An invasionist laments the fact that the visual rhetoric isn’t working as designed anymore:
You may look at this photo and think that its deep message is “We are all hoping for a better life and will take extraordinary risks on behalf of those we love.” But someone else will probably say, “People shouldn’t cross borders without permission.” The drowning becomes a kind of punishment, a river stands in for ideas of human authority, and the photograph doesn’t break through anything. It merely reiterates an old and cherished belief: Bad things happen to those who break the rules. … there will be efforts to make it an allegory of law and judgment rather than an opportunity for moral imagination and compassion.
The day after these two people perished in the Rio Grande, the president of the United States dismissed an accusation that he had sexually assaulted a prominent author and columnist in the 1990s. He used a phrase similar to ones he has used in the past to deflect similar allegations: “She’s not my type.” It is a terrible thing to say, with a specifically misogynistic meaning in the context of how men practice violence against women.
But it is a perfect summation of our new and deformed American conscience. It is pithy and dismissive, an invitation to look at people who have been victimized and see only otherness. It shuts down any understanding of trauma before empathy has begun to interrogate how trauma is felt and experienced. It is about looking without seeing, judging without understanding. For anyone who wants an off-ramp to the moral demands made by this image, this could be the universal caption: “They weren’t our type.”
Translation: Did you not see the DROWNED LITTLE KID? How can you not submit to our insane immigration policies when we are showing you pictures of a DROWNED LITTLE KID! And WITH HER DADDY no less! FFS, what do we have to do, drown an entire kindergarten class of refugees just to evoke the desired Pavlovian reaction from you heartless bastards!
The title kind of gives it away. “We used to think photos like this could change the world.” That’s just it. They did. But that was before people began to recognize that they were being rhetorically manipulated.