Over the past few weeks we have read several texts that have given us some insight into the installation of the black-white binary as the guidepost for racial formation in the United States. After reading George Aiken's play Uncle Tom's Cabin, Cheryl Harris's "Whiteness as Property" and Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990's as texts that give you some insight into the racial trajectory mediated by the state and social relationships mediated by the law, what is your take and how do you understand these texts in relationship to some of the visual texts we have explored such as Kara Walker's Antebellum series or Douglas Kirk's Imitation of Life?
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Module 1- Black and White Matters
Over the past few weeks we have read several texts that have given us some insight into the installation of the black-white binary as the guidepost for racial formation in the United States. After reading George Aiken's play Uncle Tom's Cabin, Cheryl Harris's "Whiteness as Property" and Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990's as texts that give you some insight into the racial trajectory mediated by the state and social relationships mediated by the law, what is your take and how do you understand these texts in relationship to some of the visual texts we have explored such as Kara Walker's Antebellum series or Douglas Kirk's Imitation of Life?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
In a scene from the film, Imitation of Life, the character Sarah Jane, who has been “passing” as white while dating a white man states, “I’m going to be everything he thinks I am. I look it; that’s all that matters” (Imitation 1:04:39). Her statement reflects the historical, yet ongoing prejudice of people of color, as well as the notion that race is conflated with social and economic categories of class.
ReplyDeletePassing, and the fluid categorizations of “race” become a theme in the readings and viewings for this module. It also becomes the introduction for Cheryl Harris’ Harvard Law Review piece, “Whiteness as Property,” as Harris recounts the psychologically, emotionally torturous double life that Harris’ grandmother lived while passing at her place of employment. In the lives of this modules’ characters who are portrayed in Imitation of Life and Ride with the Devil, frameworks for understanding the intersections of racial formation simmer invisibly beneath the surface, and yet guide every single aspect of their lives, as it does for us all today. Whether it is 1861 or 1959, their lives chart a course through racial formation which challenges a black/white binary, revealing race as a complex notion that eludes a reductive understanding. Omi and Winant, in Racial Formation in the United States, chart the evolution of various understandings of race, examining intersections of ethnicity, class, nation, etc. to contextualize the meaning with which “race” is imbued. While the notion of “passing” is one that seeks to skirt underneath the categorizations of race for a multitude of reasons as complex as the act itself, Omi and Winant firmly plant us in the contemporary moment with the argument that “opposing racism requires that we notice race, not ignore it, that we afford it the recognition it deserves and the subtlety it embodies” (Racial Formation 159).
Rachel Blackburn, Module 1
Oh no! It took away all my formatting somehow. I italicized in the proper places, I promise.
DeleteBlack And White Matters
ReplyDeleteKara Walker’s black-cut silhouettes on the white background challenge, frame, and then re-present underlying racial tensions in the United States. Her room size paintings argue against beliefs that the United States is breathing in its post slavery era. In Walker’s painting, blacks and whites are simultaneously present; one’s existence cannot be fully realized without the other’s presence. However, such coexistence between blacks and whites is not equal as the latter constantly enjoys the right of exercising its privilege and dominance over the former. As Omi and Winant Argue in Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1990s, “we are all compelled to think racially.” As they assert, we cannot deny racism unless we accept its very existence. However, this acceptance often follows with the attempts of trivializing the matter. The process of trivialization is always the same and it starts with generating feelings of otherness in minorities. Upon separation of minorities from white Christian Americans, the system then categorizes all the ‘others’ in specific ethnic groups such as Afro-Americans, Latinos, Asian American, and Arabs (Arabs + Persians). A closer look makes it obvious that such categorization is done with the objective of reducing the identity of an individual to a uniform and hegemonic group identity that later will be exploited to define and consolidate the white supremacy. Thus as Omi and Winant believes, the centrality of race in the United States’ sociopolitical and cultural structure is undeniable and “race is a constituent of the individual psyche and of relationships among individuals; it is also an irreducible component of collective identities and social structure.”
Rana Esfandiary
Dr. Hodges Persley was clear at the beginning of the semester when she stated that when we as a class embark upon discussing black lives, we will also be discussing whiteness. Eve Sedgwick makes a similar argument in her book, "Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire," when she writes that when we talk about men on the English Restoration stage, we are also talking about the women. I mention Ms. Sedgwick as my research interests currently reside at the intersection of comedy, sexuality, and class. This idea that one cannot talk about one group of people without talking about the other is an inescapable thread in this module. This inseparable duality of ideas speaks to the messy nature of understanding racial formation. As Omi and Winant write in their book, "Racial Formation in the United States," nothing would be more straightforward than to think of race “as an essence, as something fixed, concrete, and objective,” or to conversely treat race “as a mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate" (54). But we must challenge both of these positions and attempt to transcend the presumable conflict between them, as race is not defined in these ways. The state of race in this country is not just about black lives, it is about the influence of whiteness.
ReplyDeleteIn the film, Imitation of Life, I was moved when Sarah Jane said, “I want a chance in life…my mother can’t help her color, but I can!” The American psyche is in a tragic place as there exists an insatiable desire to possess whiteness, and thereby dismissing value found in non-whites. Even though Cheryl Harris, in her article "Whiteness as Property," addresses solutions and defines affirmative action as “a principle;” as “formal equality” that “overlooks structural disadvantage” in order to provide “equal treatment,” the challenge remains to transform our world into a more equal and fair place to live (1781).
