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
                                    16
            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
   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112