Adjusting Our Gaze

Throughout her essay Hum calls on readers to identify the relationship between design and race, specifically the racialized gaze. First she provides readers with clear definitions for both terms, identifying design as a “processes of strategic choice making involved in deploying representational resources” (191), and the racialized gaze as “a dominant cultural habit for perceiving race related phenomena” (192).  When looking at the relationship between the two Hun asks readers to recognize how designers may sustain racialization and stereotyping and perpetuate racial exclusions. She also goes on  to explain how this racialized gaze is often ingrained in design decisions, oftentimes without deliberate intent.

This is seen often throughout pop culture, specifically as the “white-gaze” seems to dominate the norms. For instance, films like John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club or the film Boyhood, a white suburban American tale, are often regarded as classic movies that everyone can relate to. However, these movies portray a perpetually white, and middle-class experience, thus implying that this is the overall standard. This racialized gaze was developed and cultivated through years of reinforcement in media and the surrounding culture, and has become so seamlessly woven into our society that it’s difficult at times to recognize. 

But it also presents dangerous problem, as it excludes minority races and lower classes from the literary conversation, and thus forces their stories to either take a back seat or be redefined from a majority perspective.  It also forces us to take a look at how taking on the white-gaze can obstruct our view of the world making it uncomfortable to view both reality and texts through a different lens. This is often exemplified when fictional texts about black and brown people are often automatically characterized as "urban", even when they feature similar themes as those that have white characters. It implies and reinforces this need to refer to anything that is non-white as inherently different or out of the ordinary.

Cooper manages to further highlight this problem in Voices from the South, stating that “most of the writers who have hitherto attempted a portrayal of life and customs among the darker race have belonged to our class II: they have all, more or less, had a point to prove or a mission to accomplish and thus their art has been almost uniformly perverted to serve their ends” (pg. 181) This ties back into Hum’s notion that too often do designers become wrapped up in their own perceived notions and stereotypes that they end up neglecting accurately portray the experience of a particular group. She attributed this inability to accurately portray a human experience different from their own to an utter lack of sympathetic knowledge, stating that “without this power our portraits are but deaths’ heads or caricatures and no amount of cudgeling can put into them the movement and reality of life” (382) To work toward expanding our gaze we must urge our content creators not to fall back on age-old assumptions and stereotypes of black and brown people, but to look sympathetically and try to understand our experiences. And minorities must overcome the stipulations that can accompany going against the white norm to ensure that they aren’t being misrepresented.