I've been dragging the slides around since then.
The first reason I had for not scanning them is that I didn't have a flatbed scanner. Then I got a scanner. But I still didn't scan them for a few years. Not until this April actually.
Why did I wait so long? Maybe it's a variety of grief. My dad died in 1998. His mother, my favorite grandmother, died in 2001, a few months before 9/11 of a heart attack at home. In 2009, my great-aunt Marjorie died. She had kidney failure. She died at home; my sister and I did hospice care for her for the five weeks she lived after they took off dialysis.
I have a huge pile of photos from those deaths too.
They live in plastic boxes to keep them dry and safe. For some reason, this spring I could start looking at them and wanted to preserve them digitally. This is going to take ages.
But that's not what I wanted to write about.
What I wanted to write about is how ordinary these pictures are. They are often out of focus, have weird compositions, heads cut off, big expanses of beach sand with tiny people in the center. There are pictures of incredibly skinny Christmas trees. There's one of me in a bunny suit for Halloween.
These are the pictures that any family takes of time together. Times at the beach, when the kid is in a performance at school, going to the cemetery, going to a petting zoo or a historical place. Ordinary people taking ordinary pictures. Just family life in the middle of the 20th century.
So why are we invisible? The image of African American life in the 50s and sixties are of struggle, heroic bravery, resistance, and violence. There's the Montgomery Bus Boycott. There are the Freedom Rides. There's the March on Washington. There are the Panthers. There are Newark and Detroit burning. And all these thing happened. And all these things are important. But this is big history and most of us have small lives
The small, normal lives of African Americans don't get much play in the public mind. We're often pathologized or presented in the same tired stereotypes that have made Tyler Perry a very rich man. We're assumed to be so outside mainstream American life that a commenter on a blog is surprised that a black guy is a Bon Jovi fan. Or people are surprised that we're geeks or sf readers or cosplayers or resounding ordinary.
Last month there was a #blackprivilege on Twitter. It was sad and funny. A ton of black people of all sorts of ages tweeted their experiences of being treated like some rare beast. A scary beast. A stupid beast. A serving beast, but nothing human. For all the changes since I was a kid, and believe me there have been a ton, there's still a way that the most American of Americans, African Americans, aren't seen as part of the mainstream, as unremarkable and unremarked.
