We produce, learn, adapt, repeat, and perpetuate ways not to have to think or to act consistently, from one context to the next. New York’s “stop and frisk policy,” which regularly subjected minorities to arbitrary humiliation and abuse in the name of public safety, was considered reasonable until very recently, not only by the Bloomberg mayoral administration but also by many white people who felt “safer” because of it. The Black Lives Matter movement has had to insist on the value of black lives, as opposed to “all” lives, because black lives have not registered as valuable, in the manner of “all” lives, to the white majority. When I taught at a large, private, urban university, all of the food court workers in the student union building and all of their student clientele were in their late teens and twenties; strikingly, and yet somehow invisibly, all of the food servers were black, and most of the students were white. Closer to home, most of the universities I know of, including my own, rely on the labor of adjunct professors whose names we never learn because they are not “really” our colleagues.
We are incredibly good at not knowing what we know, and so were the Victorians. The same culture that developed and embraced modes for representing inequality and injustice could be horribly blind to its own oppressive practices. The same Dickens who wrote humanitarian epics wrote deeply racist essays. The same narrator in Jane Eyre who famously makes common cause with slaves describes Bertha in stock racist terms. Elizabeth Gaskell undercuts her representation of the suffering working classes in Mary Barton with caveats about the “dumb and inarticulate” masses. There are many, many examples any of us here could cite of Victorian disjointedness – so many that we tend to expect them. “Blind spots” like these are so normal that they themselves have become easy to ignore.[i]
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