Project iPad
by Courtney Baker | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
On July 17, 2012, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a photograph depicting an eight-year-old black child named Michael Smith, Jr. holding an iPad as he sat on the stoop of the housing project where he lives. The photograph was printed to illustrate an article about the destruction of a public housing project and the attendant concerns that community members had about possible health dangers. One of the most disturbing circumstances, as highlighted by the article, was that many of the residents of Smith’s neighborhood had not been informed of the pending implosion by the city housing authority, but instead learned of it through news reports.
One resident, Lanetter Dorsey, drew her own conclusions as to the significance of this oversight: “"I keep saying, 'When are they going to come tell us something?'" said Lanetter Dorsey, 54, who is in poor health and doesn't feel comfortable staying inside her Iberville apartment during the implosion. "I guess they've decided we need to fend for ourselves," she said.”
For the black working class, fending for one’s self is a dangerous game. The project of “making do” that is a gold-star achievement under an ethos of austerity is frequently reconfigured in the public visual sphere as looting, stealing, or recklessly indulging when it is undertaken by poor black folks.
At the heart of the photograph of Smith with an (his?) iPad is the loaded question of what the poor deserve. A follow-up article reports that the initial coverage resulted in some state movement. Sort of. “Concerns about airborne particles prompted state officials to offer hotel rooms for residents who live within a 600-foot radius of the demolition site, but the Pallas Hotel and Iberville are separated by 725 feet.” Call it bad math or bad faith, but even the state seems unsure of whether or not the black poor deserve to have their health protected.
To the surprise of the newspaper’s editors, many of its readers were quite certain that Smith did not deserve an iPad. Wrote one reader, “I hope this is nothing more than someone gave him the iPad as a gift ... I hope I am not over thinking this. I am not prejudice [sic] – this just did not look right.” Clearly, there is a preferred narrative that this person wishes was attached to the image—a narrative that “looks right” in the context of the ‘hood.
The author of the follow-up piece responded laudably here, calling into question the “rightness” of the narrative sought and in so doing spoke to that underlying question of what the poor of color deserve: “The sight of a kid in public housing with an iPad doesn't offend me. Actually it gives me hope. So many poor people have no access to the digital world. They fall behind in school because of it. They miss the opportunity to apply for certain jobs. Yes an iPad is an expensive gadget, but we can't deny its usefulness. As computers go, an iPad comes cheaper than most laptops and desktops.”
All of these points seem right on—both as factually correct and as an insightful way of perceiving the eradication of poverty. The mention of the technology’s utility functions as an especially effective way to defuse the righteous and exclusive claims of the anonymous reader.
But more is at stake when we question what the African-American poor deserve. Particularly when we are speaking about government subsidized income and housing, especially in the United States, we are also speaking about a sense of ownership of the black working class. The rhetoric of deserving employs the toxic language of capitalist individualism that disavows the idea of collective reserves and resources. It is that same language—and that same logic—that spawned the image of the welfare queen and that continues to underwrite the dismissal of a national health care system. It is a language and logic system that treats the poor in general and the black poor especially as effective tenant farmers, as guests in a land who are not pulling their weight and have overstayed their welcome.
This thinking, however, is a trap, for it mistakes education and technology as solely the domain of the entitled. Per this logic, the black poor do not deserve to have anything but their own dispossession—no Air Jordans, no foreign language skills, no “free” food, no safe housing, and certainly no effective and reliable access to the digital tools of their self-enfranchisement. If we dare to think of Michael Smith as entitled to his iPad, we must also consider seriously his right to own himself and to represent himself—a twinned project that has everything to do with having secure access to the digital sphere.
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Courtney Baker is Assistant Professor of English at Connecticut College. A graduate of Harvard and Duke universities, she researches and writes on African-American visual culture and literature, death, and ethics. Her book, entitled Human Insight: Looking at Images of Black Death and Suffering, is forthcoming.
