Ours is a culture driven by optics. Look at the popularity of apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, and to a lesser extent Facebook. In fact, Snapchat boasts that it provides “the fastest way to share a moment.”
In our public discourse oftentimes we make decisions based on the optics of the moment. Optics are powerful because they are void largely of nuance, they provide a visceral image, offering an emotional appeal.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy went from lukewarm spectator to overt civil rights proponent in a mere six months because of the optics of children being attacked on the streets of Birmingham by police dogs and high-pressured waters hoses. And the nation followed Kennedy’s impulse.
Before the television coverage of the police dogs and water hoses, 4 percent, according to Gallup, felt civil rights was a national concern, but after the coverage that number climbed overnight to 52 percent.
This brings me to the optics of immigration. Immigration under President Trump is an issue that appeals to his base. It was one of his core campaign issues.
According to Vox, between October 1, 2017 and May 31, 2018, at least 2,700 children have been split from their parents. 1,995 of them were separated over the last six weeks of that window — April 18 to May 31 — indicating that at present, an average of 45 children are taken daily.
President Donald Trump repeatedly blamed Democrats for the separation of families at the US border. When the optics show small children in cages akin to a petting zoo, if the primary talking point in response is “Democrats did it too,” it probably means one has lost control of the story.
“The Democrats forced that law upon our nation,” Trump recently told reporters. “I hate it. I hate to see separation of parents and children. The Democrats can come to us as they actually are in all fairness, we are talking to them, and they can change the whole border security.”
The president can blame whomever he wants, but the optics vociferously provides a counter narrative that is more compelling.
According to a recent CBS poll, only 17 percent approve of separating children from parents who enter the U.S. illegally at the southern border, the policy is supported by 36 percent of Republicans.
This, in my view, reflects the power of optics. From children being brutalized in Birmingham to bodies returning to Dover Air Force Base from Vietnam to torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, optics can sway and cement public opinion faster than other methods.
Optics are more powerful than justifying perceived callousness with selected biblical passages, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions sought to do recently with his understanding of Romans 13. This is particularly glaring should one juxtapose any biblical passage to justify separating children from their parents with Matthew 25:40: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”
But there is no scripture that can successfully justify one’s morality when pitted against the image that recently went viral of a 2-year-old girl crying while U.S. boarder agents patted down her mother. The optics may verbalize this is the face of the administration’s “no tolerance” policy.
In an attempt to quell the backlash, the president signed an executive order that would stop families from being separated at the border. But the optics of separating children remain.
It is a visual of how far the administration was willing to go to keep a campaign promise to a small slice of the American electorate.
The optics of children being separated from their families place the president in a precarious political situation. The notion of family separation reflects America at its darkest. A civil war was waged because of an institution that sustained itself in part because of legalized family separation. It is something that most Americans find naturally revolting.
Right or wrong, fair or unfair most Americans will side with the optics that pulls at their moral heartstrings over any political talking point.
The lesson Kennedy realized when the world saw the optics of children being brutally attacked by police on the streets of Birmingham bears repeating: America cannot hold moral standing globally with the optics that currently appears on its southern border.
Does any this suggest the president’s political fortunes have been permanently damaged? Who knows?
What we do know, while there are exceptions, rarely in American politics does one’s political fortunes hinge on whether they are egregious to others. Such outrage is usually reserved for our personal grievances.
Rev. Byron Williams is one of the leading public theologians in the nation. He is a columnist, author, and adjunct professor at Wake Forest University. He is also host of the NPR-affiliated broadcast The Public Morality. He is the author of Strip Mall Patriotism, 1963: The Year of Hope and Hostility, and the forthcoming The Radical Declaration: An Enlightened Ideal Learn more >
“Living in the south now, my observation is that whites do NOT LIKE blacks, and the feeling is mutual”??
Mutual? There is no mutual disfranchisement or mutual cops shooting your kids.
There is no mutual over-incarceration or mutual under-education.
“The feeling” (of Not Liking) can’t POSSIBLY be “mutual” because in one direction
the CAUSE of the feeling is BIGOTRY and in the other it is brute oppression.
The white people are IN CHARGE and to the extent that black people do
not like them, it is because of WHAT THEY *DID*AND*DO* with their power
and NOT just because they are white. White people canNOT POSSIBLY have
any mutual or reciprocal similar complaint about black people because
black people do NOT have the power to order&run this state.
More to the point, at a statewide level, the Democratic party in this state
is still majority white, despite the fact that all the black people are in it.
This proves mathematically that there is clearly a third of the white population
of the state that likes black people just fine, fine enough even to vote for them
or be represented by them. Obviously there cannot be any mutual dislike by
black people of the 1/3 of the state’s white people that like us enough to work
and vote WITH us.
If that was your observation from “living in the south now”, then you really
haven’t been here long enough yet, and you need to get out more.
what pray tell do thing I’m missing?
The part I think you are missing is that the pictures also make a lie out of Trump claiming they are animals. The pictures say that they are people just like us. Have you also forgotten that the defense of slavery was that blacks were not human, they were animals? This is a riff rump is also trying to revive.
Living in the south now, my observation is that whites do NOT LIKE blacks, and the feeling is mutual
I am sure “some” whites do not like blacks, but fortunately it is not 100%, or even close, in the South or elsewhere. What is sad, however, is that too many of those whites who do not instinctively dislike blacks, may still be fearful or anxious around them. The lack of daily contact in ordinary human ways between races still continues, and as long as our housing is segregated, so are our schools and our minds. The same anxiety applies, I think, to immigrants.
I agree that the optics have made it impossible to see those seeking to enter our country these past few weeks as the “animals” Trump has pictured them as being. Few, I suspect, who heard the recording of the children wailing and begging for their mother or father, or just whimpering, can forget. I certainly hope they do not. Regardless of Trump’s executive order a few hours ago, we still have over 2000 children in US custody who were separated from their parents over the past few weeks. I saw nothing about how they are to be reunited, and don’t trust this administration to give damn unless the “optics” and the outrage continue unabated.