Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race 9781786605382, 9781786605368, 9781786605375

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 A People Yet to Come
2 Multiplicitous Selves
3 The Intersections of Race, Gender, and Criminality
4 The Veil, Race, and Appearance
5 Challenging Conceptions of the “Normal” Subject in Phenomenology
6 Social Psychology, Phenomenology, and the Indeterminate Content of Unreflective Racial Bias
7 A Phenomenology of Seeing and Affect in a Polarized Climate
8 Race Consciousness Phenomenologically Understood
9 The Black Body
10 The Phenomenology of White Identity
11 Seeing Like a Cop
12 Becoming White
Index
About the Editor and Contributors

Citation preview

Race as Phenomena

Race as Phenomena Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race Edited by Emily S. Lee

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Executive editor: Frankie Mace Assistant editor: Rebecca Anastasi Marketing manager: Sean McDonagh Credits and acknowledgments for material borrowed from other sources, and reproduced with permission, appear on the appropriate page within the text. Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 https://rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2019 by Emily S. Lee All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Name: Lee, Emily S., 1971–, editor. Title: Race as phenomena : between phenomenology and philosophy of race / edited by Emily S. Lee. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019005449 (print) | LCCN 2019007688 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786605382 (electronic) | ISBN 9781786605368 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781786605375 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Race—Philosophy. | Ethnicity—Philosophy. Classification: LCC HT1523 (ebook) | LCC HT1523 .R2519 2019 (print) | DDC 305.8001—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005449 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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1 A People Yet to Come: “People of Color” Reconsidered 1 Boram Jeong 2 Multiplicitous Selves: Being-between-Worlds and Being-in-Worlds 15 Mariana Ortega 3 The Intersections of Race, Gender, and Criminality: A Black Woman’s Phenomenological Account 35 Shaeeda A. Mensah 4 The Veil, Race, and Appearance: A Political Phenomenology 55 Hourya Bentouhami 5 Challenging Conceptions of the “Normal” Subject in Phenomenology 69 Christine Wieseler 6 Social Psychology, Phenomenology, and the Indeterminate Content of Unreflective Racial Bias 87 Alex Madva 7 A Phenomenology of Seeing and Affect in a Polarized Climate 107 Emily S. Lee 8 Race Consciousness Phenomenologically Understood 125 Lewis R. Gordon 9 The Black Body: A Phenomenology of Being Stopped 143 George Yancy v

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10 The Phenomenology of White Identity Linda Martín Alcoff 11 Seeing Like a Cop: A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property Lisa Guenther 12 Becoming White: White Children and the Erasure of Black Suffering Shannon Sullivan

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Index

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the contributors to this book. This is an eclectic group of people who are both established and budding within the field of philosophy. I’m glad we share interests in philosophy of race and phenomenology. I’ve long admired some of the contributors’ work, and I’m learning so much from the newer members. I am proud to be a member of this community. I would also like to thank the editorial and publishing staff at Rowman & Littlefield International. The idea for this collection came from this publishing company; I’m very impressed with the forethought of its staff. It has been a pleasure working with Sarah Campbell, Rebecca Anastasi, and recently Frankie Mace in finishing this book. Their professionalism and patience were just what I needed. Thank you, Professor Kyung Sun Cho, for permission to use one of your paintings for the cover design of this book. (You can see her work at www.kyungsuncho.com.) I have learned a lot about the temporality of color from you. Thank you for being such an admirable colleague here at California State University at Fullerton, and more importantly thank you for your friendship. Last but definitely not least, I want to thank my family and friends for their support, especially my immediate family: Nelson Toy and Lilah Toy. Thank you, Lilah, for quiet time that lets me have a career and be your mommy.

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With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, talk of a postracial future proliferated. With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016, where is the talk of a postracial future? I think that talk of a postracial future has subsided. Nevertheless, philosophers of race still question the continued discussion of race. For me, the necessity of a continued discussion and analysis about race is obvious. It is obvious because elementary school black boys still face disproportionate disciplinary action from their teachers. 1 It is obvious because opportunity hoarding by white parents prohibits children of color from academically succeeding. 2 It is obvious because those with ethnic-sounding names still experience discrimination when searching for employment. 3 It is obvious because the difference in class between black and white is worsening in terms of wealth. 4 It is obvious because the current immigration debate clearly takes place along the lines of race, such that talk of “no tolerance” is not directed at white population groups. It is obvious from the now publicized police brutality against people of color. Each of these examples illustrates the continued relevance of race in not simply a trivial sense but in significant, materially important ways that economically impact lives. Hence, it is more than obvious that race still functions as an axis of meaning in the current times. In this context, when on the one hand I must acknowledge that numerous white people are tired of talking about race, and most people of color cannot help but talk about race, the traditional philosophical method of searching for a universal, systematic means of analysis does not suffice. As a philosopher, I long for such a systematic means to understand the functioning of race. But I have come to accept that expressions of race and racism are so creative that they defy such systematicity, consistency, and predictability. For this reason, I turn to the phenomenological method because phenomenology aims to ix

