WASHINGTON DC — In the years leading up to the re-election of Donald Trump, a wave of destruction began across the country, this time targeting the very symbols meant to honor Black lives lost to police violence. In 2021, a mural honoring George Floyd was defaced, a white canvas with an image of Breonna Taylor’s face was ripped apart, and several community-funded monuments commemorating victims of racialized state violence have been vandalized or removed. These weren’t just artistic tributes; they were public reckonings carved in concrete and painted on brick, intended to ensure that America never forgets what was done to them, or why. Their destruction is a terrifying metaphor for how easily truth can be erased in a country struggling to confront its past.
The erasure of memory is especially dangerous in a nation where mass incarceration covertly continues the legacy of racial control. As a Black man and aspiring photojournalist, I feel a responsibility to preserve what others try to destroy—truth, history, and the dignity of those institutionalized racism and mass incarceration dehumanizes. That’s why I was riveted by Shane Bauer’s explosive 2016 investigation for Mother Jones, “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard,” where he went undercover at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana. The prison was operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and what Bauer witnessed inside was mortifying: unchecked violence, understaffing, and criminal, medical neglect. One inmate, Robert Scott, begged for medical attention as a wound on his leg worsened. By the time anyone intervened, he had lost both legs and several fingers.
Bauer’s work raises its own questions: What does it mean to secretly document such suffering? Was it ethical for a reporter to embed himself as a guard? Would these abuses ever have come to light if he hadn’t? Arguably, his methods can lead one to question traditional lines of journalistic transparency; however, his methods feel necessary when the institutions in question are so deeply shrouded in secrecy and systemic racism. The fact that we need covert infiltration to tell the truth about incarceration says more about the system than it does about the reporting.
For me, this story isn’t just about prison abuse—it’s personal. My mother once worked as a lawyer-lobbyist for CCA, back when we believed as a nation that private prisons could offer innovation, relief from overcrowding, and better care for incarcerated people. She believed in what she was doing. But over time, and with the unfolding of exposés like Bauer’s, it became clear that cost-cutting and the commodification of human beings, many of whom are Black, was not about a kinder and gentler form of punishment, but was more akin to slavery. We’ve talked openly about that disillusionment. It’s made me question how many other people of goodwill unknowingly uphold machinery that exploits Black men and women.
My interest in these issues began in high school, when I participated in an Ethics Bowl at American University. Our team debated the morality of private prisons, inspired by The New York Times Lens Blog photo essay “Breaking Into Prison.” The images were a painful look life behind bars. That debate, like Bauer’s article, forced me to think more critically about the ethics of incarceration, but about how storytelling, especially visual storytelling, can detonate systems that rely on silence and invisibility.
As I move toward a career in photojournalism, I carry those early moments with me. My goal is to use the lens to amplify all voices that are ignored, marginalized, or forgotten. To document what others try to erase, be it a mural of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, or the humanity of a man in a prison infirmary. I want my work to be a form of resistance and remembrance, because memory is a battleground. And truth, when captured honestly, becomes a monument no one can ever tear down.
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