The Harmful Implications of Racialized Gaze

When addressing the existence of race in literature, we encompass what seems to be an extremely large portion of American literature. This is largely due to the existence of a racialized gaze amongst both the audience and the author of a text. No matter the intent of a writer or a piece of literature, the inclusion of race brings forth implicit assumptions about that race from the audience. Sue Hum addresses this process as “racialized gaze as design”, as these messages about race are created through the simple inclusion of other races. In other words, “no one approaches images with an innocent eye” (Hum 193).

Through the essays of Hum and the essays of Gates, we can deduce that the use of race in design is a powerful tool that often becomes harmful to the races being addressed.While this statement may seem obvious, it is important to note that the problems of race do not lie in inclusion but rather an inaccurate representation of a race in literature. An author constantly undergoes the task of telling the stories of others, but these stories can only be told from the gaze of the author. An author’s racialized gaze can render the inclusion of race ineffective or harmful, as the author risks creating a generalized other that runs off of harmful stereotypes. Hum’s example of this occurrence lies in the cartoons of Thomas Nast. Nast’s largely progressive thought process was foreign to the eyes of the uninformed American people who had never met a Chinese person. In order to address this missing experience, Nast adjusted his cartoons to depict Chinese people through a largely stereotypical lens. Chinese men were portrayed with long, braided hair and traditional “eastern” garb. Not only does Nast misrepresent the Chinese community with this depiction alone, he also invokes race in a negative manner to make the Chinese better by comparison to other races. Such is the case in the cartoon comparing a respectable Chinese man and a horrid caricature of a black man. “Despite the connotative differences in meaning, race is represented as merely physical, recognizable traits, which then stand in for an entire group” (Hum 202).

Nast’s intentions seem to have been good-hearted, he wanted to end persecution of the Chinese. However, Nast’s invocation of race caused more harm than good to both the Chinese and the African Americans. This occurrence not unique, it is laced within the history of American literature as noted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations. To do so is to engage in a pernicious act of language, one which exacerbates the complex problem of cultural or ethnic difference, rather than to assuage or redress it” (Gates 5). Race is a tool that can tell powerful stories, but it is too often addressed through myopic viewpoints that push harmful messages without the consent of the groups being exploited. Gates uses the example of African slave poet Phillis Wheatley for this racial bias. Her career as a poet was consistently fighting the expected racialized gaze of the audience of her poems. To the general public, it was not possible for a young African girl to know of various allusions and Latin words. As a result, she was forced to go under stiff board examination to determine her validity as an author. To immortalize her place as a writer, Wheatley included an “Attestation” with her work that addressed the importance of an author with her heritage. Without the published “Attestation,” Phillis Wheatley's publisher claimed, few would believe that an African could possibly have written poetry all by herself. As the eighteen put the matter clearly in their letter, "Numbers would be ready to suspect they were not really the Writings of Phillis” (Gates 8).

In short, the implications in the design of racialized gaze can destroy the message of the literature the author is attempting to write. While there may be a useful piece of discourse in a text, we must remember to examine it with this racialized gaze in mind, and we must discern fact from hyperbolic fiction accordingly.