The image above is titled The Liberation of T.O.: “I’m not goin’ back to work for massa’ in dat darned field!” 2003/2005 by Hank Willis Thomas

Artist Hank Willis Thomas takes advertisements, real advertisements, and removes all of their text. Takes off all the text that the advertiser included on the image. Then he renames the image.

That’s all he does.

Yet what he leaves us with are powerful images of how Black bodies are treated as commodities and how they are viewed within our racist society.

I cannot, for the life of me, fathom what an advertiser was trying to convey with this image. It seems, to me, to be a violent image fraught with danger. I had a hard time believing this was even an advertisement at one point. In the article titled “Image-Based Culture:Advertising and Popular Culture,” author Sut Jhally states that “Advertising thus does not work by creating values and attitudes out of nothing but by drawing upon and rechanneling concerns that the target audience (and the culture) already shares.” (Jhally, p 3) 

It seems to me that what is drawn upon, the rechanneled concerns expressed in this image, are the fear white people have of Black people and the ways in which they are portrayed as looters so often in our news media. We, as white people, look at an image like this in popular media, and don’t even recognize it for the violence it portrays against Black bodies.

If you’d like to see the image above as it originally appeared as an advertisement, you can do so by clicking HERE.

WORKS CITED

“The Liberation of T.O.: ‘I’m Not Goin’ Back to Work for Massa’ in Dat Darned Field!” 2003/2005.” Brooklyn Museum, https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/187023.

Jhally, Sut, “Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture.” The World and I.http://www.worldandlibrary.com. Article 17591 (July 1990).