[reposting] racialized gaze as reality

All three of these theorists have ideas that are grounded similarly yet take off in different directions. Cooper and Gates’s arguments seem to run most parallel out of the three. Cooper shows some strong-toned rhetoric at the beginning of her work, where you can almost see her anger bleed into her thesis. Gates, too, goes on a long-winded (but insightful and very necessary) elaboration on how racism is a “fiction” (4) and a “dangerous trope” (5). She spends several pages roasting racism to the point where any conceivable marginalization of anyone sounds not only under-evolved but completely dumb. Cooper would greatly add onto Gates’s argument in the way that Cooper claims that black people have not truly had a chance to contribute to humanity because they’ve been oppressed (383). Hum makes an interesting point as she elaborates on her term of racialized gaze as design. Racialized gaze is a perceptual habit, meaning a habitual way of looking at something. Racialized gaze as Design argues that design has been influenced because of these perceptual habits. She claims that racialized gaze as design makes it harder for artists to express what they mean to (193) because the audience’s perceptual habit keeps them from fully empathizing with the artist. My issue with this claim is that if the audience is so affected by racialized gaze, then the artist should too be heavily affected by it. Further elaborating on these ideas, the only African American influence we currently have is one that has been shaped by racialized gaze, regardless of whether or not this gaze is held by the audience or the artist.