I took this double-exposure to see if I could make a visual point about an invisible reality in the spaces I now inhabit. I think it came through.
This house is one of the many dozens in this neighborhood that used to be governed by racially restricted covenants; whole blocks were redlined here, barring blacks, “asiatics,” and sometimes even “hebrews” from moving in. Some of these covenants were in place as late as the 1960s.
And that’s just the topsoil of a much deeper palimpsest of dispossession in this land. Our politics today are just the latest superimposition.
I’ve been reading about “the land” as an operating framework and object of ideology in the bible. It’s shocking how, the more you know your bible, the less any divinely ordained claim to a land covenant with anyone in particular makes any sense. The author identifies six ways the land is addressed. So that’s six ways the claim is made and remade, and they don’t all fit together.
Odd.
I pray that one day I’ll be able to go there and take photos like this and have to use in-camera tricks to illustrate my point there too: how there was once a landscape of dispossession in that land, now a substratum beneath a loam of liberation. We’ll puzzle over today like an ancient artifact, and we’ll promise each other: never again for anyone.