Race and Design

Hum introduces the idea of design to us as both a noun and verb. As a verb, design can be understood as the “process of strategic choice making involved in deploying representational resources (images and words) to enact our communicative purposes, while, as a noun, design is defined as the “existing resources from which those representations are crafted.” Design, as Hum argues, provides a theoretical framework for visual rhetoric by directing our attention to how designers and authors may sustain practices of racialization and perpetuate racially based sociocultural exclusions, referred to as the habit of racialized gaze. This gaze as design functions as both the choice-making process of design and the available recourses used. This framework of race-related visual phenomena offers first, the methodological possibility, with design promoting a conscious awareness of the recursive relationship between rhetorical purpose and perceptual habits, while visual representations shape even as they are shaped by our ideologies on race relations. Theoretical possibility focuses on how both processes and resources are already sedimented with perceptual habits that may run counter to designer’s professional goals. The pedagogical concept requires that designers cultivate an overt awareness of the diverse culturally dominant perceptual habits that influence design. Combining these ideas, we can analyze the ways in which design takes into account the ways in which a culture’s own perceptual habits influence or limit the rhetorical purpose of images seeking to initiate social transformation.

Cooper writes to illuminate and amplify the voice referred to as the Negro (or of the Black Woman). She elucidates the classification of writers, as those who write to please or as they please (just painting what they see) and those that preach (whether righteous or unrighteous), to propagate an idea. This distinction is made in support of literature and contributions arbitrarily produced by those blinded by prejudices, as well as those with open-minded or kind intentions. She states, “Presenting the black man as a free American citizen, not the humble slave of Uncle Tom’s Cabin- but the man, divinely struggling and aspiring yet tragically warped and distorted by the adverse winds of circumstance, has not yet been painted.” Then “...the canvas awaits the brush of the colored man himself.” This encapsulates the idea that the black man’s voice has been silenced and lost by a hierarchal society that has (re)produced work with a biased, distorted or censored approach or clouded mindset. Reading words such as “it’s nuffin but a man!” weigh on us and paint a picture of what is written and what is true, while some write and acknowledge history acting the part of a coward, while others embrace the darkness with a calm spirit that knows what is right.

These texts can be conflated as we analyze and mesh their ideas, considering Hum’s identification between race and design, and Cooper’s light shed on the neglect and distortion of voices (from the south). Putting that into conversation, our perception of race throughout history has essentially been manmade, as the white-gaze has had the upper hand in literary construction. Authenticity in design both emphasizes and creates racial identity, whether negatively or not, to underscore certain characteristics to a biased eye. This design influences interpretation in a racial sense as it shifts our perspective to match watch we engage with. African-American individuals were completely neglected in the regard of being able to utilize design to paint their own portrait and instead were often shunned in the public light of imagery. It is important, as audience members, that we remove this racial lens when viewing design that often magnifies stereotypes, and instead note that conflict comes into play when images are crafted based off authors or designer’s perception of events, or fondness of what they want to see distributed.