Access of Sight

On page 191, Hum wrote, “We invent what we see.” In the 1880s during The Yellow Peril, Thomas Nast, a self-proclaimed progressive and American cartoonist, documented the “progressive” ideologies at the time. However, his stereotypical portrayals of foreigners and minorities did anything but spread a progressive message. In Mitchell’s article, we look at Jacob Rii’s How The Other Half Lives and examine how the process of the photographs taken during nighttime police raids perpetuate a violent dynamic between a photographer and his subject/powerless victim. Hum breaks down design as a process that roots from existing resources, and in photo-journalism, photographers often go to dangerous extents in order to expose a certain “truth”. However, the intentions of cartoonists and photographers and the constructs of both industries are based on the obsession of making vulnerable moments, peoples, or situations, into subjects of their narrative.

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.

Oppression in Literature

Gates uses a similar methodology as Hum to describe the roll race and history play in literature. For Gates, early literary theory was concerned with historical perspectives in literature. Literature was interpreted according to the period in which and the people by whom it was written. Race was crucial in literary criticism. It was considered to be the origins of man, the truths, ideas and ideals held by the author as part of the race. These were expressed implicitly and explicitly in their work. For gates, many of his ideas stem from his belief in the meaninglessness of race as a biological classification. We as a society treat race like a scientific classification. That classification leads us to further isolate ourselves from one another by attributing characteristics and biases to that race. To clarify lets dissect a concept called “talking white”. This is a concept that Gates addresses in another one of his works. “Talking white” is the idea that ones ability to speak properly and intelligently is attributed to their relative “whiteness”. Similar to the story about Phillis Wheatley, it’s as if other races must “prove” their whiteness in order to be considered intellectually equal. But under this racialized white gaze like the one described in Hum’s work, African Americans will never be able to create their own personal perception of themselves or the work they create because of the feeling of “otherness” that this gaze and racial classification causes. We associate characteristics concerning intelligence with the attributes of certain races. Gates would likely take issue with that sentence alone simply for its acknowledgment of specific races having specific attributes, an idea that contradicts his argument.

Adjusting Our Gaze

Throughout her essay Hum calls on readers to identify the relationship between design and race, specifically the racialized gaze. First she provides readers with clear definitions for both terms, identifying design as a “processes of strategic choice making involved in deploying representational resources” (191), and the racialized gaze as “a dominant cultural habit for perceiving race related phenomena” (192).  When looking at the relationship between the two Hun asks readers to recognize how designers may sustain racialization and stereotyping and perpetuate racial exclusions. She also goes on  to explain how this racialized gaze is often ingrained in design decisions, oftentimes without deliberate intent.

Race Unites People In a Toxic and Misleading Way

While it is common to think of race as a dividing force between people of different skin colors, religious affiliations, and social situations, the concept of race can also be a cohesive force but in an ultimately negative way. Race seems to imply that the greatest divide between people is their skin color even though, like mentioned by Gates, has no biological backing. The components of the racial divide suggest that people within particular races resemble each other to the greatest degrees of comparison which is disgustingly inaccurate. A white man can resemble a black man in humor, style, taste, and so on just as equally as two people of the same race. Because we have comprised a concept of race, race has now become a prominent literary component, in a way that really is not necessary if this sort of divide had never been created.

Racial Perception Throughout History

Although Hum and Gates elaborate on different focal points in their argument, “Between the Eyes: The Racialized Gaze as Design” and “Writing Race and the Difference it Makes” both make strong accusations that racial perception ultimately influences our interpretation of art and literature throughout history. Hum begins this argument by elaborating on the complexities of racial perspective and breaking down racialized gaze as Design. “No one approaches images with an innocent eye. Designers’ perceptual habits, such as the racialized gaze, influence their choice-making processes, including choosing, sequencing, and combining resources.” (Hum 2) Hum is essentially arguing that one’s racial perspective may be shaped by historical changes in representation. The projections of those representations are what constitutes racialized gaze as Design. Hum views racialized gaze not only as a perceptual habit, but also as a dominant cultural habit for perceiving race-related visual phenomena.

Painting the Portrait of African Americans

In her article "Between the Eyes: Racialized Gaze as Design," Sue Hum writes, "we invent what we see" (Hum 191). The assigned readings by Sue Hum, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Anna Julia Cooper contain a common idea: that for African Americans who have been dehumanized and stereotyped, who "internalize the white racial gaze," and who have been silenced in literature and art, it is nearly impossible to invent without limitation or to create without first responding to traditions of abuse and mockery (Hum 194).

Contemporary Poetry and Racial Gaze

These three readings actually tie together well with something else I've been studying as of late. That being poets of the 20th century of whom are either first or second generation immigrants. In Gates' essay he talks about how the white man discouraged and didn't believe in the writings of a black man/woman. In the 1700's Gates shows us that many theorists were throwing the idea of blacks writing out the window, never letting their work even surface. This caused black writers to learn and speak/write the way of the white man in order to even be remotely heard. How does this relate to poets in the 20th century?

Race and Gender

     While reading these three articles by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Anna Julia Cooper, and Sue Hum, I couldn't help but notice the relation of race to the current understandings of gender. There is the idea that history repeats itself, and that is why we must study history to understand the world around us; but with these articles I kept coming back to the notions of gender specificity taking the place of race in these articles. I am by no way saying that the notions of race that are being addressed in these articles have been solved and it is time for a new ideological set to come to the forefront of society, but rather I present the notion of how gender terminology is now moving into the spotlight in society, as ideas of race become more known.
   

Race as a Construct

A panel from American born Chinese, a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. The character pictured is 

aimed to represent the stereotypes used to label and alienate people of Asian descent.

Understanding the idea of "race" as a construct requires that one understands the historical context of its conception and usage. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells us in Writing "Race" and the Difference It Makes, “Western writers in French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and English have tried to mystify these rhetorical figures of race, to make them natural, absolute, essential. In doing so, they have inscribed these differences as fixed and finite categories which they merely report or draw upon for authority” (Gates 6). Gates tells us that the creation, usage, and perpetuation of the idea of "race" only serves to alienate people from one another - particularly those who are less privileged in historical and contemporary environments.“It takes little reflection, however, to recognize that these pseudoscientific categories are themselves figures. Who has seen a black or red person, a white, yellow, or brown? These terms are arbitrary constructs, not reports of reality” (Gates 6).