Applying the Philosophy of Photography and Washington’s Style of Rhetoric to Seeing What’s Been Sown
Open Access DepositedInside the Indirection of Booker T. Washington
Being the Confessions of a Yankee. Toward the end of his life, he strategically interacted with eugenicists, for the purpose of undermining the cultural bias embedded within their field. This strategy was carried forward by his successor, Robert Russa Moton, who oversaw the start of Tuskegee’s eugenics and syphilis experiments. Washington positioned himself in a backstage position, premeditating on what his audience would see and hear. Indirection was his survivalist strategy. Rather than speaking in his own words and voice, he used content that his audience was aware of so that any negative responses would aim at the sources rather than at him. When looking from the inside and through the lens he’d constructed, it becomes possible to reap many of the things he’d sown, that have sat unrecognized in African American history.
11 of the Bible for the purpose of acknowledging the allusion to it that Washington made in his statement about the black community being “more fittingly and generously recognized.” This also shows that Du Bois was well aware of the Bible’s messages. During the time of this speech, and continuing throughout his life, the use of a broad range of sciences, like agriculture, palm-reading, phrenography, and eugenics, became components within Washington’s visual and literary methods of indirect communication. In 1905 he worked with the phrenophysicist Edgar Charles Beall to combat the extreme critique in Stanton Becker Von Grabill’s book Letters From Tuskegee
Information hidden, rather than erased, becomes planted in the periphery. When information sits unseen for long periods of time, society can become unaware of how that absence has shaped their knowledge. The social epistemology of Booker T. Washington has been shaped by many apertures. He worked with the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston to make pictures that prioritized the tangible items in the scenes, like the architectural and electrical engineering taught at Tuskegee Institute, but due to the camera’s aperture, his intended message at times became cropped out of view. The philosophy of photography is applied to studying his archives, his books, and writings about him, because it is a philosophy that insists on investigating their structure and functionality. His archives contain the unpublished work of biographers who were trying to decipher his complexity. As his papers were transferred from Tuskegee Institute to the Library of Congress his archives became an aperture almost as complex as he was. Studying the structure and function of his photography, his archives, and his rhetorical style are tools to see what’s resulted from what has been known and unknown about him. In his 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address, he intentionally used non-specific words like “miscellaneous” and “nothing,” to indirectly point out things that most of his audience members were already aware of. He subtly quoted the work of creative writers like William Shakespeare, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Sam Walter Foss. He subtly quoted the Bible in ways that can be seen in the celebratory letter that Du Bois wrote to him, describing the speech as “a word fitly spoken.” Du Bois was quoting Proverbs 25
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