Page 107 - Cultural Studies Volume 11
P. 107
EXPERIENCE, EMPATHY AND STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISM 101
context in which it was offered, however—a course in which whiteness is never
addressed, yet informs every aspect of the topic, material and method of
instruction—was inescapably racialist. The anecdote may well be true; however,
if the purpose was to highlight cultural difference which Revlon or Proctor &
Gamble need to take into account as they seek overseas markets, the same point
could have been made without implicitly, if inadvertently, relying on a long
history of stereotypes about Africa and Africans.
I leave it to you to consider whether this would have been understood
differently if the tale had been about an unspecified American in an
unspecified foreign country or a black American and a black African—or if
indeed the same point about cultural differences might have been made with a
completely different type of example.
Whiteness, as an unmarked category, is neither fixed nor obvious, but has
become so naturalized that it is hard to get at its unmarked-ness. Cornel West,
among others, advocates the need for an examination of ways in which whiteness
is ‘a politically constructed category parasitic on “Blackness”,’ a project Toni
Morrison effectively carries out for literature in her book, Playing in the Dark
(West, 1993:19; Morrison, 1992). Poet and professor Ishmael Reed provides a
telling example from his students. When asked to draw on experiences from their
own ethnic backgrounds, the white European-American students nevertheless
tended to write stories about a ‘black’ person (Reed, 1989).
Related to the ways whiteness is rendered colourless and monolithic under the
auspices of ‘pre-fixed’ cultural studies, is a pervasive silence over white anxiety
in the face of racial ambiguity. I suggest that this needs to be disrupted along with
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essentialist notions of blackness. The following example illustrates the kind of
internalized misconceptions that most students—in fact probably most people—
bring to the academy. In the public sphere of visual images, you may recall that
the performers chosen to portray the central characters in the television series
Queen (Alex Hailey’s sequel to Roots) and in the film Malcolm X, were both
significantly darker than the people whom they were chosen to represent—
despite the fact that skin colour was a crucial aspect of identity in the real lives
of Hailey’s grandmother and Malcolm Little. Film-makers Kathe Sandler and
Haile Gerima (professor of drama in the Communications Department of
Howard University) have both used their art to challenge the black community to
confront pigmentation stereotypes in contemporary visual representations of a
notion of blackness. 17 This type of effort also needs to be directed at a white
audience.
In sum, in the context of thinking about general education as the place where
students learn how to think critically, race has to come out of the closet and be
disentangled from the notion of culture. Where a particular sector of the
population is defined as a distinctive group—a cultural entity—the markers of
race and ethnicity often reinscribe the very boundaries which negate the effort to
convey the porousness and interrelationship of group identities as well as the
complexity of an individual’s identity. An alternative is suggested by educator