One of my lingering questions after last week’s reading was how we can go about expressing stories of silenced people who are not dead. What right do we have, as outsiders benefitting from the privilege to travel and learn and write, to represent the experiences of people who don’t get to represent their own experiences? This is one reason I chose to write about the divides between the intellectual cosmopolitan elite and blue-collar/rural americans, rather than about mass incarceration. That is, I have personal experience with the former. To me, it seems problematic to represent experiences of marginalized communities rather than seeking to support those communities in speaking for themselves. Agee expressed many of the problems I see with this type of representation as an outsider. He describes the act of 

      “prying intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, to parade the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’ (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity” (7)

In a — presumably purposeful — patronizing tone, Agee delineates two separate groups of people. There is this “appallingly damaged group of human beings” being paraded to “another” separate group of people, one that Agee, and we as scholars are part of. He suggests that this display or documenting or storytelling is always in the name of something — “humanity” or “science” or “journalism” — but insinuates that these things are a guise for a more perverse desire of one group to see another’s difference and suffering. I think Agee thus complicates what “truth” means in these images when they come from his own representation as an outsider meant for the gaze of other outsiders.