There are many iconographic representations of discrimination, generally including overt visual symbols, such as pairs of drinking fountains marked “white” and “colored,” or people wearing gray-striped coats, embroidered with Stars-of-David. But the most remarkable visual statement about inequality that I know of, illuminating both its inner workings and its terrible human cost, is the Diane Arbus photograph, Loser at a Diaper Derby, N.J..
Loser at a Diaper Derby, N.J.
1967
Artist: Diane Arbus, American, 1923 - 1971
©2011, Yale University Art Gallery
(The "diaper derby" has been an American suburban custom at least since World War II, involving infants of crawling age. In a diaper derby, a line of mothers faces a parallel line of their infants, from a distance of several feet. At the "starting gun," the mothers call to their infants, and the infants crawl towards them. The "winning" infant reaches the line of mothers first.)
The photo’s subject is a jovial infant with big, dewy eyes. The infant has presumably just placed last in a diaper derby. The adult holding the baby—the mother, perhaps—is in profile, the child blocking her face. The adults believe the baby has just failed definitively, and will continue to disappoint throughout life. Relative to the infant, the adults are all-powerful, and their dark consensus about the child’s future is absolute. But the baby isn’t sensible of any of this, yet. The child’s innocence is contrasted with the somber prescience of the surroundings, in the baby’s prominent, bright face and hands against the dark, silhouetted trees, and the mother’s obscured face.
Only the workings of a corrupt mentality, social prejudice, ascribe permanent "failure" status to an infant who hasn't placed well in a diaper derby. Social prejudice always makes somebody or other a shame-worthy "loser," believed to be forever less-worthy, less-important, less-real—less deserving of chances—than the person issuing the verdict. In conformist, hyper-competitive suburbia, every public move counts, and to make an awkward one—even if one is a young child—is never to recover in others' eyes. Though still too young and too full of wonder to realize anything is amiss, the victim won’t ever live down that decree from outside, will bear its full brunt. A life will be circumscribed by others’ scorn. Choices will be limited. But the infant is, for the moment, whole and joyful.
Winners and losers are decided early. They are decided according to impersonal rules, and by means wholly outside their control. They are culled remorselessly. The baby had no part in devising the diaper derby, and hadn’t understood it, or the terrible destiny its outcome would set in motion. The little loser’s hands are pressed together, suggesting motion, maybe pumping. The child is proud—but all alone. The child’s exuberance is fleeting. The jagged shadows of trees in the background signify a fate about to come down without mercy.
I look at the baby in the Diane Arbus photo, and it calls to mind the heartbreaking innocence of children in awful circumstances they didn’t create, ones that will doom their lives. The baby in the photo evokes for me a delighted small boy, dressing up in his mother’s clothes, in the moment he is surprised by a mortified adult. The image makes me think of the innocence, sweetness, and beauty, of a dark-skinned little girl, playing hopscotch among decaying buildings. They are beautiful and whole and strong, these children, and they are legion, but they are no match. The judgments against them are awful, and they poison lives forever.
The child in the Diane Arbus photo, with the heart-breaking eyes, hasn’t “failed,” meaningfully, and doesn’t need improving. The baby is perfect. The more I look at the photo, the more I believe that what needs attention—what causes me to question—is the mother’s silhouetted head, in the summer twilight, and those jagged trees.