Harvard’s framing of Agassiz’s photographs obscured their racist purpose

Evidence

The conference program, which was also adorned with Renty’s image, contained a description of the photograph that took Ms. Lanier’s breath away: The man you see on the program’s front cover, Renty, lived and worked as a slave in South Carolina in 1850, when his photograph was taken for the Harvard professor Louis Agassiz as a part of Agassiz’s scientific research. While Agassiz earned acclaim, Renty returned to invisibility. … Harvard conspicuously omits the nature of Agassiz’s work—even having the gall to characterize the photograph as a part of “scientific research” rather than a racist and dehumanizing crusade—and implies that Agassiz had rightfully “earned acclaim” for his work. … Even more insidiously, Harvard relegates Renty to “invisibility,” in flagrant disregard for Ms. Lanier’s repeated attempts to share Renty’s story and restore a measure of the humanity that Agassiz stripped from him. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 1128

Categorization

• QUESTION: The word ‘invisibility’ recurs through the case — worth tracing how Harvard’s own conference rhetoric deployed the exact language of erasure Lanier fought against.