Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial

Today the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C. was dedicated. This was the picture that accompanied the story about it on The New York Times website. The caption of the picture read, "Audience members sang during the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial dedication ceremony on Sunday." There are several parts of this image that hit me right away.

The first being that there are only two or three white people in this picture and they are out of focus on the far end of the line of "audience members". Now, Dryer would tell me that my "whiteness" is the reason why the first thing I noticed was the lack of people of my same skin color and I can't say that he is wrong. I would like to say that it's because I specifically was looking to see if there were any white people in it, but I think we all know that's not true. I think that the editor's choice to use this picture is sending a very clear cultural and political message. This picture is signifying to the reader that the only people who showed up for the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial were, for the most part, African American. Now, despite whether that may or may not have been the truth, anyone who looks at this picture is going to think that. If they are white then their "whiteness" will tell them that "of course there were mostly African Americans there because those are MLK Jr.'s people". The editor of The New York Times perhaps inadvertently, through what I am assuming is the editor's "whiteness", or maybe intentionally is reinforcing African American stereotypes and Dryer's theory of "whiteness".

The second thing that drew my attention was that the caption said these "audience members" were singing. This seemed like an even more blatant action of reinforcing stereotypes and "whiteness" because the first thing that came to my mind is the story of how "soul" music came about. "Soul" music is supposed to have started in the cotton fields of the south by the African American slaves all singing together while they picked cotton. (Something interesting to note relating to Dryer's theory of "whiteness", I almost just typed slaves implying that all slaves were African American, which is the same idea as only specifying someone's ethnicity if they are not white.) Knowing this relation between large groups of African American's singing and slavery, the caption of this photo along with the image of mouths open and emotional faces is drawing a not too subtle line to slavery. The editor is drawing out white people's "whiteness" with this photo and is making them think "of course the African American people are singing; that's just what they do when they get together in large groups".

This photo is essentializing African Americans, reinforcing society's stereotypes, and even proving Dryer's theory of "whiteness". The editor of The New York Times chose this picture for many reasons, however, either he/she was not aware of the power that the media holds and couldn't see all of the cultural implications of this image and the caption or he/she was attempting to use the power of the media to send both of those messages. Our world has already been constructed for white people to think lesser of ethnic minorities and for white people to think that you must be African American to engage in any sort of public demonstration by them. I don't think that The New York Times editor needs to be using his/her power to reinforce these constructions. Only cultural studies can show you how this image taken at the dedication ceremony for the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is full of raced bodies, which the media is using to reinforce the social constructions that MLK Jr. was fighting against and the whole reason he got such a grand memorial.