Dear Editor,
Emancipation Day 2023 and there is an image of a Black woman on your front page, in torment. There is a twisting of the body, and later on we see inside your paper that the police have arrested her for manslaughter – the back story being that she is accused of stabbing a man who ‘playfully’ hugged her from behind after the man pinched her.
This image as we know of other images of Black bodies resisting slavery, being accused of crimes which are no longer crimes. Are there other images, which reflect emancipation which can show this story? Would the images be of the woman with a lawyer, a legal advocate, mental health support? A timeline of her life to the night when people watched the interaction turn violent? No image at all?
Yours sincerely,
Vidyaratha Kissoon