Skip to main content

Reflection on “A Plaintiff Speaks,” by Clarissa T. Sligh

A Plaintiff Speaks” is an autobiographical reflection on the influences of mid 20th century racial attitudes in the formation of the author’s own creative vision. The story is transports the reader back to Washington DC at a time when the nation is struggling with rectifying a national injustice rooted in Plessy v. Ferguson, and dramatically altered by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.


To Americans living in the era of the Obama Presidency the Washington DC of 1955-1956 must seem like an alien land. Washington DC has always been a city fixed on the border between north and south, a pawn in the struggle of national ideas. Now a predominantly African American city, it had entered the Civil War a city full of slaves. On April 16, 1862, President Lincoln signed an act abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, months before the Emancipation Proclamation issued on January 1, 1863. Not a state, but a Federal District, even today the people of DC are denied the benefits of statehood and self-rule.


At the center of Clarissa Sligh’s recollection is the impact of pictures. As a 16-year-old African American she found herself entangled in the struggle for equality in Clarissa Thompson et al. v. The Arlington School Board et al. Her recollections of how she was portrayed in pictures in a Washington Post article about her case illustrate the power of pictures. Her own perception of her own images used in the article, is that they betrayed her cause for equity.


A subtle dance of emotive consequences is portrayed in her reaction to her own portrait. She becomes a photographer as a result of her own transformation by photography. She gives herself a life mission of using images as a means to help the viewer become aware of how photographs are really abstract constructions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflections on “Stalking with Stories,” from Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache by Keith A. Basso.

Keith A. Basso finds embedded in the the language of the Western Plains' Native Americans a memory code of place tied to stories. Human memory is often organized in associative patters. Different cultures have different depths of association based on their interactions with their environment and their means of producing food, shelter, and clothing. The Inuits, who live in the Arctic have many words for snow; modern technical fields have their own complex jargon; language morphs to reflect the underlying complexity of the daily interaction of the individual with his or her environment. Basso illustrates how the traditional hunter gatherers of North America formed a rich linguistic bond between their culture and the spaces they occupied. What perhaps is most surprising in Basso's telling is the incredible detail and richness of the prescriptive association. His research into the the rich linguistic depths of the Western Apache reveals a form of thought that seems alien to the we...
1 comment
Read more

A Reflection on Anne Frances Wysock’s English 202

Current archeological theory puts the origins of writing in Mesopotamia over six thousand years age. It is hypothesized that the first symbols where clay tokens used to account for products used in agricultural trade. Somewhere along the line an entrepreneur started using a reed stylus to mark inventory down on a piece of clay. From these mundane origins as a primitive spreadsheet, cuneiform writing evolved. A surprising number of cuneiform writings have transition themselves to the digital age. The Internet is a hungry information beast, devouring Cuneiform, Sanskrit, Aramaic, Hebrew, Mayan, Latin, Greek, Demonic … any text from any era, be it on clay tablets, stone, papyrus, bamboo, frescos, or paper. An insatiable cavernous void in mind of humanity demands to be filled with knowledge. Reading transforms writing into knowledge that fills the void. What is writing? Writing is a noun that is a verb. Writing is an act of transmitting thought through an intermediate media. What parts do...
Post a Comment
Read more