Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race

by George Yancy

Click here to listen to George Yancy's radio interview with C. S. Soong on 'Against the Grain.' Black Bodies, White The Continuing Significance of Race understands Black embodiment within the context of white hegemony within the context of a racist, anti-Black world. George Yancy examines themes such as double consciousness, invisibility, and corporeal malediction that capture the lived reality of Black bodies under tremendous existential duress. He demonstrates that the Black body is a historically lived text on which whites have inscribed their projections which speak equally forcefully to whites' own self-conceptions.

Genres: Race, Nonfiction, Social Justice, College, Activism, African American, Education

290 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience. He is particularly interested in the formation of African-American philosophical thought as articulated within the social and historical space of anti-Black racism, African-American agency, and questions of identity formation. His current work focuses on the theme of whiteness and how it constitutes a site of embedded social reality and a site of deep and enduring opacity, which is related to what he has theorized as white ambush. He is interested in the ways in which whiteness as an embodied phenomenon is a reality underwritten by historical forces and practices. Hence, he takes history seriously as an ever present force through which bodies are positioned. He is interested in themes such as white subject formation, white epistemic ways of knowing/not knowing, privilege and hegemony, and forms of white spatial bonding as sites of white solidarity and interpellation (or hailing). He is also interested in how such forms of white epistemic and bodily bonding are underwritten by white intelligibility. Yancy explores the theme of racial embodiment, particularly in terms of how white bodies live their whiteness unreflectively in relationship to the deformation of the black body and other bodies of color. He sees the two as relational. Within this context, his work explores Black Erlebnis or the lived experience of black people, which raises important questions regarding Black subjectivity, modes of Black spatial mobility, ontological truncation, and embodied resistance. He has theorized critical processes of what he terms suturing and un-suturing and how both concepts are linked to questions of embodiment and spatiality. Yancy is also interested in the intersection between philosophy and biography. More specifically, he is interested in questions regarding philosophical self-formation, that is, how philosophers come to believe what they believe and how such belief formations/configurations are linked to historical, cultural, racial, and gendered processes. Yancy is also interested in ways to engage philosophy dynamically, to practice frank speech or courageous speech, within and outside the classroom. Yancy's publications are varied and extensive. He has authored, edited, and co-edited numerous books, articles, and chapters. His work has been quoted worldwide, including in Turkey, Australia, South Africa, and Sweden. He is known for his powerful and influential conversations with philosophers on race at The Stone, New York Times. Yancy is also "Philosophy of Race" Book Series Editor at Lexington Books.

