Picture This

Before leaving for college, I saw something my little sister got in the mail, and it really made me think.  It was a brochure for an all girl’s private high school in Louisville, Kentucky.  On the front was a picture of an African American girl, an Asian girl, a tan girl with dark brown hair, and a girl with pale skin and flaming red hair, all sitting together on a field, wearing their plaid skirts, and laughing.  I myself attended an all girl’s private high school, and I can tell you with full honesty that this is not what those schools look like on the inside.  Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved my high school experience and everyone that was a part of it, but this depiction is quite inaccurate.

               

My graduating class (and the graduating class of this brochure’s school as well) was made up of primarily upper-middle class, blond-haired, white girls.  And while I grew up with the label “basic white girl” for attending such a school, I was able to concede that the people saying this weren’t necessarily wrong.  With only three Asians and five African Americans in my graduating class of 235, I pretty much existed in a solely white world.

                

So, this makes me wonder why these advertisements work to make the school look as those it is racially diverse.  I remember my friend Rachel, whose dad is Asian and whose mom is white, telling me that she was asked to stay after school one day for a photoshoot for a pamphlet cover.  After asking around, I discovered my friend Tarryn, whose parents are both immigrants from Nicaragua, was also asked to stay.  I was curious as to how they decided who would represent the school in these photos, and I remember thinking both Rachel and Tarryn are extremely smart, well-rounded students.  They, however, had a different theory.  “It’s because I’m Asian,” Charlotte said, “It happens to me all the time.  They just want to make the school look diverse.”  She didn’t say it in a way that was bitter at all, but you could tell she knew exactly what was up.

It makes me wonder: why are schools, institutions, and businesses hiding behind photographs? Why are they using people of other races to make them “look” integrated instead of actually integrating themselves?  Representations should be just that: accurately representative of the whole.  If a place is filled with predominantly blond-haired, teenage girls, isn’t that what the photographs should depict?  If photographers and people in advertising are going out of their way to make it seem like there isn’t a problem with diversity, then they obviously realize that the problem exists.  Instead of trying to blanket over it with inaccurate photographs and representations, I say they go out there and do something about it.  Make those photos a reality.  Picture this: a world where integration doesn't solely exist in staged photographs.