Our Kind of People is a platform for challenging bias, promoting social equity, and fostering community.
Our Kind of People examines perception based on appearance and deconstructs how clothing, race, gender, and class signifiers affect our daily interactions and social systems. To do this, Our Kind of People uses images and stories created in collaboration with everyday people from across the globe.
Created by interdisciplinary artist and educator Bayeté Ross Smith, and co-produced with FOTODEMIC, Our Kind of People is an ongoing series of images, videos, and stories that create nuanced and sophisticated conversations and reflections about how identity affects our daily lives. This awareness and analysis will become a tool for challenging bias, facilitating education, and promoting social justice. These images and stories will engage audiences via social media and ongoing publications to our web platform ourkindofpeople.org, that will be accompanied by workshops, physical and virtual events, implicit social cognition tests, and analysis of this research. All of which will be tools to improve cultural competency and facilitate mutual understanding.
Why this matters
Our Kind of People allows everyday people to control the images and stories that define them and share them with people and cultures across the world. Please help us build this living narrative that shows our nuanced and complex selves, challenges biases, and promotes social equity and community. Based on appearance, the perceptions of others are often the basis for discriminatory policies and practices that uphold systemic inequity. Although some assumptions stem from real-world encounters, most develop from the stories we are told and share. Your images and stories are a critical part of this movement for equity and inclusiveness.
Participate in Our Kind of People by photographing yourself in at least six different outfits and sharing your personal experiences related to the assumptions you have faced based on appearance, through either text or video.
We will be working directly with researchers studying bias and creating programs that engage political and industry leaders in the U.S. and abroad. We will be engaging the legal community through installations and workshops with law schools and lawyers working in the criminal justice system.
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Join the movement.
Be a part of the movement to show our nuanced and complex selves, challenge biases and promote social justice and community. Now is the time to tackle our biases straight-on and move society towards a future without discrimination!
How to get involved
Choose 3-6 outfits that best represent who you are in different areas of your life. Photograph yourself in each outfit OR record yourself answering the following questions:
What is an assumption people make about you when wearing the outfit you have on? Or an assumption people make about you based on your clothing?
Describe yourself in 59 seconds or less. Essentially, who are you ?
Describe your experience being misjudged based on appearance. Is there a specific situation you can tell us about?
Submit your photographs and videos or post them on Instagram with the hashtag #ourkindofpeople #OKOP. We will feature the most compelling photos and videos on our Instagram feed and on our web pages ourkindofpeople.org and fotodemic.org.
Technical Guide
Find a quiet place in front of a white or light colored background
If possible, sit or stand facing a window and avoid strong light sources behind you (windows/tall lamps)
Set your digital camera or iPhone vertically
Place the device on eye level and yourself on the center of the frame.
Position yourself with a neutral or blank facial expression.
Take a photo
Record the video(s)
Please make sure the lighting and your facial expression remain the same in each image.
