Seeing the Unseen

“The most violent element in society is ignorance.”
— Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman's claim demands a lot of us. An anarchist writer and political activist, Goldman was described as "the most dangerous woman in America" during the early twentieth century; but her image softened after her death and many of her ideas were embraced by the women's movement of the late twentieth century.

Goldman reframed ignorance as a practiced refusal to see what would disrupt comfort or demand responsibility. Violence, in this sense, begins long before physical harm, when suffering is kept invisible. Society depends more on the quality of our attention than the quantity of information we possess.

Depression-era documentary photographer Dorothea Lange’s "Migrant Mother" is among the most influential images in American history precisely because it takes us beyond mere information and activates our attention. The subject, Florence Owens Thompson, is neither romanticized nor sensationalized. There is something deeper. Her gaze is distant, burdened with calculation and care. She is inescapably human and we can't look away.

Goldman's and Lange's works counter a basic human weakness to see only what we've already deemed important. This is aided by the abstractions of our civic language. We speak of “the economy,” “immigration,” or “poverty” as if these were independent realities rather than the lived conditions shaping real people. Over time, these abstractions anesthetize us. Large groups of people exist within our society without fully entering our empathetic imagination. We live in a gap between knowing about others and truly seeing them.

Community at its best is a practice in seeing. Seeing alone does not solve everything, but it subverts the lie that suffering is distant, inevitable, or someone else’s responsibility.

1. Emma Goldman, "Anarchism and Other Essays" (1910).
2. Dorothea Lange, "Migrant Mother" (1936). Library of Congress.