An Accurate History Through the Racialized Gaze

The last book my 6th grade English class read was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We began our unit on the book with short lecture from our teacher. “I know I am strict about no foul language in this classroom” she began, “but in understanding this book, we are going to encounter some”. She explained to us a bit about the book and its context. She explained that there are words in this book, racial slurs, that we should never repeat to another person. “But” she explained, “to pretend that these words were not used as they were at this time in our history would be an insult to all those who endured it”.

Meanwhile, it seemed my entire class was shifting uncomfortably in unison. We knew this speech was coming. The students from her first class period had told us all about it. We also knew about the word she was referring to. “The N word” was a swear that even immature 6th graders avoided entirely. It had always been a word explained to us as one that shouldn’t exist, like there was a pain attached to it. It was a word that made a classroom of 6th graders, who were convinced that swearing was the coolest thing a person could do, incredibly uneasy. We were uneasy for another reason as well. This particular class room had a variety of kids, from a variety of racial backgrounds. Only one was black. His name was Chris.

Each day we would go into class and our teacher would read aloud another excerpt. Each occurrence of the word and every set of eyes in the class room turned to Chris, waiting for some sort pained reaction. For the most part, he did not react at all. When he finally did, it was in reference to the line “It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that n****r vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin” (Twain 29). When we all looked over this time, Chris was laughing.

The idea of the racialized gaze is at nearly all given moments a negative and wildly confining constraint that puts different racial groups at enormous disadvantages. However, the concept, when viewed historically, can be seen to be a system that helps us progress by serving as an accurate snapshot of the past that is created through examination of how individuals interacted with the culture they lived in.

In Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes, he recounts the story of Phillis Wheatley, a poet whose authorship of her own poetry was questioned due to her status as a slave. Gates explains that without the signed document from her hearing, “few would believe that an African could possible have written poetry all by herself” (Gates 8). In understanding the overwhelmingly appalling set of circumstances that could have possibly led to this gross delusion of difference among human beings, I found that Hum’s theory was essential in making sense of it. Hum explains in “Between the Eyes”: The Racialized Gaze as Design that

We are not simply sets of disembodied eyeballs: perception is always a “view from somewhere” (Jay, “Scopic” 24). The gaze, referring to normative habits for selecting and perceiving visual input, influences how we make sense of what we see by reinscribing the dominant culturally authorized values and beliefs. (Hum 193)

Hum’s theory here is beyond enlightening in understanding the way race has infiltrated the violently varied ways that human beings have treated one another throughout history. The idea of artists (and politicians, celebrities, world leaders, etc.) absorbing the dominant culture and reflecting it back in the ways that they interact with the world contextualizes situations like that of Wheatley in an essential way. In seems foreign to imagine a scenario where a legal hearing must take place to defend a person’s authorship due solely to the color of their skin, but imagined with the idea that the accuser was expressing a “dominant culturally authorized value” and it begins to make sense.

While the racialized gaze does create these horrific times in our history and contributes to deplorable treatment of racial groups, the gaze becomes essential in dispelling backwards ideas when viewed historically. What I mean by this is that the racialized gaze as explained is a spot on concept forwarded by Hum. The gaze pushes design to simply be a reflection of accepted culture, which allows it to serve as the most accurate understanding of racial attitudes throughout history that we humans have access to. Wheatley’s accusers took what they understood as “factual” about those of her race and reflected in back in their designs (their accusations). This moment in history is a perfect encapsulation of the attitude of the time, an attitude so wildly different than the current one that it is still being referred to and learned from.

Imagine our history without artists creating works through this gaze. What we would be left with is a set of facts of human life and a misunderstanding of how through human interaction these facts came to be. Instead of accurately looking at any given story from the time period of enslavement of African people as an absurd and entirely illogical subjugation of an entire group of people, we would see it (from our modern perspective) as a story of someone treating another person incredibly poorly. Accounts of how people expressed themselves tells us exactly what the cultural climate of a time period was.

When we all us sixth graders looked over at Chris that day, he was laughing. After class a friend of his asked him why. “The guy in the story said he was going to stop voting because a black guy voted” he said, “people were so stupid back then they gave up on voting just because a black guy could do it too”.

Huck Finn is of course a work of fiction, but that fiction is heavily based in reality. There was surely a man in the south at that time who made it clear that he would not vote again because an African American man was allowed to as well. Fast forward to my sixth grade class and we see a young boy perfectly understand a very different culture not from a relaying of facts of the time period, but from hearing a realistic account of how a man might have reflected the dominant culture at the time.

The racialized gaze is an incredibly damaging and seemingly innate trend of human beings, but it has a silver lining. We learn from our history, and the accuracy with which we can view past versions of our culture through examinations of individuals interacting with it gives us knowledge we need to ensure we progress and never return to it.