Seeing through Whiteness
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Both James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew and George Yancy’s book introduction explore many of the same ideas. Both explore internalized racism and the reality for people of color living in a world built at their expense. Both argue for the necessity of including POC’s experiences and gazes in challenging the white gaze, as well as for implicating whites in the white gaze. While telling his nephew not to believe/accept whatever white people think or say about him, Baldwin reverses the image: “The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them” (Baldwin, 22). Baldwin therefore points to the tragic yet necessary inclusion of people of color in challenging the status quo of whiteness. Yancy does this too, through his “Look, a white!” argument, meant to reverse the gaze to uncover what is made invisible (whiteness as the default, background) – the need for whites to see through “our” gaze (that of people of color) in order to make their assumed invisibility apparent. Yancy also argues for the necessity of a shared perspective. Both authors emphasize the idea that whiteness is defined against the backdrop of the dark Other, which Edward Said’s definitions of Orientalism as central to the western identity and idea of itself articulate also.
Baldwin critices “the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration” (22) which The Kominas also adress in 4 White Guys with “the pizza represents assimilation killing us all”. The musical group also points out in the title of the song as well as in the lyrics that they are for white guys, echoing Baldwin’s idea quoted in Yancy that the n***** is useful and necessary to white people as something define themselves against. (5)Hence Yancy’s argumentation for reflecting whites back to themselves like a mirror. For Yancy “flipping the script” is an invitation to take an active part in deconstructing whiteness, calling it a gift – of course not free of discomfort, because it implicates whites as the root cause.
Both Baldwin and Yancy call for the necessity to shatter the blissful ignorance that whites live in and refuse to see. They both point to the reluctance of whites to recognize their privilege and accept the responsibility that comes with this recognition – that is, to be an active agent of changing the reality. Both authors make strong cases for holding whites accountable. Baldwin: “it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime” (19-20). Yancy: “how does it feel to be a problem?” (16).Yancy writes “confronting whiteness directly is a function of how I understand the love of wisdom, which I link to a conception of danger and risk” (16). It is this love of wisdom (confronting reality as it is, no matter how uncomfortable) that whites seemingly reject, because of the associated danger and risk. Indeed Baldwin explains “people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger” because this confrontation in itself deconstructs the entire white identity (23).
For whites, confronting their privilege equals being faced with a Weltschmerz hitherto made invisible to them, while nonwhites, by their lived experiences, never had the option of blissful ignorance to begin with. As pointed out by the “white female” at Yancy’s conference/class, whites prefer to return to ignorance rather than face a reality of their doing (through their privilege and ascendancy). Yancy argues for a decolonisation of the gaze, by revealing to itself whiteness as the absolute ownership of the earth (historically through colonialism and imperialism) (12). Hence “We cannot be free until they are free” because “They [the whites] are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it” (Baldwin, 24).