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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWalking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’
Man, I almost blew you away!
Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late 1970s who caught sight of me carrying the new telescope my mother had just purchased for me.
I thought you had a weapon, he said.
The words made me tremble and pause; I felt the sort of bodily stress and deep existential anguish that no teenager should have to endure.
This officer had already inherited those poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices that make up what I call the white gaze. He had already come to see the black male body as different, deviant, ersatz. He failed to conceive, or perhaps could not conceive, that a black teenage boy living in the Richard Allen Project Homes for very low income families would own a telescope and enjoyed looking at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.
A black boy carrying a telescope wasnt conceivable unless he had stolen it given the white racist horizons within which my black body was policed as dangerous. To the officer, I was something (not someone) patently foolish, perhaps monstrous or even fictional. My telescope, for him, was a weapon.
In retrospect, I can see the headlines: Black Boy Shot and Killed While Searching the Cosmos.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/walking-while-black-in-the-white-gaze/?emc=eta1&_r=0
raging moderate
(4,312 posts)It is well worth reading. The author shows such a wide range of knowledge and huge depth of understanding. One thing I noticed: the prohibition of a black person looking a white person in the eye. Long ago, it was poor white peasant people who were prohibited from looking their aristocrats in the eye, or questioning orders, or "stealing" some of the food they had produced but were required to give to their masters. When they got the chance, they turned around and did it to others, as though that would make them safe at last.
We white people are, as a group, encased in a rigid stifling suit of armor. Each of us must keep chipping away at the small portion within our reach. Our ancestors built it out of unreasoning terror, but the suit itself will eventually kill us, if we can't break out of it. We must learn to accept ourselves as we are and connect with other human beings. Articles like this one are very helpful to us in this struggle.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)K&R
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)See? There's only ONE kind of racism in America,...reverse racism.
MrScorpio
(73,631 posts)Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)Who knew?
Supersedeas
(20,630 posts)Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)joshcryer
(62,277 posts)Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)I do not think Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck or O'Reilly would like it. Tough shit.
malaise
(269,225 posts)ismnotwasm
(42,021 posts)JustAnotherGen
(31,942 posts)States the experience. And he does it in such a way that to argue against the actual experience is to do exactly what Yancey discusses in this essay.
This - this explains how it is as old asthe fore fathers:
My point here is to say that the white gaze is global and historically mobile. And its origins, while from Europe, are deeply seated in the making of America.
DLevine
(1,788 posts)Supersedeas
(20,630 posts)which resulted from a black man carrying an umbrella (telescopes, umbrellas...and the gaze of others--though not always the white gaze)
See:
http://triad.news14.com/content/news/692881/new-evidence-says-umbrella-may-have-caused-a-t-university-lockdown
Grateful for Hope
(39,320 posts)Liberal_in_LA
(44,397 posts)struggle4progress
(118,379 posts)justification, involving notions such as the intellectual inferiority and uncivilizability of "black" savages, the successor to slavery -- which was chain-gang labor -- required ideological justification, involving notions such as the inherent criminality of black males
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017131999