Mark Laita, We Are Not Your Soft White Underbelly | Curiosity Shots (2023)

Mark Laita: Is This Exploitation Or Stark Reality Through The Guise Of A Societal Need For True Awareness?

The grey area we humans tend to reside in can be different shades depending on where one stands. Tinted lens chiseled from privilege sit upon gold frames, attempting to acknowledge the divide between class and race by creating a type of one-way mirror built from exploitation and potential redemption.

The lack of historical respect or consideration of the forces behind circumstance and the brevity of immersion within the subject’s world said privilege can consent to its user keeps the line between exploitation and representation as brittle as the American psyche. These days, the purveyors of such an area usually trend between journalists, artists, and activists — supposedly stripped of implicit bias while entering the domain of their subjects to display the unvarnished truth. That truth is then up to the storyteller to present, not only in a way in which lends the most credence to the subject but paints the entire picture for the audience to interpret for themselves.

As an artist myself, the job of interpretation is precious, akin to the first taste of a new dish you’ve never tried because you knew not of its existence. Yet a lens honed by the hands of time in shoes that have always fit tends to miss the mark, unbeknownst or not by the storyteller. I’ve never been as conflicted and confused after watching Mark Laita’s interview series called, “Soft White Underbelly.”

Some nights I have a hard time sleeping when I don’t take melatonin, so I surf the viral video landscape satiating my need to be entertained to the point of boredom turned slumber. I almost didn’t click on the video entitled: “Very Sad: Crack Addicted Prostitute Living On The Streets of LA Looks Completely Different After a Year”. I usually wouldn’t, especially since the thumbnail featured two yearbook-style photos of a Black woman named Amanda in varying stages of her addiction. I, for one, am full up on the depiction of Black pain, especially the societal caused agony of Black women.

Let this now be the grand reveal of my own implicit bias I haven’t the inclination to ever shed after years of desensitization of me and my own people’s suffering. But something made me click further. Maybe it was the simple logo thumbnailed in the top left corner, adjacent to the YouTube embedded title “Crack Addicted Prostitute-Amanda (spring 2020).” Most likely it was my initial reaction of disbelief, shifting in light speed toward the question of “Who thought this was a good idea?” and whether or not I should watch the video. I pressed play and began the latest chapter of Amanda framed within the lens of Mark Laita’s eye.

Most of Mark Laita’s Underbelly work starts with an intro: monologues from the subject’s life or samples from pop culture set as the backdrop to either a still or video. Amanda’s interview starts with shaky cam-footage of her in the middle of a crack high, perched on seating we can’t see, in front of a backdrop that looks like something you’d see out of a high school yearbook. The format is pretty similar throughout all of Mark’s videos. He asks his subject questions in talk show fashion, usually starting simple, then working his way up to open-ended inquires that send the interviewees into introspective, sometimes incoherent dialogues about life or their place in it. Amanda’s particular video, and various otherslike it, were the last of a trilogy of videos he’d done over the past year.

Stuck between a crack-induced comatose state and self-awareness still fighting to be heard, she tried to explain her circumstance; her story, but the pieces were as lost as the sun is bright during the midday.She, as many of his subjects do, rambles along a line of thought scrambled from years of systemic neglect and oppression. Bad choices be damned if the opportunity to do something more, something better, were at least given to any of the interviewees. At the end of every visual scene, there were links to assist, shelters to donate to, mutual aid funds that could directly impact the subjects of Laita’s work on display for the audience to support.

Yet there was no true call to action, no plea from anyone but the subject of Laita’s work — the person who finally had someone listening to a life’s story that most people on this earth wouldn’t care to learn nor experience. That’s where I arrive at the dilemma; the grey area similar to the Schrödinger’s Cat, where optimists and people of privilege tend to live, as their position in this caste system can afford them that luxury.

Pinned at the top of Soft White Underbelly’s channel is an intro video featuring Mark Laita’s explanation of what he’s doing and his version of why. He explains that after working for an advertising agency as a photographer, “helping wealthy corporations even wealthier,”the uncomfortable truth that ad work would be the legacy left behind when no longer on this earth sunk in. I think a majority of us can relate to his wanting to do something that truly mattered in the world, working to better the lives of those less fortunate because dismantling the system few benefit from is a cause worth working for. In this case, there’s something of a Sinclair’s Concrete Jungle effect. Storytelling mixed with privilege-fed ignorance that could either be masquerading under the guise of awareness through artistry or the commodification of oppressed laden experiences that would otherwise be ignored. Interestingly enough, the explanation was only recorded and published two months ago almost three years after his first upload, and about nine months from when Laita started to upload his interviews more frequently.

