We all see things through our own tinted lenses. We can’t change that but if we are aware of it, we can make adjustments by virtue of our knowledge base. The following story is a demonstration of that: “A black man entered a restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona and notices a picture hanging on the wall of a group of coal miners who had recently gotten off work. Naturally their faces were black from the coal dust, or soot in the mines. The picture on the wall happened to be a ‘still scene’ from the motion picture titled, “Birth of a nation” from 1915. The black man was immediately offended assuming that these men had purposely painted their faces black, mocking black people. He asked the restaurant owner to take the picture down, which he refused. After a lengthy explanation the black man was pacified. Black faces, born to mock or to make fun of, are naturally offensive, but miners with soot on their faces by virtue of their work are not. They, too, are victims. Let us not forget minors worked long hours for pennies in the unsafest of conditions. That soot on their faces also lined their lungs, killing many at far too young an age, leaving their families without an income. Ignorance of the unknown was the only thing offensive in that story.” When a business displays a picture of men with blackened faces, that culturally, says to a black person, ‘Whites Only’ from the genuinely evil days of segregation. It says, people like him, are not welcome. If the photograph is left up, it should have a title note on it explaining what it represents in order to avoid first and false impressions.
An article, in the The New York Times, noted that Mary Poppins might well be a racist as well. Mary Poppins had soot on her face during the scene where she and the chimney cleaners were black faced from the soot. Those making these accusations were apparently serious writers but whose limited backgrounds made them unable to evaluate what the pictures actually represented.
I remember attending a play many years ago. It was billed as a mystery play where members of the audience were to determine, ‘Who did it?’ The play went on for about twenty minutes and after the last scene, the producer came out on the stage and questioned the audience as to who they thought was the culprit. There were as many answers from the audience as there were actors on the stage. The play was conceived in such a way as to be confusing and to make every actor appear guilty at some point in the production. Then they demonstrated why, by replaying certain scenes over, showing how the innocent actors were made to appear guilty and how the real guilty person sometimes appeared innocent. As I recall only a few of the audience members got the guilty one correct and that was most likely a ‘lucky guess’. We each are very selective in choosing what, from our environment, we are going to see: to evaluate, and to then put back into our minds and memories before we go on to something else. For example: looking at a scene, my eyes will be drawn to one portion of the scene and my wife’s eyes may be drawn to another. She may ask me if I saw the thing she saw and my response may very well be, “No!” She may even be disturbed with me for not opening my eyes to what she was seeing. Our eyes are directed to things, in a scene or picture, that is most comforting, startling or attractive to us as individuals. Two people will see the same thing and concentrate on the same thing, only if, it is something in the picture that they have mentally in common. For example, if we are looking at a picture of our mutual family members or a picture of our only child. Then our eyes, our hearts and our minds are in sinc. We will then be seeing the same thing; we will experience common emotions.