False Assumptions

   While reading Sue Hum’s “Behind the Eyes,” and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Writing Race and the Difference it makes,” I noticed that Gates address the history and reality of racial issues, and Hum discusses how and why race has come to influence society.  By putting these two authors and their works in conversation, we can unpack race and its constructs within literature and design.

           

Racialized Gaze As Old As Race: Understanding Author's Racialized Gaze

Hum and Gates expose the unspoken issues within hegemonic culture, where society is built from certain cultural thoughts and expectations from a dominating cultural group that undermines and excludes other groups to terrible extremes. Hum focuses on an artist from the dominant group in our hegemonic society who has taken the task upon himself to re-present what Gates calls "the Other (be that odd metaphorical negation of the European defined as African, Arabic, Chinese, Latin American, Yiddish, or female)"(2), in Hum's case study, Chinese immigrants. Gates also discusses the author from the dominant group who attempts to re-present "the Other" by creating "pseudoscientific categories"(6). "Western culture's use of writing as a commodity to confine and delimit a culture of color" is exactly how these categories are contrived or, at least, supported (6). Since "reason was privileged, or valorized, above all other human characteristics" and "writing...was taken to be the visible sign of reason", "blacks were 'reasonable,' and hence 'men,' if -- and only if -- they demonstrated mastery of 'the arts and science'" through writing (8). And, unfortunately, "blacks and other people of color could not write" (9). Gates focuses on "the Other" as an author/artist representing their self.

Foundational Racism

“We invent what we see” Hum (191.)

It is my belief that none of us are born with pre-conceived notions, we all are sponges, absorbing whatever is taught to us and said to us from the moment we are born, and the way we are raised is so vital, as it shapes who we become the rest of our lives. This is all too true when pertaining to race, as such a big part of racism is the way people are brought up, and how some are taught from an early age that certain races are inferior at certain tasks, superior at others, etc. This stereotyping has been a problem in this country forever, and despite making steps it is still a major issue today. The key aspect about racism in America that people easily forget is how recent the civil rights movement was, and how our parents and grandparents were alive when many blacks were still being forced to use separate water fountains, or when the Chinese were viewed as aliens, or how the National Guard had to be called in to let a black girl attend a high school.

The Stereotype of All Stereotypes

Established ideas and frames of mind direct every other aspect of one’s life whether he or she is fully cognoscente of it. Some of the effects on those aspects are more explicitly influenced by details of the subconscious than others, but are nonetheless present factors. Cultures make it a point to acknowledge differences based on physical attributes and qualities, using them to construct ideas and form assumptions as means of categorizing people. Society and exposure are mainly responsible for these perceptions and understandings of how the world works and how people are; things heavily associated with other things frame these expectations that people have for things or people categorized in a certain way (going beyond race). A specific case that demonstrates the concept is the influence of racial gaze and perception of “design”.

An Accurate History Through the Racialized Gaze

The last book my 6th grade English class read was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We began our unit on the book with short lecture from our teacher. “I know I am strict about no foul language in this classroom” she began, “but in understanding this book, we are going to encounter some”. She explained to us a bit about the book and its context. She explained that there are words in this book, racial slurs, that we should never repeat to another person. “But” she explained, “to pretend that these words were not used as they were at this time in our history would be an insult to all those who endured it”.

How Race Can Alter History

Made up depictions of race throughout history have developed and staged how we view certain races. In regards to how people shape their views by the content that is available to them, "...shape their interests through the design of messages with resources available to them in specific situations" (Hum 191). The process of design is one in which everything about the design is made up in part by the designer based off certain characteristics that negatively depict a race. Hum uses "radicalized gaze" (Hum 192) in order to describe how these images aimed focus on a  negative aspect of the race, "by directing our attention to how designers may unwittingly sustain practices of racialization and perpetuate racially based sociocultural exclusions" (Hum 192).

Both speak on the problem of people of color adopting a white perspective

Hum introduces her idea of Design to talk about the racialized gaze. Her term, Design is related to both the noun and the verb. Design as verb “spotlights the processes of stregic choice making involved in deploying representational resources, such as images and words, to enact our communicative purposes” (Hum 191). Design as a noun: “focuses on the existing resources from which those representations are crafted” (Hum 191).

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.