While I am stewing with all those internal dilemmas, I randomized my images as much as I could (paradoxically). I wandered all over campus shooting from the hip, trying to capture the sensation of randomness in my semi-planned shots. I roamed from the student union to class to the library to the sidewalks to the information center and even to the chapel. I was struggling the entire time to keep the concept of race/ethnic relations out of my head as I struggled to find representative images.
Part of my struggle with this project is the frame of reference that I have for race relations from my own background. I’ve spent all my life in the most whitebread areas of the country, insulated from race interactions at nearly every turn. I grew up in a small Dutch community in Western Michigan where the only people of color in my high school (less than 5 out of 800 or so) were adopted by pious white families. This was only further compounded by my teaching years spent in small, white, Christian enclaves. My lack of experience with race relations likely shows in my images as well as in my interpretations of them. This also made my randomizations hazier due to my ignorance on most matters racial and ethnic. Are the only pictures that illustrate race relations on campus those with members of minority groups in them or is there more freedom to work among different settings and objects?
In light of this then, how do race/ethnic relations happen on campus? In summary, awkwardly at best. Nearly all of my pictures involved a largely white population with marginalized minorities. A couple of images stand out as illustrating the sort of marginalization I saw happening. When I took the first image I was trying to get a larger frame of the corner of the cafeteria where students were hard at work and I thought the busser had blocked my shot. Then, the next day when I re-examined the image, I see how perfect it really is. Work in the cafeteria isn’t being done by former students of Loyola, or, for that matter, any of the affluent white families sending their children to study up to “lead extraordinary lives” after college. The cafeteria workers are all uniformed members of differing minority racial and ethnic groups operating in anonimity on the sidelines while the students work through dinner on whatever earth-shattering occupation they are set to.
The second image I just stumbled into this very day. As I walked into the student union to use the restroom I was confronted with this scene: highly amped mariachi music in the center of the auditorium. I quickly shot from the hip, trying to get at the experience from the side of the room to capture object and audience at once. Thinking back, shooting from the perspective of the band would have been fascinating, but would likely violate the spirit of the assignment. I saw the thin, sparsely populated room of people going about their regular routines in the room with no audience for the band. One woman’s back is turned, another girl checks her phone, only one in four people in the frame is actually looking at the performance. Around the room, people looked momentarily bewildered when they walked in, some laughing, others mocking a little dance (mainly a group of white girls by the steps), but largely taking little notice outside of standing in the back of the room. The image that I am left with is a band all dressed up with no one to entertain. This also looks like a school sanctioned cultural offering to try to offer differing experiences for students on campus. Is there a more stereotypical, B-movie representation of Latino culture than the mariachi band? This flaunting of a “foreign” culture in the face of indominable apathy might be funny if it weren’t so damn sad.
Loyola is an overtly religious institution as well, and Catholic at that. I was hoping that the single most racially/ethnically wide-reaching religious institution on earth would mitigate the content of my other images. A quick trip to the chapel after dark told me otherwise. The picture that I included at the end is more symbolic than anything and actually came to me as an afterthought. I initially took it to capture a really cool moment of lighting and symmetry, but closer inspection spoke to me about racial and ethnic relations at the school as well. What images populate the mural behind the baptismal font? It’s a collection of white faces (if anything, they are vaguely Mediterranean) looking toward a glowing savior. Our very cultural conception of good vs. evil symbols rests on a color line. Black is obscuring, wicked, and symbolic of base human nature while white represents clarity, purity, and transcendent redemption. Try postulating the concept of an Middle-Eastern looking (or black for that matter) Jesus and watch the fireworks. The very religion, the collected salvation of humankind is colored (couldn’t resist the pun) by concepts of hierarchy, race, and dominance reinforced by symbol and myth. (P.S. There’s a great gender discussion implied in that last photo too…)
It’s this very cultural base of symbology that limits our thinking and lays a foundation for the social actions and relations that the other images attempt to convey. This marginalization is only the end product of underlying hierarchy and dominance that these collected images highlight succinctly.
And again, this week's runners up:
That's the student diversity office crammed by the loading docks.
And that's the entrance to the new information commons, tricked out with gates, electronic entrance and "guards" at the info desk.
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