How Racialized Gaze Shapes Our Perception

It is often said that “race is a social construct” and Hum and Gates both support this argument by showing how throughout history the voices of black authors have been altered. In “Between the Eyes: The Racialized Gaze as Design,” Hum draws attention to the fact that individuals make strategic choices in the design of their rhetoric based on a culture’s dominant perceptual practices. She writes that “when we speak of "the white race" or "the black race," "the Jewish race" or "the Aryan race," we speak in biological misnomers and, more generally, in metaphors.” (Hum 4) We, as individuals, rely on our racialized gaze as an available resource of design. Sometimes we use these resources subconsciously without even realizing it.

The perception of an entire culture can be shifted by visual and verbal imagery used by an author. In order, to differentiate ourselves between races we use sight and site, according to Hum. The visible corporeal differences and physiological features we use in design influence our opinion on social attributes such as identity, intelligence, morality, and nationalism (Hum 194). This is how the racist imagery of Africans and American Indians changed societal perception as they were portrayed “primitive” and “savage.” These types of imagery shape how we view a particular culture and categorize them as “the Other.”  

There are instances when a message that could be viewed as progressive still rely on overtly racial depictions or “sight in design.” For example, Hum uses the political cartoon of Columbia protecting the Chinese man despite featuring derogatory picture of the man himself.  It is easy to see how these characteristics can create a social hierarchy since black writing can viewed as otherness. As Gates points out in his essay, “black signifiers, regardless of their intent or desire, made the first political gesture in the Anglo-African literary tradition "simply" by the act of writing. Their collective act gave birth to the black literary tradition and defined it as the "Other's chain," the chain of black being as black people themselves would have it.” (Gates 12)