Reviews

[Sue Lyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a teacher educator for over 20 years. For ten years I was in a position to ask my young white students – 18-19 years old – to write down on a piece of paper how many Black or Asian people they thought lived in the UK. I gathered in their responses, quickly sorted them and one-by-one read them out loud. Less that 5% of them in each of those ten years got the answer right (at that time around 9%). A small minority (around 10%) thought people of colour constituted over 70% of the population. The vast majority guessed at between 30-50%. They found it hard to believe the official statistics. I asked them to reflect on why the majority of them held such a distorted view of the make-up of the country. I then asked them to anonymously write down things they had overheard other people – not themselves – say about Black or Asian people. I then read their comments out loud. Apart from the ‘they take out jobs’, ‘they should go back where they came from’ there were many words of abuse and denigration. Listening made them uncomfortable. I wanted them to see how the racist gaze of whites distorts not only the experience of ethnic minorities in the UK, but all of our beings. I asked them as trainee teachers what they thought they should do about it. I wasn’t accusing them of racism, but of holding a distorted view of actual numbers of Black and Asian people living in the UK. I didn’t blame them for that, but I wanted them to take responsibility for knowing the truth and to be prepared to challenge those who hold mistruths or utter racist comments in front of them. I wanted them to understand that if they, as future teachers, were not prepared to do that then they would be implicated in the maintenance of whiteness as power and privilege to the detriment of all the children they would be responsible for. I wanted them to realize that the Black and Asian children they would be teaching were the subject of the racialised gaze of whites, where whiteness is seen as the norm and their black and brown bodies as ‘other’. I would have been surprised to find out that any of these students were actively racist, but their world-views were imprisoned by a historically inherited racism built by the institutions of slavery and colonialism and post-colonial immigration of which they were largely ignorant ¬(Britain choses not to teach our children that aspect of our history). I wanted them to see that a desire not to be racist is not enough. I wanted them to take responsibility for knowing British history, to see how the claim “I don’t see colour” is disingenuous; that the discursive practices they themselves had brought to our attention which constructed people of colour as inferior should be challenged. Later in their training I helped them see that the white gaze is a specific historical practice, where the values and assumptions of the white slavers and colonisers created institutional structures to maintain white power that underpins racism today. As Yancy does with his own students, I wanted them to enlarge their frame of reference, to come to terms “with the ways in which their bodies are marked by a history that they did not create, but will perpetuate”. I wanted to disrupt that perpetration, to see that history has given them their frames of reference and their identities and yet they are largely ignorant of that history. In the final year of their training I asked them to reflect on the brutal murder by a gang of white youths of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence as he waited for a bus with his friend Duwayne Brooks in 1993. I asked them to imagine what they thought the white people in their cars were thinking when they didn’t stop in response to Duwayne desperately trying to flag them down to help the dying Stephen. Why did no one stop to ask, “Are you OK? “Can we help?” Year after year students suggested the car drivers were afraid – a black person trying to flag them down would probably be dangerous. Self-preservation was more important than human compassion. I ask them why they think the police failed to investigate the murder effectively which led to the Macpherson report in 1999 accusing the police of institutional racism. Through this example I wanted my students to confront white hegemony and to see how it impacted on all people of colour. I was trying to start them on a lifelong journey of what Yancy names as ‘un-suturing’, a commitment to challenge white racist practices whenever they see them. I wish I had had this book when I was teaching. I recommend it to everyone who is committed to white antiracism and has responsibility for preparing new teachers. Yancy calls on white people to critically engage in “unmasking and fissuring white historical sedimentation” if we are to find a “new way of seeing, a new way of knowing, a new way of being”. This book has renewed my own commitment to this task.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

We average Americans’, observed Eric Holder in February 2009, ‘simply do not talk enough with each other about race.’ The Attorney General’s diagnosis of this deficit was a national failure of nerve: ‘We always have been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.’ Seeking to overcome such cowardice in his new book Black Bodies, White
Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race, George Yancy’s tools are as varied as his subject: phenomenology and existentialism, literature and current events, calm analysis and charged classroom illustrations. The result is a blueprint of racism’s mechanisms that
Cornel West has pronounced ‘the most philosophically sophisticated treatment we have of the most visceral issue in America and modernity.’ Bringing together the insights of numerous thinkers – Douglass and DuBois, Husserl and Sartre, Toni Morrison and Frantz Fanon
– Yancy attempts to unpack, in turn, the white gaze and how it denigrates the black body; how this denigration threatens to violate its victims’ subjectivities, and how such violations can be resisted; and, finally, how whites evade responsibility for the wreckage their
gaze still wreaks, but can yet recognize, and resist, its ‘ambushes’.

This is part of a review which was published in "Radical Philosophy" vol 156 (July/August 2009): pages 56-59. pdf files can be found at http://www.scribd.com/doc/93514995/Ti...
and http://lensbased.net/files/catastroph...

[Mills College Library]

305.80097 Y21b 2017

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beyond the understanding of white as being normal is its taken for granted invisibility in opposition to the hyper-visibility of the other in relation to it. There is also an interpellation that is exhibited psychologically as well as physiologically and is continued through social actions, inactions, and material circumstances. Yancy gives a slew of narratives and personal examples of these behaviors but challenges people who can identify as white to disrupt interpellation in a way that does not continue to deny the socio-historical existence of whiteness dependent on the subjugation of blackness but recognizes itself and disrupts it's own "calling" in opposition to the presence of blackness that buttresses the white supremacists structure materially, politically, and in any other ways.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the intro and chapters 1-3 of this book. I find his theorizing on whiteness to be sound and, surprisingly enough, both interesting and accessible. His anecdotes are a bit intense, though, and his anger and resentment shine through a little too much for me to take those parts as seriously as the theoretical parts of the text.