Steve Martinot

“What would white people become if they (we) actually confronted the fact that being white was not inherent in a person, in ourselves and others, but actually a demand that others make on us, a role we must play to fulfill a certain responsibility? Part of what is demanded is that we see others as different, yet attribute that difference to those others and not to ourselves, who are told to see it. Who would white people become if they saw their own eye as an active agent in the production of race though that eye's attribution to others? The so-called colorblindness that has become a prevalent notion these days would be impossible. Is the essence of race, for which color is a symbol (of the imposed categorization), exists in the eye itself and not in the object seen by the eye, which has its own qualities, to what could the eye be blinding itself? Who would we become if we saw those others not as different but as living under an imposition of difference? Who would we become if we saw that imposition as something in which we were not only implicated but active agents in producing? Who would we become if we sought to interpose ourselves in that process of imposition, to obstruct it in its primordial moment? Who would white people become if they saw themselves through the eyes of those on whom they impose themselves?”
― Steve Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization