{"id":33422,"date":"2013-09-04T21:15:10","date_gmt":"2013-09-04T21:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=33422"},"modified":"2013-09-07T19:16:03","modified_gmt":"2013-09-07T19:16:03","slug":"walking-while-black-in-the-%e2%80%98white-gaze%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=33422","title":{"rendered":"Walking While Black in the \u2018White Gaze\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walking While Black in the \u2018White Gaze\u2019<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2013-09-01<\/p>\n

George Yancy<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Philosophy
\nDuquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cMan, I almost blew you away!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer \u2014 one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late 1970s \u2014 who caught sight of me carrying the new telescope my mother had just purchased for me.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought you had a weapon,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This officer had already inherited those poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices that make up what I call the \u201cwhite gaze.\u201d He had already come to \u201csee\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

A black boy carrying a telescope wasn\u2019t conceivable \u2014 unless he had stolen it \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, I can see the headlines: \u201cBlack Boy Shot and Killed While Searching the Cosmos.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was more than 30 years ago. Only last week, our actual headlines were full of reflections on the 1963 March on Washington<\/a>, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King\u2019s<\/a> \u201cI Have a Dream<\/a>\u201d speech, and President Obama\u2019s<\/a> own speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial<\/a> to commemorate it 50 years on. As the many accounts from that long ago day will tell you, much has changed for the better. But some things \u2014 those perhaps more deeply embedded in the American psyche \u2014 haven\u2019t. In fact, we should recall a speech given by Malcolm X<\/a> in 1964 in which he said, \u201cFor the 20 million of us in America who are of African descent, it is not an American dream; it\u2019s an American nightmare.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…The president\u2019s words<\/a>, perhaps consigned to a long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their everyday lives. Obama\u2019s voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon<\/a>, for example) that have long attempted to describe the lived interiority<\/a> of racial experiences. He has also deployed the power of narrative autobiography, which is a significant conceptual tool used insightfully by critical race theorists<\/a> to discern the clarity and existential and social gravity of what it means to experience white racism. As a black president, he has given voice to the epistemic<\/a> violence that blacks often face as they are stereotyped and profiled within the context of quotidian<\/a> social spaces…<\/p>\n

Read the entire opinion piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walking While Black in the \u2018White Gaze\u2019 The New York Times 2013-09-01 George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania \u201cMan, I almost blew you away!\u201d Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer \u2014 one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,6941,394,20],"tags":[15634,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-33422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-george-yancy","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}