Foundational Racism

“We invent what we see” Hum (191.)

It is my belief that none of us are born with pre-conceived notions, we all are sponges, absorbing whatever is taught to us and said to us from the moment we are born, and the way we are raised is so vital, as it shapes who we become the rest of our lives. This is all too true when pertaining to race, as such a big part of racism is the way people are brought up, and how some are taught from an early age that certain races are inferior at certain tasks, superior at others, etc. This stereotyping has been a problem in this country forever, and despite making steps it is still a major issue today. The key aspect about racism in America that people easily forget is how recent the civil rights movement was, and how our parents and grandparents were alive when many blacks were still being forced to use separate water fountains, or when the Chinese were viewed as aliens, or how the National Guard had to be called in to let a black girl attend a high school.

These events are all pretty recent, and it sickens you to know that going to a high school was a problem, let alone racism in a micro sense. As Gates said, "learning to read and write, then was not only difficult, it was a violation of law." Gates (9.) The three readings we had for today are all pieces that dive deep into the way we depict things in pictures, especially race. Hum did this to perfection in my opinion, as she analyzed some of Nast’s political cartoons from the late 1800s and actually claimed that these depictions were racist and unflattering, despite that not being Nast’s intention. Mitchell brought up another fascinating angle about how what we see influences the way we see others, using examples of televising the KKK member David Dukes run for office, or how CNN live streamed a missile strike wiping out an entire city almost as if it were a movie that was being watched on Netflix. The issue with this is that the media has turned everything into entertainment, as we have seen with politics, and are not solely responsible, yet are a big reason why so much racial tension still exists today.

Yet drawing back to Hum and the racialized gaze, that to me really took over these readings. The gaze is defined as a dominant cultural habit for receiving race-related phenomena. The racialized gaze is really just a deeper dive into the word stereotype, yet the gaze wants to know why we have these stereotypes, and where they came from. The gaze is concerned with the fact that as a society we are too fast to judgement and too close minded when it comes to accepting others, all because the traits we learned and picked up growing up from various sources have made us this way. This is not to say that most parents turn their kids into racists, more so the influence of pop culture and the world in general shape young people a certain way.

Someone else I did some extensive research on in this chapter was W.E.B Dubois, a famous theorist from the 1800s, who had an interesting take about racism in terms of color. Dubois claimed that where he grew up, the poorest members of the community were not the blacks such as himself, but the Irish who had just recently arrived. This goes with Hum’s point that she made that racism is so much more white vs yellow or black vs white etc. People who are racist are immoral, vile people, and can be of any color. Yet, the issue is to not generalize or stereotype, and assume all whites hated all Chinese people in the 1800s and so on. The ways the angry white people were depicted in Nast’s cartons could also be viewed as a bit problematic, considering they were always drawn out to be eastern European, pudgy, and angry. There were artistic stereotypes for nearly every race, such as Indians being depicted as half-naked savages, or black people always having nappy hair or overly large lips, or Asians have extremely squinted eyes, all of these traits are a part of each race, yet they do not define each race, which is what many thought Nast did.