It's a faraway memory, nearly lost in the tide of zeroes and ones that shape our new digital world. Sometimes, though, I do remember the calming effect of a safe light: the soft red glow that spilled through the darkrooms of my adolescence. Years ago (decades now, I'm amazed to say), I pursued photography as a serious study. I didn't go far with it, never approached anything near a professional level, but I took it a tad farther than just a hobby. For a time. I was still in high school, and the darkroom was a comfortable place to be—hidden from sight, engaged in the act of creating something, seeing images develop from nothing. I remember the smell of chemicals, the eddy of the water bath, but most of all the light in darkness. Red is usually a stimulant—to passion, to action, to anger—and it's associated with all kinds of vice. In the darkroom, though, it was none of those things. I did not meditate when I was a teen. I had no informed opinion of meditation. Still, what I did in those hours standing in front of the enlarger, the trays of developer and fixer, was just that: meditate. My mind worked, and I observed its working, but I never over-thought anything in that space, and it was a relief to me. I remember especially being an unhappy girl on a medical leave from school, and my mother would take me to an art center in Norwalk, Connecticut, where there was a darkroom available for rent. I am not doing a very good job at identifying exactly what it was like, or really focusing on the memory. It is late now, and I need to be in a different sort of darkened room—one without light; one with only sleep. But I lost myself in that scarlet artist's space when I could, and no matter if there were others in the darkroom with me (sometimes yes, sometimes no), the safe light made me feel relaxed in a way that was like solitude. Peaceful and hypnotic.
The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...
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