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understand the situation of being-in-the-world, of the reality and the meaning of experience. Hence, instead of systematicity, phenomenological methods aim to understand the contextually laden, ambiguous nuances of being-inthe-world. A growing number of philosophers have found such an exploration of the interstices between phenomenology and philosophy of race productive. As the philosophers in this text demonstrate, addressing the question of race through a phenomenological method may not achieve systematicity and universal understanding, but it does provide for depth in understanding the function of race. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK Phenomenology is first and foremost a descriptive enterprise to avoid the epistemic mistakes of empiricists and intellectualists. Without the certainty of immediate access to the world or one’s self-consciousness, the phenomenological framework aims to understand the experience of the world as inextricably intertwined between the natural and the cultural, as the objective and the subjective. Phenomenology posits that experience of the world occurs as negotiations between the intentions of the subject and the givens of the world, or rather, that subjectivity and the world condition each other. In other words, the phenomenological framework recognizes the ambiguity of situatedness in the world. This relation that phenomenology explores is the site of racial meaning. Perhaps most emblematic of this ambiguity of being-in-the-world is human embodiment. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology centrally figures embodiment and recognizes that all bodies are not exactly and entirely alike. Each body’s positioning in the world reflects the body’s differences. In other words, the phenomenological framework heeds not only the role of the body in general but its particularities. For after all, because of the differences of the body, each individual occupies a unique position in the world that facilitates a unique perspective of the world. The uniqueness of each perspective has its benefits and drawbacks. Because of the differences of the body, each subject possesses her own unique blind spot; the subject cannot possess full self-consciousness of the situations of her own body at any moment. Phenomenology is not simply a descriptive enterprise but also an ontological enterprise. The conundrum or miracle that phenomenological analysis understands is that, in our situatedness as beings in the world, we nevertheless acquire transcendental ideas and ontological truth. Building on MerleauPonty’s idea of a hyper-dialectic, Francoise Dastur describes a hyper-reflection; she writes, “hyper-reflection discovers in the problem of the double genesis of world and reflection, of being and thought—and not solely the problem of the correlation of thought and the existing object.” 5 This double

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genesis of being and thought describes the endeavor toward the truth of ontology, when both ideas and the world escape epistemic certainty. Without the certitude of either thought and the world, and with any change in one affecting the other, epistemic endeavors have ontological consequences. On the one hand, this hyper-dialectic condition can clearly frustrate. But on the other hand, the possibilities of this ontology can inspire new thinking. This hyper-dialectic condition demonstrates how phenomenological descriptions of the situated and ambiguous embodied experience of race at the same time have ontologic consequences. In this descriptive and ontological enterprise, with a more careful understanding of our ambiguous and transcendental state, phenomenological analysis facilitates normative analysis—for a relationship exists between living situated in the world and judging and creating the valuable in the world. Without the certainty and security of knowing one is right and the other is wrong, one must nevertheless act, for one cannot refuse to act. Not acting constitutes passively conceding, for time continues to flow. In other words, the hyper-dialectic insight that in the intertwined coming into being of both thought and world implies that the descriptions of our situated state characterize what we value. Human engagement with the world determines the meaningful in human lives. PHILOSOPHY OF RACE AND RACE AS PHENOMENA Philosophy of race has explored the theory that racism originates from conscious individual prejudices and conscious malicious intent. Philosophy of race has also explored the theory that racism persists embedded in the institutional structures and the cultural practices of society. Many scholars, including myself, asserted that overt signs of racism have subsided, and that phenomenology facilitates recognizing covert indications of race and expressions of racism. In the present day, with the passing of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, overt expressions of racism have increased. Perhaps this demonstrates that awareness of race—if not racism—always remained in individual consciousnesses. Clearly, the current climate in the United States and the United Kingdom demands new thinking about the function of race. Philosophy of race understands race as a social construction. But because of the sedimentation of racial meaning into the very structures and practices of society, the socially constructed meanings about features of the body are mistaken as natural. Hence, although racial meaning is theoretically recognized as socially constructed, during a lived, everyday interaction, racial meaning is mistaken as inevitable and natural. This slippage lends to the difficulty of dislodging racist meanings from the practices of society and the perceptions of individuals.

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Phenomenology precisely elucidates this confusion of a social construction as natural. Race is a phenomenon. Race serves as the perfect example to illustrate both Martin Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s refocusing of the project of phenomenology—not to eradicate the meaning structures in the world but to explore, analyze, and understand these indeterminate meanings as conditions for being-in-the-world. Race is an open-ended framework, an ambiguous meaning complex that promises to perennially function within the social horizon. Recognized as not natural, race’s persistence in its multiple creative manifestations testifies to the impossibility of eliminating it as a meaning system from our social horizon. In other words, racial meaning has sedimented into ontology. Michael Omi and Howard Winant define racism as essentialism. They write, “a racial project can be defined as racist if and only if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race.” 6 In defining essentialism, they write, “a key problem with essentialism is its denial, or flattening of differences within a particular racially defined group.” 7 Gail Weiss concurs in writing, “racist, sexist, and classist behavior are often directly connected to a refusal to be open to different horizons that would yield different (i.e., non-oppressive) interpretations of one’s encounters with others.” 8 Racism as a static, repetitive refusal to see or to think otherwise about people denies precisely race’s phenomenological structure as an ambiguous meaning structure. Treating the meaning of race as static denies the social construction of race, and treats race as natural—with a controversial conception of nature as itself fully formed and static. Racism precisely forecloses understanding the interplay between the givens of the world and human existential generations of meaning. Racism does not recognize the phenomenal structure of race. THE COLLECTION OF ESSAYS The essays collected and organized here recognize a wide variety of phenomenological method. Probing the theoretical parameters of various phenomenological figures from Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to figures such as Gilles Deleuze and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, these essays prod phenomenological method forward while selectively utilizing it to explore questions within philosophy of race. Work that analyzes the relation between phenomenology and philosophy of race remains relatively new, but it is clearly growing. This collection brings together a few works that can now be considered classic, along with recent works that explore new questions in both philosophy of race and phenomenology. The essays examine persistent questions within philosophy of race, from how to conceptualize race to the lived experience of blackness and whiteness, alongside recent

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focuses in philosophy of race, including implicit bias, the phenomenon of veiling, the relations between conceptions of disabled and normal embodiment, and the very recently prominent discussions around police violence. I am very heartened and excited to see such growth of work in this interstitial area of philosophy. The collection represents a wide variety of racialized viewpoints primarily in the United States. Of course, because of the inevitability of exclusion and because racial categories change and evolve, a complete representation will always remain beyond grasp. The essays come from the perspective of Asian Americans, Latin Americans, African Americans, and white Americans. In “A People Yet to Come: ‘People of Color’ Reconsidered,” Boram Jeong, as an immigrant, considers becoming a person of color. In the context of Asian and Asian American attempts to deracialize or to identify as white, her chapter explores the identity “people of color” as distinct from whiteness. She begins by looking at how racialized subjectivity is produced by examining the notion of “people” as a political category in Rousseau’s work. Focusing in on the function of time, she explores the temporal dissonance of lateness and absence in Fanon’s work and contrasts this with Deleuze’s concept of “a people to come” (un peuple à venir). With such a focus on time, she investigates the becoming of racial identities. This essay explores the possibility of a present free of the “colonial past that they are identified with, and the white future ascribed.” Mariana Ortega in “Multiplicitous Selves: Being-between-Worlds and Being-in-Worlds” kneads together the work of Gloria Anzaldua, Maria Lugones, and Martin Heidegger and explores in depth the meaning of multiplicitousness and oneness for multiplicitous selves. This paradoxical experience of multiplicitousness and oneness characterizes the lives of people of color, but Ortega focuses on the experiences of Latinas here. Ortega carefully traces the phenomenologically rich words of worlds, being-in as well as beingbetween, to clarify the different functions of anxiety, being-at-ease, and temporality in each. Ultimately, Ortega relies on the phenomenological concept of mineness to relate the multiple experiences of worlds. Shaeeda A. Mensah in “The Intersections of Race, Gender, and Criminality: A Black Women’s Phenomenological Account” argues for attending to black women’s experience with state violence and mass incarceration. Even as Mensah recognizes that black men have been falsely characterized as dangerous and as such are subject to having their actions misread, exposing them to state violence, black women are not necessarily relatively better off than black men. Mensah explains the neglect of black women in discussions of mass incarceration and state violence even as black women do not enjoy the protections traditionally afforded with femininity. Drawing from Kimberle Crenshaw’s understanding of intersectionality, Mensah explores how

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the presumption that femininity protects black women has served to neglect attending to the violence—mired in discussions about good women versus bad women and hegemonic expectations of motherhood—that black women experience. Hourya Bentouhami in “The Veil, Race, and Appearance: A Political Phenomenology” focuses on the construction of the veil in France as a phobic object that arouses disgust at a glance. Her chapter presents at least two reasons for why the veil provokes such an intense reaction. Bentouhami’s analysis follows the relation between the veiling of Muslim women and the new version of French-style secularism, laïcité: (1) veiling forsakes the imagined French national tradition of gender performance in which the game of seduction functions as a recognized response to gender inequality; (2) veiling reactivates the colonizers’ self-justifying narratives of emancipation that are intricately intertwined with orientalist fantasies of erotically “penetrating private spaces.” Bentouhami ends the chapter by explaining the ramification of such phobia: the association of veiling with modesty, domesticity, and the ability to do care work has metamorphized today into the modern construction of veiling as a sign of the inability to care for others. Christine Wieseler in “Challenging Conceptions of the ‘Normal’ Subject in Phenomenology” analyzes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work to clarify the characteristics of the “normal subject,” locating normality at the level of the individual. Merleau-Ponty goes beyond the objective body by considering implications of bodily alterations for being-in-the-world, but stops short of attending to ways that worlds privilege certain bodies while marginalizing others. Using Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s notion of material anonymity, a condition of an ideal fit between a body and its social and physical environment, Wieseler clarifies how the assumptions of Merleau-Ponty and some of his successors do not consider the role of horizons and world in understanding normality. Wieseler demonstrates how Havi Carel, Shaun Gallagher, and Kay Toombs develop phenomenological accounts of illness and impairment that tacitly assume the white male able-bodied subject is standard or “normal” and omit considerations of race and gender when discussing ill and disabled subjects. In characterizing normal subjects as having to pay minimal attention to their bodies, these authors imply that those who scrupulously attend to their bodies under conditions of sexism, racism, and ableism are abnormal. In “Social Psychology, Phenomenology, and the Indeterminate Content of Unreflective Racial Bias,” Alex Madva argues that unreflective racial attitudes are neither mere unconscious associations nor fully articulated, propositionally structured beliefs or emotions. Their intentional contents are fundamentally indeterminate. For example, when a white person experiences a “gut feeling” of discomfort during an interaction with a black person, there is a question about the meaning or nature of that discomfort. Is it fear of black

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people? Is it anxiety about appearing racist? Madva argues against a general, determinate answer to such questions. The contents of unreflective racial attitudes are fundamentally vague and open-ended. Their content can become determinate—depending on context, social meaning, and structural power relations. Utilizing phenomenological and hermeneutical methods and concepts—principally represented in work by Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and Alcoff—Madva endeavors to better understand what social-psychological research has begun to reveal about the conscious access individuals have to their own racial attitudes, as well as the intentional contents of the attitudes themselves. Emily S. Lee in “A Phenomenology of Seeing and Affect in a Polarized Climate” focuses on the polarized political climate that reflects racial and class differences in the wake of the Trump election. She explores how to see differently about those with whom one disagrees—that is, in this specific scenario for Lee, Trump supporters, including Asian American members of her own family. Within Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s relation of the interstice between the visible and the invisible, if human beings are to see otherwise, we need to disrupt the ready association between the visible and the invisible. Here she explores the function of affect for the possibility of this break. The phenomenological understanding of emotion does not necessarily empower emotion with any sort of superlative force, especially over reason. But a subject’s emotion chiasmatically reflects the world and vice versa. The caustic and strong emotions felt by people about this presidency reflect the entrenched political climate in our society, and chiasmatically the entrenched political climate embroils people in strong emotions that make it difficult to see those with whom we disagree as people we can trust and consider reasonable. To break out of this standoff, to see differently about Trump supporters, one needs to feel differently about them as well. Lewis Gordon in “Race Consciousness Phenomenologically Understood” focuses on the Husserlian insight on the constitution of consciousness by and to that which it is related. From this understanding of the relatedness of consciousness, Gordon forwards that human beings’ ontological status is relational. The prevailing view in critical race theory is to treat seeing race as a form of malediction or failure “to see” reality clearly. Yet, as part of the social world, racial seeing affords ways for human beings to articulate distinctions. After all, one sees race only in relation. To promote reevaluations of the ontological status of race, Gordon ends his article with speculations on consciousness’s relation to ontology, reality, and nature. He writes, “The human being exceeds the sciences by virtue of having to articulate them selfreferentially.” George Yancy in “The Black Body: A Phenomenology of Being Stopped” juxtaposes Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of being stopped as a site of trauma with Yancy’s own previous analysis of the return of the black

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body and how motility is truncated through processes of racialization, specifically in terms of being interpellated as “black.” To rethink motility vis-à-vis blackness requires rethinking forms of motility in relationship to being racialized as white. Through explorations of personal experiences from Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Jacqueline Woodson, W. E. B. Dubois, and his own personal experience, Yancy provides a phenomenology of white motility that is able to undo occlusive and oppressive forms of white racial embodiment. Yancy is concerned not only about the embodied movement through social space but the aspirational ideals of blacks. Linda Martín Alcoff in “The Phenomenology of White Identity” addresses how whiteness is so often treated as a form of false consciousness or ideological mystification so that a phenomenological approach to it can be rejected out of hand, unless that approach aims to reveal the fallacious nature of white self-ascription. Yet a phenomenology of white identity reveals, Alcoff argues, that whiteness has a referent that is more than ideological. Whiteness is an identity born of both history and current practices, with some significant variation and fluidity, as well as some common elements. Racism has constituted the ideas about the content or meaning of whiteness—its comparative attributes vis-à-vis others—but it has not constituted the identity ex nihilo. A phenomenology of current white identity in the United States in particular helps to explain the political forces behind white reaction to, and support for, white nationalism. As its purported superiority over other racial identities is being contested more vigorously than ever before, the lived experience of whiteness is in significant ferment, and a phenomenological approach is more useful than ever as a means to shed light on the continued current position of American exceptionalism. Lisa Guenther in “Seeing Like a Cop: A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property” argues that a possessive investment in whiteness as property requires the intensification and propagation of the perceptual practice of suspicious surveillance, or “seeing like a cop.” For this argument, Guenther explores some of the current motivations for gentrification and the perceptual and habitual training of police. But Guenther juxtaposes these current developments by reading Fanon’s three structures of embodiment (corporeal schema, historico-racial schema, and the racial epidermal schema) and translates them for white embodiment. In this triad, Guenther demonstrates the fusion of personhood and property. Shannon Sullivan in “Becoming White: White Children and the Erasure of Black Suffering” addresses a transgenerational concern about how habits of whiteness are sedimented in young white children. She examines a particular type of white habit, that of not perceiving the suffering of people of color. Through a phenomenological account of an elementary school field trip to a former plantation, Sullivan argues (1) that plantation field trips tend to subtly teach children (of all races) to not see black suffering and (2) that

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not seeing black suffering is a crucial form of support for ongoing white class privilege and other patterns of white domination of people of color. NOTES 1. See Lewin, “Black Students Face More Discipline”; Rudd, “Racial Disproportionality in School Discipline.” 2. See Lowrey, “Hoarding of the American Dream”; Rury and Rife, “Race, Schools, and Opportunity Hoarding.” 3. See Tulshyan, “Have a Foreign-Sounding Name?”; Howard, “New Study Confirms Depressing Truth about Names and Racial Bias.” 4. See Campbell, “Vast Wealth Gap between Black and White America”; Shin, “Racial Wealth Gap”; Weissmann, “Wealth Gap between Blacks and Whites.” 5. Dastur, “World, Flesh, Vision,” 27. Robert Burch and Renaud Barbaras also come to this conclusion. Burch, “On the Topic of Art and Truth,” 350; Barbaras, Being of the Phenomenon, xxxii. 6. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 71. 7. Ibid., 72. 8. Weiss, Refiguring the Ordinary, 164.

WORKS CITED Barbaras, Renaud. 2004. The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Translated by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Burch, Robert. 1993. “On the Topic of Art and Truth: Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and the Transcendental Turn.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson, translated by Michael B. Smith, 348–70. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Campbell, Andy. 2016. “The Vast Wealth Gap between Black and White America Would Take Centuries to Close: Report.” Huffington Post, August 9. Dastur, Francoise. 2000. “World, Flesh, Vision.” In Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, edited by Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, 23–50. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Howard, Jacqueline. 2015. “New Study Confirms Depressing Truth about Names and Racial Bias.” Huffington Post, October 8. Lewin, Tamar. 2012. “Black Students Face More Discipline, Data Suggests.” New York Times, March 6. Lowrey, Annie. 2017. “The Hoarding of the American Dream.” Atlantic, June 16. Omi, Michal, and Winant, Howard. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States, from the 1960s to 1990s. New York: Routledge. Rudd, Thomas. 2018. “Racial Disproportionality in School Discipline: Implicit Bias Is Heavily Implicated.” Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Ohio State University, February 5. Rury, John J., and Rife, Aaron Tyler. 2018. “Race, Schools, and Opportunity Hoarding, Evidence from a Post-War American Metropolis.” History of Education 47, no. 1: 87–107. Shin, Laura. 2015. “The Racial Wealth Gap: Why a Typical White Household Has 16 Times the Wealth of a Black One.” Forbes, March 26. Tulshyan, Ruchika. 2014. “Have a Foreign-Sounding Name? Change It to Get a Job.” Forbes, June 13. Weiss, Gail. 2008. Refiguring the Ordinary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Weissmann, Jordan. 2014. “The Wealth Gap between Blacks and Whites Is Even More Enormous (and Shameful) Than You Think.” Slate, MoneyBox: A Blog about Business and Economics, December 15.

Chapter One

A People Yet to Come “People of Color” Reconsidered Boram Jeong

Dear white fella Couple things you should know When I born, I black When I grow up, I black When I go in sun, I black When I scared, I black When I sick, I black And when I die, I still black. You white fella When you born, you pink When you grow up, you white When you go in sun, you red When you cold, you blue When you scared, you yellow When you sick, you green And when you die, you grey. And you have the cheek to call me colored? 1

Born and raised in Korea, I had never considered myself a person of color until I moved to the United States. As a recent immigrant, the first challenge was to accept that I am a person of color—in fact, there is no other possibility for me but to be a woman of color. Realizing the racial meaning of one’s own body as an adult is a debilitating experience since it requires a radical, profound reconstitution of identity. For a long time I was reluctant to accept this part of my new identity or to allow it any determining power, since I wanted to be a scholar among other scholars, not a woman-of-color scholar or even a 1

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woman scholar. As do many others, I thought denial would take the power away from this “absolute” reality. When I realized that denial was not going to open up more possibilities and began articulating myself as a racialized subject, I faced another challenge—I was told that Asians and Asian Americans are not people of color. What does it mean to identify oneself as a person of color in the United States? Who are the people or peoples we refer to when we say “people of color”? If the distinction between “colored” and “noncolored” is arbitrarily drawn by whiteness, as the above poem points out, is it not problematic to adopt the term to describe racialized peoples? In the United States, various terms have been used to designate those who are not white: colored people, people of color, racial and ethnic minorities, and more. The term “people of color” originated from the French phrase “gens de couleur libres” (free people of color), which indicated free people of mixed race in the French West Indian colonies in the 18th century. The term “free people of color” was used in Louisiana in reference to an intermediate class between whites and enslaved blacks. Along with more derogatory terms such as “negroes” or “colored,” 2 the term “people of color” was initially used to designate black people in the United States. 3 Then it evolved to be a more general, neutral term that embraces various forms of racialization. As VidalOrtiz points out, “One of the developments of the term people of color is precisely its flexibility in accommodating various groups similarly disadvantaged, even if their disadvantages are based on different variables (e.g., access to education, housing, employment, immigration status, English proficiency).” 4 The “flexibility” of the term, however, comes with limitations. It importantly highlights the supposed commonality among the people it includes as a general category—the shared experience of systemic racism—but tends to obscure differences among racialized peoples. Manning Marable writes, Many advocates of diversity and the study of racialized ethnicities tend to homogenize groups into the broad political construct known as “people of color.” The concept “people of color” has tremendous utility in bringing people toward a comparative, historical awareness about the commonalities of oppression and resistance that racialized ethnic groups have experienced. Our voices and visions cannot properly be understood or interpreted in isolation from one another. But to argue that all people of color are therefore equally oppressed, and share the objective basis for a common politics, is dubious at best. 5

As Marable notes, questions have been raised regarding the problem of homogenization that the notion suggests. Lumping all nonwhite peoples together neglects historical specificities of various forms of racism and often prioritizes the experience of certain racial groups over others. For example, Linda

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Martín Alcoff showed how the black–white binary in racial discourse fails to recognize the differential racialization processes of Asian Americans and Latino/a Americans and thus creates conflicts within communities of color. 6 More recently, Jared Sexton claimed that there is a form of color blindness inherent to the concept of “people of color” that “insists upon the monolithic character of victimization under white supremacy,” and thus fails to understand the specificity of antiblackness and the singular structure of racial slavery. 7 I agree that recognizing the differences between racial groups is critical for coalition building. I would like to ask further, however, by whom and for what purpose these differences are to be recognized. The ways racial differences are understood currently seem to rely largely on their proximity to whiteness; peoples of color are hierarchized according to the degree to which one is regarded as “colored,” or to the degree to which one is white-identified. White normativity has become so adaptable that it can embrace diversity while maintaining racial hierarchy by promoting certain forms of assimilation—the unthreatening, subservient kind. Positioning differential racialization and assimilation processes in relation to whiteness does not advance people of color’s understanding of themselves beyond their lack of whiteness. The notion of “people of color” would remain reactionary if it does not move beyond the building of coalitions in opposition to whiteness. Furthermore, the “people” as a collective political subject would defeat its own purpose if it reproduces internally the logic of racial domination and alienation that it aims to resist. This paper problematizes the notion of “people of color” as it is used in racial discourse in the United States. I consider the strategic importance of the term “people of color” for multiracial coalition building as well as the reluctance toward such categorization as a merely negative delimitation that reproduces white normativity as an organizing principle of “the people” within communities of color. In order to abolish its conceptual dependency on whiteness, the notion of “people of color” should be construed in affirmative terms that point beyond their negative, oppositional identity as nonwhite. It is my contention that the notion is best understood through its implicated absence—the absence of belongingness, and of self-determination. This is not an absence in the sense of lack, a lack of whiteness. It is an absence in the sense of “yet-to-come” that refuses racial predeterminations as the condition of presence. Thus I explore the idea of absence as a temporal experience and show in which sense people of color do not belong in the present, using Frantz Fanon’s description of the racialization process as “arriving too late” in the world. Then I turn to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “a people to come” (un peuple à venir) to articulate what this absence of the people entails. I conclude by arguing that the notion of “people of color” understood as “a

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people yet to come” is an assertion of the right to belong and a call for a new form of subjectivity. THE NOTION OF “PEOPLE OF COLOR” Before we look at the notion of “people of color,” let us briefly consider the term “people” as a political concept. This is important because the inherent ambiguity of the term “people” is relevant to the tension between the commonalities and differences among people of color. On the one hand, “the People” is understood as a unitary political body whose general will constitutes the basis of the state. On the other hand, “the people” refers to a multiplicity of subgroups of the People, oppressed and marginalized. In this section, I examine the notion of “people of color” as an instance of the latter, characterized by oppositionality and externality, and consider the limitations of understanding the term only in reference to whiteness. According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the notion of “People” as popular sovereignty is based on the idea that the authority of a state comes from the consent of the people. The legitimacy of sovereignty is derived from the general will of the people. He writes, “Thus, before examining the act whereby a people chooses a king, it would be well to examine the act whereby a people is a people. For since this act is necessarily prior to the other, it is the true foundation of society.” 8 For Rousseau, the people constitute themselves as a sovereign through the immanent rearrangement of forces rather than giving the power to someone external to them: “the people only contracts with itself.” Rousseau’s idea of the people as sovereign presupposes the identity of the governing and the governed, and thus no subordination to the will of others. The supposed unity of the people is what gives them power. But the condition under which the unity is imagined politically determines the distribution of power among the people. Once the question of the people becomes that of power differentials among them, we are already speaking of multiple peoples, fragmented and divided, rather than “the People” as a unitary subject. This explains why, when we consider actual groups of people as a political construct, they are often defined by division or opposition; a people is organized against what it is not, whether it is a state, class, or race. As Sadri Khiari argues, it is when an exterior to the people, potentially hostile to the people, becomes apparent that the constitution of a people is mobilized. 9 We may say that externality is the condition for possible emergence of the entity of a people. Oftentimes, what the people resists is what binds them together. Since the motive for its organization is external, there exist no immanent characteristics that make the people an indivisible whole prior to its construction. As Kevin Olson writes, with no preexisting collective identity, the

