(This image is from photographer Wing Young Huie's blog under the category "We are the Other (2012-2013). Click here to check out more of his work, and click here to see this photo on his website.)
At first glance, what I noticed was the two people sitting at the wooden table with chalk boards holding messages, presumably written by the person holding them. When I first read the boards, I assumed that the only messages the boards had were the ones written on them. By this I mean that I thought the boy holding the board on the right side of the picture had chronic depression and was making a statement that depression was more than just sadness. The girl holding the chalk board to the left of the boy, at first glance, merely appears to be saying that she prefers to be called African-American over the term "black." I notice the picture is in black and white, possibly to highlight contrast in shade or to emphasize a duality of light and dark, white and black. I notice the boy looks exhausted with his arm on the table and his head in his hand, which could emphasize his comment on depression. The girl has a serious facial expression, and is sitting straight up, which may be because she feels passionate about what wrote on her board.
While these assumptions may be correct, I was not able to draw connections between the words on the two boards and the between the two people until I looked deeper into the words and the colors of this photograph. Upon closer inspection, the phrases "I'm not black, I'm African-American" and "I have depression, I'm not sad" appear similar in structure, using a negative and a positive independent clause. Each phrase represents societal misinterpretations of the issue it is discussing. In this case, the girl is making a statement on race, and the boy is making a statement on awareness for mental illness. Both boards represent common phrases used by society to generalize a group into a certain classification. In the case of the girl, the term "black" is used to generalize any person of African descent or with dark skin tone, and in the boy's case "sad" is used to generalize the symptoms of depression. Both of these generalizations degrade the meaning of the original word, and have been over used to the point of not having as much meaning when used in society.
The use of black and white imagery on the chalk boards represents this duality in society, where issues such as mental illness and race have created two sides of people. Each has created an "us versus them" mentality on the two sides of the conversation, where one side is right and one side is wrong. However, other areas of the picture have shades of gray between black and white, representing that in some areas of life, society allows for compromise and a blend of ideas, while the issues on the board remain black and white, they remain divided.
In Huie's photograph, "othering" is presented through the use of black and white colors to represent the duality of society on controversial issues. In this image, the chalk board are black and white to show that these issues of race and mental illness have no "gray area" in society. There are two sides, and they have created an "us versus them" mentality, as stated above. This divides people into groups, and pits one against the other. "Othering" is also presented by showing how mental illness and race is perceived by society, where depression is generalized as "sad" and "African-American" is generalized as "black." This is presented by using similar sentence structure between the two boards, with one positive and one negative independent clause for each.
In The Haidmaid's Tale, the idea of "us versus them" is not present like it is in Huie's photograph. Rather, the presented mentality is "us with them," where both the women and the men appear to be "trapped" by the ideals of the Republic of Gilead. Offred presents the Ceremony as work, as a task that both the Commander, her, and the Commander's Wife must suffer through together. Atwood presents this through the concept of "duty" and "roles" of different groups in society. This idea is reinforced by the government through the classification of Handmaid's as a job position. By classifying everything, from the Ceremony, to the Prayvaganzas as work, they force all members of the society to act and person these "duties" in a certain way. Thus, everyone in the society is suffering together through the Republic of Gilead, creating the "us with them" mentality of the women suffering alongside the men.
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