Imagery made to prove Black inferiority instead immortalized its subjects

Evidence

At the end of her article she writes, “Agassiz’s theory was discredited by the mid-1860s, but the daguerreotypes survived; and it’s ironic that these pictures, made to demonstrate the inferiority of their subjects, instead conferred a kind of immortality on the men and women we only know as Renty and Delia, Jem and Jack. It was no consolation for the humiliation they endured both as slaves and objects of scientific curiosity, but a rare gain for those who now encounter these people as memorably real survivors of a painful epoch.” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 749

Categorization

• DEFINE: Reframes what it means to “survive” slavery—survival through being made memorably real in an image, a reframing Lanier adopts despite its disturbing irony.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘On Sacrifice’-style thinking about who is granted memory versus erased—the daguerreotypes, unlike the Lindow Man or Ur tombs, ironically give the enslaved subjects a kind of permanence their enslavers intended for other purposes.
• XREF: connects to: Black intellectuals reworked feminized racial stereotypes into a defiant positive self-image — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 669