The Aspect Ratio of Race and Class

Rev. KP Hong, Beloved Community Staff Team
[Transcript of a talk presented as part of a larger report on ministries at the 153rd Annual Meeting of the Congregation on Saturday, December 7, 2024. Some details have been edited for readability.]

​The journalist and author on technology, Nicholas Carr, made an intriguing observation recently: “The aspect ratio of our lives has changed.” In September of 1930, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held one of their most consequential meetings to standardize the aspect ratio of the movie screen, the proportion of width and height of an image or video frame for motion pictures. That standard would not only influence the technical and artistic aspects of filmmaking but shape the viewing experience of audiences for decades to come. 

The attendees at the meeting were offered various aspect ratios to consider, but a horizontal screen was taken as a given. The reasoning? Because traditional landscape and narrative paintings were almost always horizontal in orientation, a more natural orientation for the telling of stories. Furthermore, human vision is itself horizontal. With the lateral placement of our eyes, our horizontal field of vision spans about 180 degrees while our vertical field is limited to about 130 degrees. The horizontal bias also makes evolutionary sense, with more opportunities and threats presented by the land than the vertical sky. A species like ours benefits from a broad landscape view, and a horizontally composed image feels truer to our human point of view, something closer to the reality of the broad and encompassing world we actually inhabit.

So imagine being forced to wear blinders and seeing the world in a narrow portrait view. Not only would the portrait view feel cramped and claustrophobic, it might even pose a danger in constraining our wider perception of reality. Consider the smartphone, our handheld devices designed to be held vertically, in portrait mode. According to studies, we look at our phone in portrait mode more than 90% of the time, even when viewing horizontally composed photos and videos. When the phones were first introduced, people routinely complained about feeling constricted and unnatural. But as the phone became our primary screen, we all got used to the narrowing field of view, cropping reality and its wider complexity to fit the size of our solitary screens.

The aspect ratio of our lives has changed. It has narrowed, not just on our smartphones but on many fronts, from the polarization of our political life to individualization as a defining feature of contemporary life to the epidemic of loneliness and the search for deep belonging. The aspect ratio of our lives has narrowed, as complex, multifaceted social narratives get cropped and manipulated to fit into one narrow established perspective or another. But in his magisterial work, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), rather than narrowing the aspect ratio to racism alone, W.E.B. Du Bois expanded its frame to the conflict between capitalism and labor, to a class struggle and how racism is time and time again manufactured by the oligarchs and capitalists to keep the masses divided. In the evolution of his racial justice work, Martin Luther King, Jr., found himself in Memphis supporting a labor strike, his aspect ratio expanding to capture the deep connections between capitalist exploitation and racial oppression and both tied to the militarism of the United States.

As the Beloved Community Staff Team attended to the many fronts of Unity’s antiracist multicultural work this past year, what became increasingly clear was the work of enlarging the aspect ratio of our prophetic imagination, the importance of complicating the narrative and reviving complexity amid false simplicities manipulated to fit one narrow established perspective or another. Foremost among complexities is the fact that racial oppression and economic exploitation have always been entwined in capitalism. We forget that George Floyd was unemployed and allegedly using counterfeit money, that Eric Garner was selling untaxed cigarettes to earn a living, that Walter Scott was under warrant for delinquent child support payments, that Breonna Taylor lived in gentrifying zones where police sweeps regularly cleared the neighborhood for real estate valuation. Countless fatal police encounters result from minor infractions like broken taillights or unpaid tickets which are symptoms of economic hardship more than real threat to public safety. The fact that so many resort to criminalized forms of work to make a living remains critically important for understanding the common class predicament of policing today. 

Racism alone cannot fully explain the expansive carceral power produced by capitalist class society, relentless in securing conditions for compounded growth. A singular focus on race only serves the interests of neoliberal capitalism by reducing the question of obscene economic inequality to skin color and a distorted politics of identity, while obstructing discussions about healthcare, homeownership, unionization, progressive taxation, deregulation, privatization, childcare, education, and more. 

What are the stories about money and wealth that frame our relationship with money? Our values, policies, and economic imagination about debt,

spending, saving, investing, scarcity, abundance, enoughness? We have been living in the imagination of rich white capitalists for most of our history. What are other imaginaries that tell a different story? And how can we tell a better story of money? These are some of the questions guiding the work of the revitalized Development Ministry Team.

But just as a focus on racism alone frames an inadequate aspect ratio, neither does a singular focus on class address the multiple forms of racism that have historically and specifically harmed communities of color. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out to the Bernie Sanders campaign when making his case for reparations, that “Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty.” Such a view misses the way in which centuries of racism have hammered inequality so deep into American society that general solutions will not suffice. A rising tide will not lift all boats, not the boats that have been chained and tied down and wedged among the rocks. Without special repairs for descendants of chattel slavery, enacted alongside general efforts, the rising tide cannot help those boats.

What is needed is not shoehorning our history of injustice into either race or class — especially as our nation’s racial composition complexifies — but to see and engage more complexly, intersectionally, and courageously. What is needed is a much larger aspect ratio, a larger focus and truer framing that imagines a cross-racial solidarity and movement that can match the complexities of our world today. These are the generative edges as we step toward the Ends Renewal process and the prophetic horizon of our shared ministry.