[reposting] Race Manifested in Society

In Sue Hum’s essay, Between the Eyes: The Racialized Gaze as Design, she opens her essay with a quote form Gunther Kress that not only provides a smooth entry into her theory of Design, but nicely summarizes it as well. Kress said that individuals “shape their interests through the design of messages with the resources available to them in specific situations (191).” In other words, people’s interests are unconsciously generated from images and messages that are created with available resources and their invisible dominant perceptual practices. However, Hum argues that a person’s dominant perceptual practices, as well as their cultural perceptual practices, may “influence and even limit the rhetorical purposes of images seeking to initiate social transformation (193).” Thus, why she advocates that the English studies needs “a theory of Design that better acknowledges the dominant perceptual habits that function to both constrain acts of choice-making and restrict the repertoire of available resources (192).”

When Hum says “dominant perceptual practices,” she literally means how a person looks at something or someone (the act of looking). Hum also says that a person’s looking habits are constructed with the aid of cultural ideas and events, thus preventing someone “to approach an image with an innocent eye (193).” Art historian Ernst Gombrich describes how dominant cultural perceptual practices are created through a set of shared assumptions specific to a historical period or ideology. For example, an American is walking down fifth avenue and casually walks by a Muslim. Unfortunately, words such as terrorist and feelings of fear may associate with the American as the Muslim walks by because of the 9/11 attack in early 2000s. This cultural event may cause the American to “unwittingly sustain practices of racialization and perpetuate racially based sociocultural exclusions (192)” through his/her creation of commercials, billboards, or advertisements. Hum calls this the racialized gaze.

In this blog post, I would like to focus on the aspect of the racialized glaze that “interpellates human subjects, but also contributes to the production of their subjectivity within particular sociohistorical circumstance (193).” A good example of this would the African-American movie narrative. The African-American movie narrative has never been marketed as mainstream because many critics have believed that not all audience members could not relate to a black reality. Therefore, this led African-American narrated films to be marketed as niche entertainment, or the “other films” for the “other people.” This refusal to market African-American narrated films as mainstream helped create the idea that the African- American people should be seen as-09 cvbhgkljuikolp,.associated with derogatory characteristics. Through both Gates and Hum, we see how deeply manifested this idea of race can structure the sources of our thoughts and feelings towards other people and prevent society and social equality from progressing forward.