I’d like to approach racism, which I have developed throughout this article, from a perspective and terrain familiar to me. Photography and storytelling are subjects that I’m passionate about and have been how I make a living through this project.

If we use the narrative tool again, telling stories and creating characters not only for clients. I think it’s fascinating how this is something we do daily, without having to work professionally on it. Telling stories is inherent to human nature, we’ve been doing it for centuries and it has been a great way to maintain the knowledge that we have generated, whether in writing or orally.

Although the techniques mentioned above have been formalized, we already spoke of villains or threats and had protagonists and antagonists. I’m not sure about dichotomies, but this topic could also sparkle another whole article.

There’s another relevant point that I haven’t dug yet. Who tells the stories? Who’s the voice of the stories? Who narrates the stories that we tell ourselves internally? This is where the criticism of hegemony comes in handy. The white voice that we hear in that dominance of stories, the white perspective that shows a white man as a hero, is the same voice that we tend to unconsciously replicate by convention or muscle memory. That’s what makes it hegemonic. I say this from a mestizo/white perspective, which is my reality. It is also important to mention that I cannot appropriate or talk about how black and/or racialized people tell stories in their heads because that’s not my reality.

And yet, a step further, even when the characters within the stories and who are part of them are not white; Is it a white person telling that story? This specific point is delicate because, even with the best intentions, if we want to tell a story that we do not know thoroughly, but superficially; We’ll probably tell it from a privileged perspective, idealizing other realities according to ours, making mistakes, inaccuracies and, even worse, using our platforms to spread our perception in the pursuit of benefit under the discourse of the good to those we choose to be in our stories.

We don’t know or have experienced the struggles that others have faced for centuries from this monster that strives to disappear them. I like to see it in terms of analogies: We are part of that monster that wants to erase them. So I think it takes a lot of humility to recognize it and then a lot of work to counter it.

In the same way that we tell stories through our work, we photograph people, but we also show ourselves to society, audiences, clients in certain ways, which also counts as storytelling.

The eugenicism that the colonizing discourse defines: The people we enslave and those we dominate are inferior. They’re not capable of developing or take care of themselves. So they need us to save them. This terrible conception gives rise to a character that I have met in my experience (and I have to admit that I’ve also replicated): The white savior.

At the beginning of this text, I used the example of cynical racists who accept, inadvertently or openly, their racism and contempt for racialized people. This character represents a villain in a context that is aware of racist expressions, in addition to the possibility of virality offered by social media. We pay attention to these obvious characters.

But in terms of racism, I find other characters more harmful; those characters who are not villains, or at least not the face they show. Villains disguised as benefactors, heroes, saviors; the storytelling configuration in which we live magnifies them. That white person who gives up their privileges to dedicate their life -or free time- to saving poor indigenous or black people, who cannot fend for themselves and continue to depend on us. The problem with this character and the worship of his archetype is that makes invisible the real problem. A sector of society that has been displacing, impoverishing, and killing another for centuries; stealing and plagiarizing their culture without proper retribution.

What is truly horrible about that story, in addition to the character, is the machinery that validates them and, as I said above, glorifies them. That engine and context seem more dangerous to me than the racist villain character who is only one more head of that hydra. That’s my most lucid way of defining racism because we all privileged people are part of that beast. Not only the influencer that we use as a scapegoat to wash away our guilt and responsibility within the society where we live. It’s not only about stopping discrimination but also about unlearning how we read people and beauty, the way we perceive ourselves personally. To have a lot of self-criticism about the judgments that we have made and that we continue to make. Stop glorifying or demonizing people based on their skin color or their accent.
It’s also important to rethink how we perceive ourselves when we tell stories; try to imagine other realities in those stories that we tell in our heads and the world. And when we are privileged white/mestizo people; How do we approach racialized people? Do we respect them when we tell their stories, or is it just patronization? What benefit do people get from our work? What benefit do we get from that work? What story are we telling and from what narratives? From which perspectives? Do we really know the reality that our models/characters have to face every day?

If you got this far, thank you very much, it’s a lot of text, and I understand that reading so much on the screen is heavy. If you have any comments to add to this discussion, please use the contact form to send me your impressions, conclusions, and comments about it. I know there are many questions to close an article. I want to leave it open for now, aiming to write a second article related to this and having a more specialized focus on photography and content creation.

Do you dedicate yourself to photography and content creation and also work with socially disadvantaged projects, people, or communities and want to add instead of causing harm? Follow me on my networks. I’ll be posting about the new updates to this content there.