Looting! Burning!
Context is Everything
A small experiment to show how meaning is made, not found
In our ongoing exploration of Shit People Post on Social Media, today we’ll tackle this little gem:
In case Medium doesn’t like the repost and blurs it out, link here to see the original. Briefly, the picture is four quotes with photos of Ayanna Pressley, Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, and Nancy Pelosi, juxtaposed against a background of burning buildings — in other words, four women in front of four hellscapes implying they are condoning mayhem in the streets.
The intention, of course, is to accuse the four women of inciting riots and calling for the looting and burning that took place during the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. I don’t need to point out that three of the women are women of color. The fourth, Pelosi, is arguably one of the three most hated — demonized — Democratic women in the country (alongside HRC and AOC).
So okay, this was my first attempt at photoshopping. (I’m a wordsmith, not a picturesmith.) It isn’t perfect, but you get the idea:
