âSearching the critical work of postcolonial critics, I found much writing that bespeaks the continued fascination with the way white minds, particularly the colonial imperialist traveler, perceive blackness, and very little expressed interest in representations of whiteness in the black imagination⊠My thinking about representations of whiteness in the black imagination has been stimulated by classroom discussions about the way in which the absence of recognition is a strategy that facilitates making a group âthe Otherâ. In these classrooms there have been debates among students when white students respond with disbelief, shock, and rage, as they listen to black students talk about whiteness, when they are compelled to hear observations, stereotypes, etc., that are offered as âdataâ gleaned from close scrutiny and study. Usually, white students respond with naive amazement that black people critically assess white people from a standpoint where âwhitenessâ is the privileged signifier. Their amazement that black people watch white people with a critical âethnographicâ gaze, is itself an expression of racism. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of âsamenessâ even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think. Many of them are shocked that black people think critically about whiteness because racist thinking perpetuates the fantasy that the Other who is subjugated, who is subhuman, lacks the ability to comprehend, to understand, to see the working of the powerful. In white supremacist society, white people can âsafelyâ imagine that they are invisible to black people since the power they have historically asserted, and even now collectively assert over black people accorded them the right to control the black gaze. An effective strategy of white supremacist terror and dehumanization during slavery centered around the white control of the black gaze. Black slaves, and later manumitted servants, could be brutally punished for looking, for appearing to observe the whites they were serving as only a subject can observe, or see. To be fully an object then was to lack the capacity to see or recognize reality. These looking relations were reinforced as whites cultivated the practice of denying the subjectivity of blacks (the better to dehumanize and oppress), of relegating them to the realm of the invisible.â
bell hooks, âRepresenting whiteness in black imaginationâ, in L Grossberg, et al. (eds), Cultural studies, Routledge, New York, 1992.
ellievsbear
amandla
stormborns
romaincrisis
areudirty
