Racist daguerreotypes ironically immortalized the enslaved people they demeaned

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

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — an instrument built to degrade preserved its subjects as humans — is a genuinely dense thought worth sitting with.
• XREF: Speaks to the afterlife of images of the enslaved and photographic immortality, relevant to broader debates about displaying such images.