🎧 Episode 42: My White Friends (Seeing White, Part 12) | Scene on Radio

Listened to Episode 42: My White Friends (Seeing White, Part 12) by John Biewen from Scene on Radio

For years, Myra Greene had explored blackness through her photography, often in self-portraits. She wondered, what would it mean to take pictures of whiteness? For her friends, what was it like to be photographed because you’re white? With another conversation between host John Biewen and series collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika.

Photo: Matt Geesaman, Chicago, 2009. By Myra Greene.

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[transcript]

There’s term in marketing and advertising called markedness. Markedness says, that which is marked is different, that which is unmarked is normal.

—Deena Hayes-Green, of the Racial Equality Institute

It’s interesting to see this word “marked” defined in a modern advertising sense and comparing it with the word “stamped” in the quote “The ‘inequality of the white and black races’ was ‘stamped from the beginning'” from Jefferson Davis on April 12, 1860 on the floor of the U.S. Senate as quoted by Ibram X. Kendi in his book Stamped from the Beginning.

So now you’re combining Frisbee and golf. I mean, how much whiter can you get than that?!

—John Biewen, host of Seeing White