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# If I were a racist (Photographer’s Cut)
- URL: https://www.theblkgze.com/essays/if-i-were-a-racist-photographers-cut/
- Published: 2026-06-28T08:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T16:12:23.000Z
- Description: What if racism in photography does not always look like exclusion? Sometimes it looks like a syllabus, a canon, an archive or simply an accepted way of seeing.
- Author: Shaun Connell
- Tags: Essays

Dr Nathan Holder’s [If I Were a Racist](https://www.nateholdermusic.com/post/if-i-were-a-racist?ref=theblkgze.com), asks what racism looks like when it becomes ordinary: embedded in assumptions, institutions and habits rather than announced as hostility.

This is a photographic response to that idea. It borrows Holder’s structure to ask what racism might look like when it is built into the ways photography teaches us to look, value, preserve and remember.

If I were a racist,  
I'd teach children that photography is about  
Aperture, ISO and shutter speed.  
Everything else is politics.

If I were a racist,  
I'd teach photography as a universal language,  
Then make sure only certain voices  
Were fluent.

If I were a racist,  
I'd call photography neutral,  
Then decide  
What neutrality looks like.

If I were a racist,  
I'd teach the Masters as though they appeared fully formed,  
Without asking  
Who named them.

If I were a racist,  
I'd praise the canon,  
But never discuss  
How it was built.

If I were a racist,  
I'd teach "African photography"  
As a category,  
And European photography as photography.

If I were a racist,  
I'd celebrate one photographer from the continent,  
Then spend the rest of the semester  
Looking somewhere else.

If I were a racist,  
I'd call work from Europe timeless,  
And work from everywhere else  
Cultural.

If I were a racist,  
I'd describe photographs of white life  
As universal,  
And photographs of Black life as niche.

If I were a racist,  
I'd say documentary photography tells the truth,  
Without asking  
Who was allowed to speak.

If I were a racist,  
I'd teach photographs of empire,  
Without teaching  
How empire used photography.

If I were a racist,  
I'd discuss archives as though they were neutral,  
Not collections of choices  
And exclusions.

If I were a racist,  
I'd call it preservation  
When I saved my history,  
And ephemera when I saved yours.

If I were a racist,  
I'd write the history of photography  
As though everyone else  
Arrived late.

If I were a racist,  
I'd fund projects about Black communities,  
Provided the photographer  
Came from somewhere else.

If I were a racist,  
I'd photograph struggle endlessly,  
Then wonder why  
That's all I could see.

If I were a racist,  
I'd commission stories about resilience,  
As long as they remained  
Comfortably distant.

If I were a racist,  
I'd invite photographers into the room,  
After deciding  
What the room was for.

If I were a racist,  
I'd hire diverse talent,  
Then ask them to fit  
An existing vision.

If I were a racist,  
I'd believe access meant invitation,  
Not participation,  
Ownership or influence.

If I were a racist,  
I'd teach lighting for every skin tone,  
Then design every example  
Around one.

If I were a racist,  
I'd teach composition as balance,  
Without asking  
Who gets centred.

If I were a racist,  
I'd crop out context,  
Then call the image  
Objective.

If I were a racist,  
I'd never revisit my syllabus,  
My collection,  
My assumptions.

If I were a racist,  
I wouldn't need to exclude people.  
I'd simply teach generations  
What belonged.

If I were a racist,  
The frame wouldn't look white.  
It would look  
Normal.

The difficult thing about racism in photography is that it does not always look like exclusion.

Sometimes it looks like a syllabus. Sometimes it looks like a collection, a commissioning decision, a gallery wall or a definition of what counts as universal. Sometimes it looks like good practice that nobody has thought to question.

This is why changing who appears in the photograph is not enough. A photograph can become more diverse while the terms by which photography decides what matters remain intact.

The frame is larger than the rectangle. It includes the histories that taught us what to notice, the institutions that decide what is worth keeping, the language we use to describe photographs and the assumptions we stop noticing because they have become familiar.

That is what makes “normal” such a difficult word. It can describe what feels natural when, in fact, it is simply what we have encountered often enough to stop questioning.

The frame doesn't have to look white to carry the history of whiteness. It only has to make one way of seeing feel normal.

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