The "Dominant" Design: Why We Must Dismantle Universality

Critical Race Theory in the 21st century has many intersections and distinct voices that contribute to a nuanced conversation. Importantly, there is no single "dominant" leader who speaks for every experience. Thus, for congruence with this nuanced conversation, it seems most logical to highlight unique view points such as Sue Hum’s Between the Eyes: The Racialized Gaze as Design and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Writing “Race” and the Difference it Makes. From there one may synthesize how Hum and Gates as individuals together can offer very valuable experiences and knowledge sets to expand rhetorical theory and ideas of (re)presentation.

Beginning with Sue Hum, a stand out point from her essay is the inclusion of different ideas on how to perceive “Design”, which as a word is most commonly understood as a creative and performative verb. Yet, when Hum focuses on design as noun (also known as “what resources are available”) it is different because it informs the process of designing. Nominal design serves as an important reminder that humanity does not have infinite natural resources available but we can expand our existing limits through how our culture acknowledges the current limitations and crafts new ways to see new possibilities. For example, Hum says "we invent what we see" (Hum 191) and one way to process the strife between possibilities and resources is Doctors Mamie and Kenneth Clark's famous psychological experiment The Doll Test.




The aim of The Doll Test was to investigate the attitudes young children had toward baby dolls of perceived different races. Reflecting on how kids are influenced by what they see, Hum might raise the question,"if white baby dolls once permeated the toy market as a limited available toy option, how does that narrowed access to toys used for learning and development affect the children's perceived attitudes"?

This experiment supported the paradox of the racialized gaze as Design can "perpetuate racially based sociocultural exclusions" but the heightened awareness of these exclusions provides an opportunity to create new "ensembles" that directly challenges the Design (Hum 192). The new ensembles in this case were more inclusive markets with dolls of all different perceived backgrounds and appearances.

Moreover, mainstream culture can limit the power of images that could be powerfully used for social transformation because ease and immediacy are now more valued over sound analysis contributing to problematic "normative habits" (Hum 193, 208). The racialized gaze as Design (noun) also affects the process of resource selection (Hum 194) and when I think of resources that can conjure images, one example is available terms. For example, people are not really "poor" because what are they poor specifically? Poor of character, of spirit? Poor is a is not a fully accurate term on its own and it is a racialized term where as "low income" is more specific and actually addresses the social issue. Provided is a chart that FSU Sustainable Campus uses to directly expand available resources. How we can manipulate what is available in immediate consciousness is important because in an actively changing resources mistakes will be made but a correction is better than an ignorance perpetuating.

Grid Credit: Gabrielle Maynard, FSU Food Recovery Network Program Coordinator

Gates mentions that the Western literary tradition speaks to "the human condition" relying on "formal patterns of repetition" (Gates 2) which aligns with Hum's realization that "dynamic universality...results in the lived experiences of people of color are downplayed or erased by an assumption of sameness" (Hum 195)
I now understand why we've avoided "universal truths" and "commonalities" this semester because...
-everyone has different needs and there's "somebody in everybody" no matter how they react or their abilities/access to

Gates "ultimate opposition" is the outsiders versus the "norm"inside group and this clearly shows that Thomas Nast's political cartoons would not have landed at all without the "ultimate opposition" because they needed to create two sides (Lady Liberty and John Confucious)
-patronizing cartoons (Hum 200) and white savior complex (Hum 202)

Avoiding homogeneity (Hum 203) but perceptions are everything...(link to Gates)

Ultimately, dismantling normative "dominance" is possible through understanding (re)presentation as a paradox. Something that is wildly difficult to achieve and even when one feels they have presented another person to the best of their ability, it will always fall short of actuality. Patronizing attempts at support are not always understood as patronizing or problematic by the person person and something as simple as