Guilt Empathy And Reason How Photojournalism Supported The Civil Rights Movement

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7, University of Paderborn, language: English, abstract: The African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s can be seen as one of the major events in America’s history that fundamentally changed its entire society. In one of the most liberal countries in the world that defeated fascism and fought against communism, people of different ethnicity were still treated differently. While white people enjoyed all the rights, black people were excluded from public places, did not have the right to vote and were punished more severely than their fellow citizens. But the African American population stood up against these kinds of suppression and segregation in the middle of the 20th century and fought for their rights, especially with the help of their leading figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Malcolm X. Even if they could eventually achieve some of their goals such as the abolition of segregated buses or the right to vote, their peaceful movement was most of the times violently stopped by policemen and white civilians. Due to this unequal fight, the blacks’ demands and sufferings captured more and more the media’s attention and were documented especially through photography. This photography had a high impact on how the Civil Rights Movement was perceived all over the country and, as a consequence, indirectly helped the protestors in their plans. Interestingly enough, it is remarkable that nearly all these printed photographs show the Movement in a way that was unknown to people so that special emotions towards black people and the own behaviors were evoked: empathy and guilt. This then led to a new debate about racial discrimination and civil rights. In this term paper I will therefore examine in more detail in which way photojournalism supported the African American Civil Rights Movement. I will start by giving a short overview of photojournalism and its effects on society. Then, I will continue by analyzing different types of photographs of the Civil Rights Movement that evoke feelings of empathy and guilt. For this purpose I will describe one exemplary photograph for each category and explain how influenced society. Finally, a conclusion with possibilities to expand the topic will follow.

“Seeing Through Race is an indispensable and highly original account of how white Americans understood and remembered the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Berger shows us why photography was so central to civil rights, and his readings of iconic images are always penetrating and at times brilliant. His central argument, that whites wanted to be in charge of the movement, is complemented with rich insights on almost every page. It should be required reading for anyone interested in protest movements.” —John Stauffer, Chair of the History of American Civilization and Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University “The fervor of the 1960s civil rights movement may seem outdated by now, but terrible scenes enacted on the streets of Selma and Birmingham are preserved in the mass of surviving news photographs. Martin Berger argues that these pictures were never simple visual documents. By awakening the nation to the horrific violence of fire hoses and attack dogs, they defined what was meant by “civil rights movement.” Always engaging in its narrative as well as in its analytical and theoretical discourse, Seeing through Race is a stunning achievement both as history and as criticism.” —Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Gray, Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Communications - Journalism, Journalism Professions, grade: 5,0 => 1,0 (s. Anm.), University of Helsinki (Communications), course: Current Issues in Journalism, language: English, abstract: The Mohammed cartoons, torture photos from Abu Ghraib, videos from school shooting, and pictures from dead bodies in the London terrorist attacks taken by other victims are visual contents that we all had to deal with in the last years. The discussions on the changes for journalists caused by digitalization are ubiquitous. But mostly they focus on decreasing readership numbers, how to reconnect with the public, and on grassroots journalism. Ethical questions usually are concerned with issues such as tabloidization, sensationalism, and emotionalization- in short, quality loss in journalism. Journalistic codes are updated and adapted to the new demands. Other societal debates concentrate on possible negative influences of pictures in news media, video games, music videos, and such- usually containing violence and/or sex. But there is a lack of discourse on ethical challenges concerning photojournalism. During or after a tragedy like school shootings there is lots of talk but the ferocity of those arguments is neither reflected in professional debates of journalists on ethics in photojournalism nor in journalistic codes. However, those issues are gaining importance proportional to the rising significance cameras, picture taking, and visual media in people’s lives. This essay therefore is summarizing current debates about journalism ethics, focusing on visual media. Those issues are illustrated with two examples: the Mohammed cartoon-incident and school shootings at the Virginia Tech University, USA and in Jokela, Finland. The question to be answered is what problems exist concerning ethical issues in photojournalism and how they possibly could be improved.

A surprising, sweeping, and deeply researched history of empathy—from late-nineteenth-century German aesthetics to mirror neurons†‹ Empathy: A History tells the fascinating and largely unknown story of the first appearance of “empathy” in 1908 and tracks its shifting meanings over the following century. Despite empathy’s ubiquity today, few realize that it began as a translation of Einfühlung or “in-feeling” in German psychological aesthetics that described how spectators projected their own feelings and movements into objects of art and nature. Remarkably, this early conception of empathy transformed into its opposite over the ensuing decades. Social scientists and clinical psychologists refashioned empathy to require the deliberate putting aside of one’s feelings to more accurately understand another’s. By the end of World War II, interpersonal empathy entered the mainstream, appearing in advice columns, popular radio and TV, and later in public forums on civil rights. Even as neuroscientists continue to map the brain correlates of empathy, its many dimensions still elude strict scientific description. This meticulously researched book uncovers empathy’s historical layers, offering a rich portrait of the tension between the reach of one’s own imagination and the realities of others’ experiences.