Race Writes History

Or at least, in this case, how modern society views the historical context that surround certain significant events in the past. Whether it was purposeful or not, history was written with a racial bias; this is especially relevant here in America, where we have a long past of shameful racial prejudices throughout the development of our nation. Ever since the Colonial days when white Western-Europeans came to already-inhabited America and claimed this land their own, it has become evident that these white European's fancied themselves as the dominant race. One of the most prime examples is the continued celebration of Christopher Columbus day; it is a holiday celebrating the exploratory spirit and the navigator, who while looking for a direct route to Asia from Europe, "discovered" the American continent. This is a very biased way of learning about the events that transpired; it is often vaguely described how there were already a native people in this land, and there had been for thousands of years. But the day that a white man accidentally landed upon its shores, it was "discovered", which has a positive connotation associated with it. It is common for educational systems in America to teach about the historical time period this way, but fail to see the events that transpired in the Native American context. Christopher Columbus and his men took advantage of the welcoming Natives, ravaged them of their resources, stripped them of their lands, and essentially began the genocide of the Native American population. So why only teach about one viewpoint? Because the white race, which has established itself as the dominant one within the racially constructed hegemonic American society, has been responsible for the "white-washing" of recorded history.

This racial rewriting of history, as Hum describes it, occurs because of a racialized gaze. This gaze, which is referring to the 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. In American culture, this racialized gaze has always favored the white population over all other's, constituting of racial meanings that carry negative stereotypes about those races with darker colored skin. The racialized gaze predisposes people of a society to illustrate the world around them according to the culturally established relationship of visible corporeal difference and social hierarchy. It intertwines body and image and body in a perception-based power relationship of seeing and being seen where race is constrained to only surface level differences. Hum describes the racialized gaze further as a verb, manifesting the processes of racialization in choice making through  two interrelated characteristics, sight and site. Using people's actual sight, it inspires differences in physiological features with facticity; these perceptions, in turn, create sites of understanding about a race that incorporate culturally specified unseen characteristics about the group. This experience is not limited only to white people, though; races inside of American culture can internalize the white racial gaze and therefore experience self-alienation. This creates a natural social hierarchy according to race. 

This method of reasoning is expanded on further by Gates, who points to this racialized gaze starting to realize itself within Western-European culture in the 19th century, upon which subsequent notions of "national literatures" would be constructed throughout its future, long before Columbus landed on Native shores. Taine saw race as "the first and richest source of these master facilities from which historical events take their rise"(3)...and emphasized the naturally determining role of race within society hierarchies. His "scientific" application of the nature and role of race to the writing of literature set the tone for colonial America to maintain these standards. Gates uses the example of how in 1862, even Abraham Lincoln, the famous author of the Emancipation Proclamation which freed the slaves, presented an argument for all blacks to return to Africa upon the reasoning of white and black "natural" differences. He states that race in biological science is fiction, and was born simply with the careless misuse of metaphors for people based on their appearances, and over time it has become "a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems"(6). These tropes, apparent in Western-European literature history, sought to have these belief systems become transcendent into biological science; and ultimately, by doing so, they developed pseudoscientific categories of races. Once these fixed and finite categories were established, they were inscribed into literary historical views, which ultimately set the frame for Western-European cultures to rewrite modern history in their favor. Which is still evident even in today's mostly unbiased American society, where we continue to teach our youth that Christopher Columbus was an explorer that should be celebrated for discovering America and paving the way for our society to exist today.