His white savior-esque reasoning for creating Soft White Underbelly stemming from “maybe deciding to do something differently” about what he calls the “broken” parts of society by crafting interviews of the most marginalized of citizens in their most vulnerable state is understandable yet disgusting. Still, one has to recognize that there are infinite sides to this perspective which is why his work creates such a conflict within the confines of what we may think is redeemable or not, juxtaposed between what your newfound awareness does for the people of Laita’s project or your conscience.

From placing the burden upon the individual who happens to stumble across Laita’s work, making it to the end of a video to access donation information to the use of marginalized people’s pain as a way to ensure the survival of two-parent households and “good role models,” his “explanation” video mirrors the same kind of erasure of the kind of system we are borne unto and what affect it has upon us.

His use of titles that box subjects beneath stereotypical motifs and code words that automatically elicit implicit bias leave no room for any form of self-definition; no matter how the interviewee persuades the audience. Black and white mug shot-like portraits; of men, women, and trans folk; stuck in a moment of cathartic release or despair are reduced to just that, humanized only through a lens that lacks the space for duality for whom we deem worthy. YouTube comments penned from the gratefulness that comes from witnessing what could have been if born with darker skin or of a lower class bounce around the echo chamber built from access and Internet, using distance to excuse personal involvement because of the perceived “risk”.

The collective slumber we are under; bystanders to the world around us are only broken when our sphere of influence is affected, through degrees of social separation. What we artists and journalists tell ourselves is that our contribution is made to get the story its deserved representation and to allow the subjects of the story the agency and platform for actual understanding, not some pigeonholed tone-deaf framework that allows for an arms-length look into the so-called underbelly that keeps the greater society afloat.

This underbelly Laita perpetuates isn’t soft, nor white, but disproportionately people of color who are hardened by life’s cruel touch.Gifted with resiliency to survive our capitalist machine of society. Oppression does not make us less beautiful, less wise, or less valid in the eyes of privilege, and Laita’s work does a masterful job at widening the lens that would otherwise only fit into stereotypical bias and the exception to the rule. Yet the episodic nature of following one’s journey through poverty and addiction without actionable change married to awareness is just a cyclical wheel of predictive persecution; one that is commodified by gatekeepers of reform and monetized by YouTube algorithms.

Laita hides his “uncut, uncensored” footage behind a Patreon paywall, never truly divulging what kind of aid Amanda or any of his subjects receive; selling potential redemption stories and current downfalls like housewares on Etsy. He asks his interviewees if they need help, goading them into this fleeting form of dependence upon Laita as if their circumstance and position in life don’t already scream the abolition of systemic oppression and the induction of universal healthcare and rehabilitation.

Knowing Amanda probably took a hit of whatever illicit vice she was addicted to before becoming the subject of one of his most popular visual works screams exploitation; and while some might see it as an effective reality check for the desensitized citizenry of the United States, the lack of solution juxtaposed against his tone-deaf, savior-like lens doesn’t trend anywhere near a positive outcome.

What it does is reinforce years of bigotry through commodified poverty porn as an outlet for the privilege to feel as though their morality isn’t wasted on just themselves, but for some greater good they know won’t come without their voice attached to it.

This is the grey area we settle for, selling part of ourselves to become the unknowing martyr for a cause that’ll never be resolved as long as money can be made from oppression. When art and action coincide in a crescendo we can all hear, a revolution that results in quantifiable change heard around the echo chamber political affiliation traps us within. This is when the societal shift many of us have dreamed of will come to pass. Until then, we fall at the mercy of gatekeepers who sip from silver spoons and righteousness, peddling experience as a novelty like bus tours of the ghetto. Intent isn’t at question, for that is as unknown as to where the wind goes when lost to the world, but the methodology behind who and how one spreads “awareness” is the real riddle.

Ever-evolving is the answer to the conundrum of privilege versus awareness turning into actionable change, yet one can dream about the portrayal of black and brown folk adhering not to the stereotypical lens advantaged perception affords but to the historical influence we have had on this nation. We are neither the underbelly nor the brain, but the heart of this country, forgotten under the guise of capitalist individualism and continued neglect as if our nation’s blood pressure never mattered.

Vulnerable, but never soft, not by choice but by circumstance.