Christopher Cervantes

People have a funny way about looking at the past. Whenever a subject associated with a positive event is brought up, there is always an air of reverence about it all. Conversely, whenever there is an incident of negative association, no on seems to want to talk about it. At most, they resort to using the tired line of “thank goodness things are better now,” as if that’s all that is needed to just skip over anything involving the harsh realities of the past. For the most part, it gets accepted as such.

Sometimes, things can’t be ignored though.

The University of Iowa is hosting a special exhibit in the Old Capitol titled THEM: Images of Separation. It catalogues various works, ranging from propaganda to toys, which show some type of discriminatory feature. Subjects include racism, sexism, homophobia, religious discrimination, and cultural discrimination, and the time frame during which the works were created ranges from the 1800s to as recently as 2005.

I went to see the exhibit, and the feeling of it was practically overwhelming. I was not the only one like this, though. Throughout the room, people felt similar with what I felt.

University of Iowa student Fi-Fi Hassan was with me that day. She said she “thought the exhibit was very educational; it gave us a chance to really see all the cruel things that happened in the past, and I also learned that some of the discrimination still happens around us.”

Out of all the displays, the two most worrisome involved a collection of toys modeled after various stereotypes, each of which has a voice box that spouts out dialogue that might as well come from a 1920s minstrel show and a shirt that advocates for racial infanticide in order to bring down the crime rate. All of these were made in the 21st century.

Obviously, we have come far, passing the days of Mammy memorabilia and the Jim Crow legacy. But in reality, this type of ideology never fully changes. Oh, it may displace itself, with the quantity of hate fluctuating depending on the area, but it never fully changes.

Our country has been working to end discriminatory policies for a long time. It would be foolish to not acknowledge the progress we have made, but it is just as foolish to act as if everything is perfectly utopian.

The actual beauty of THEM: Images of Separation, is that we get to see how deep and subtle discrimination goes. There are some points where you think, “That doesn’t seem so bad,” but another will make you think something along the lines of “how disgustingly awful, how could this exist?”

In 2013, Oprah Winfrey controversially said, “There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it — in that prejudice and racism — and they just have to die.” As harsh and as slightly extreme as that sounds, she does have a point.

Some ideologies need to simply die out. Until that happens, all we can really do is be more aware of what is occurring in modern culture. But that’s only step one. Step two is harder to figure out.