Jenna Lyons
ReplyDeleteTHR 914
Hodges Persley
Due: February 3, 2015
Module 1 Blog
While reading Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States, Antonio Gramsci’s name appeared frequently and alongside several of his most prolific cultural theories. Omi and Winant used Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony to push forth the argument that an ever-dominant, ruling white class has achieved and maintained racial hegemony over a subordinate class of color. They write, “. . . after World War II a system of racial hegemony was substituted for the earlier system of racial domination” (15). By explaining how racial politics of the United States have shifted from a focus on physical domination and exclusion to the containment and rearticulation of postwar civil rights movements to the contemporary moment of buzzwords, colorblindness, and neoliberalism, their argument and subsequent observations successfully prove that the people of the United States are ensnared in the hegemonic power structure of the white ruling class.
Omi and Winant’s argument that racial politics in the United States function as racial hegemony restructures how the state and the white ruling class perform whiteness. In previous centuries, explicit and violent racism was tolerated and promoted by the state, but after the black civil rights movements, the state and the white ruling class were pressured to bring about a change in racial politics and performance. However, there was not as much change as there was hegemonic negotiation; there were efforts to appease and create consent to the racial hegemony already in practice, not a revolutionized racial state. The correlation between whiteness and the ruling class remained, but what had to be reconfigured was how to enact racist policies, commit racist actions, and guard the hegemonic structure, without being called “Racist!” Gramsci’s idea of hegemony operates on many levels of American society, and most notably, as Omi and Winant argue, in racial politics.
Black and White Matters Response
ReplyDeleteDespite the infinite complexities of matters of race, American culture tends to boil down the issue to a matter of black and white and at times black versus white. However, these complexities needs to be unpacked to be properly understood that racial formations in the United States are not based solely on skin color and there is no overarching unity for one group or another but rather that racial identities can be as varied as the number of individuals.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant explore the Three Approaches to Race, (Ethnicity, Class, and Nation) uncovering how these theories are flawed and shape our understanding of race in the United States. We can expand upon these flaws through the nuanced issues of race and ethnicity featured in Ride with the Devil (1999) and Imitation of Life (1959).
Ethnicity Theory primarily focused on culture and assimilation (15). Surprisingly, the Ethnicity Theory refuses to define ethnicity among one group, like Blacks. Deeming the group as an almost homogenous group, despite distinct variables among the population. The movie, Imitation of Life features distinct differences between a mother and daughter based entirely on one being able to pass for white. Sarah Jane’s entire racial identity is different and at times flexible because of her skin color, than her own mothers. While one, fictitious example, the story of Sarah Jane is meant to explore the larger issue of identity for African Americans that were able to pass in the United States and how they explored their own racial identity.
Class Theory explores race through the economic structures of class. Yet Class Theory does not offer a satisfactory explanation of racial identities, claiming that they are determined by class relationships. In Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil, Jack Roedel, the son of German Immigrants, is not trusted by his fellow Confederates because of his German heritage despite being a similar class to Pitt and other Bushwackers. Roedel’s heritage cast suspicious and defines most of his interactions with his fellow Confederates, rather than his class.
The Nation and Cultural Nationalism is problematic, as it does not allow for differences in the national context. Rather than understanding the differences between people internally, we are all “Americans.” The nation-based theories does not allow for the divisiveness of minority communities or that divisions can occur. Both of the above examples show that there are divisions and that racial identities are formulated outside of Ethnic, Class or National lenses.
Each of our artistic theorizations engage in “the creation of new identities, new racial meanings” and have the potential to create “new collective subjectivity,” as Omi and Winant claim is the most fundamental task of racially based social movements (85-6). The case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is particularly telling. When Aiken’s play adaptation was produced in 1852, it contributed to an abolitionist movement that, in Omi and Winant’s terms, was the first time in the US that the “unstable equilibrium” is challenged to the extent that it produces a “crisis” for the state. The play’s challenge to slavery, and the play’s widespread popularity, indicative of broadening changes in racial meaning, created new identities for African Americans – at least in the ways that whites thought about them. These same identities and racial meanings, newly formed (by whites), become part of later negotiations about race, when negative stereotypes about blacks and a claim for the essential value of whiteness are used to establish a new “unstable equilibrium” that equilibrates the “racial state” with the absolute minimum of concessions.
ReplyDeleteKara Walker’s Antebellum pieces intervene in the viewing public’s memory of the Antebellum South. She reveals the violence and sexual exploitation that undergirded the entire society. By showing, in some pieces, black body parts forming or carrying white bodies she makes literal the essential pieces of Antebellum life and reveals the centrality of race to narratives of that time period. With the art, she contests the very foundations of whiteness. Harris shows that “the right to exclude” was and remains central to whiteness (1738). Using the form with which wealthy whites memorialized themselves and their values, Walker challenges historical exclusions, and by making the exclusions and her challenge explicit, challenges any and all status quo exclusions based on whiteness, and built from the violence enacted on black bodies.