blacks that can’t handle it.” (Only stupid people get trafficked/AIDS/addicted).

Where’s the public good?

Where’s the photo series of Japanese businessmen falling out of karaoke bars, barfing on the street? The twenty-something alcoholic student nurse in Newcastle pissing in the gutter? The Russian comatose in the snow? The coked-up Wall Street investment banker driving his Merc through a shop window?

It seems its ok to portray black people as miserable, criminal, feral. Or as corpses. Starved in Somalia, mutilated in Rwanda, piled up on the streets in Port-au-Prince. Bloated and floating in New Orleans after Katrina.

What am I supposed to think, when I see this pregnant woman, crack-pipe in hand, feeding her unborn baby poison? Bringing a child into Cracolandia. Blame her? Forbid her to reproduce?

That’s this thinking that allows nice white people to go to Haiti and cherrypick “orphans” to export. That’s the thinking that says “oh, their life would be terrible. Their parents would jump at the chance to let them have an American education.”

That’s the logic that says “It’s not slavery. ALL African kids work on the farm during the holidays. Their parents can’t afford to keep them so they have to work on the cocoa plantations”. Here’s a song for anyone who believes that.

Aid agencies, led by the IFRC, came up with a code of conduct in the mid-90s which we still live by. Occasionally we sail close to the wind, but essentially our code is sacrosanct and it says: “In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified human beings, not hopeless objects”.

The irony is, of course, that we have to show the picture before we can criticise it.

And, knowing many excellent people in Reuters, I know they don’t just wake up and say “let’s dump on the black Brazilians today.”

I am sure they agonize on the merits, artistic, journalistic, humanitarian. And maybe, maybe they’ve thrown a stone that hit home. The truth is there is no dignity in crack addiction. But all of us, you, me, President Obama, Lady Gaga, Prince William and the entire cast of Lost were born naked, scared, but with the same right to life and dignity. And without Fernando Donasci’s photo essay I might not have had that thought today, and you might not have read it. 


Photo rights - it was not possible to use the Reuters photos referred to but we did link to the slideshow provided by Reuters for potential purchase. The photo used in this post is from the infamous Cracolandia but this time from AP and another photographer called Mauricio Lima. Interestingly, this slideshow also features the pregnant woman spoken about here. 
/JL