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power of the people is imagined as a normative construction—as having an inherent value, natural rectitude, or obligatory force: “Attempts to settle the meaning and composition of the people are also attempts to attach normative connotations to them.” 10 Let us now consider the notion of “people of color” in terms of externality. As a negative delimitation, it indicates “nonwhites.” The category as presently used makes sense only in reference to whiteness. There is nothing intrinsic to the people that brings them together. Moreover, not only what mobilizes the constitution of the people but also the determination of the people itself—“of color”—lies external to the people; racialization of the peoples is itself an external demand and an external imposition of meanings. Hypothetically, those who are never in contact with whiteness would neither identify themselves as a person of color nor constitute themselves as a people. What is the significance of this externality? The externality in the constitution of people of color can be thought in two ways: the recognition of whiteness as the external motive for its organization, and the identity formation of the people as an externally construed entity. First, the externality is expressed in an oppositional structure that centers whiteness as the organizing force for people of color. Some argue that the racial divide between whites and nonwhites introduced by the term creates a misconception that being white is not a race and thus racialization concerns only people of color. 11 However, the oppositional structure only makes racial privilege explicit to those to whom it is often invisible. It calls attention to white normativity while revealing the fact that the racialization of people of color is a product of white domination as well as a necessary element in producing white subjectivity. The category of people of color does not aim to establish the oppositional structure but to dismantle it, so that racial differences can be properly understood as constitutive of any subjectivity. Second, for people of color themselves, the externality concerns a question of racial identity. Identifying oneself as a person of color is a positioning of subjectivity in relation to the white, necessitated by white normativity, but not a submission to racial ascriptions as external determinations. Thus “person of color” as self-identification could be used to express resistance toward such subordination. Yet “person of color” as an imposed category does not provide an affirmative formulation of identity beyond the acknowledgment of racial hierarchy. Not being able to define oneself on one’s own terms and constantly having to situate oneself in relation to whiteness could make one vulnerable to pressures to assimilate to white norms. Lastly and relatedly, the externality of racial determinations and its implied lack of affirmative identity can result in interethnic tensions. As mentioned earlier, when white normativity as the external uniting force of the people is internalized, people of color are likely to conceive themselves and each other according to their

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proximity to whites. The people would lose its collective force when it reproduces within it the racial hierarchy it is trying to resist. If the aim of racial struggle is not to obtain the power of dominance but to reclaim the right to self-determination, then it is compromised by the use of the term “people of color” in a purely oppositional sense. In this regard, the process of Asian and Asian American racialization is worth noting. It is said that Asian Americans and immigrants from Asia have become “basically white,” and that they are a model minority well assimilated to the white culture. In her article on the invisibility problem of Asian Americans, Yoko Arisaka discusses how assimilation requires a rejection of their identity not only as Asian but also as a person of color. Thus successfully assimilated Asians are invisible as a group both in the dominant culture and in the racial minority culture. 12 From their point of view, becoming invisible is not a problem but rather “a sign of success.” She continues to point out that the rejection of racial identity could contribute to the interracial tensions within communities of color. According to Arisaka, “It is not unusual to see such assimilated Asians developing racism against blacks and Hispanics, adopting exactly the racism prevalent in white middle-class culture. The irony of course is that they are often targets of such racism themselves, yet they continue to think of themselves as being lucky that they are still ‘more white’ than the other groups.” 13 What Arisaka calls the “assimilationist ideology of white-identification” 14 is a particular expression of external determinations as internalized. Assimilation is often considered as a process of “deracialization,” since white normativity presents itself in nonracial terms. But assimilation is ultimately white identification, and the attempt to conform, assimilate, or “deracialize” takes the effacement of one’s nonwhite self. This is an attempt destined to fail because it is impossible for Asian Americans, portrayed as “ineradicably foreign,” to become white. 15 Having rejected one’s racial identity as a person of color and having been rejected by whites, one could easily be placed in the in-between state as nonwhite and noncolored, or in an impossible state between “honorary White” and “forever foreigners” in Mia Tuan’s terms. 16 The assimilationist ideology perpetuates itself through this identity crisis that makes nonwhite subjects more precarious, and thus more susceptible to internalizing racial identifications ascribed by whites, such as the myth of the model minority. The model minority myth defines Asian American success by white norms and presents it as a model for other peoples of color, who in turn are racialized by their failures to meet those norms. 17 Thus, on the collective level, the assimilationist ideology is sustained by a hierarchy between peoples of color based on their proximity to whiteness that reinforces the normalization of whiteness. 18 In short, what is most alarming about the externality in the constitution of “people of color” as collective subjectivity is its lack of self-determination

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and affirmative identity. Given its oppositional nature, the strength of the notion “people of color” lies in its critical power rather than a creative one. The following questions arise: How can people of color organize themselves without reproducing the oppressive logic of white supremacy within the communities of color? How do we understand racial differences without hierarchizing them in relation to whiteness? Can the term “people of color” be used in a way that does not submit either to an inferior, submissive position or to the assimilationist ideology? I propose that we conceive the notion of “people of color” in affirmative terms that point beyond its opposition to whiteness. In what follows, I show that the notion of “people” in “people of color” is best understood in terms of its implicated absence—the absence of self-determination and that of belongingness. I articulate the idea of absence as a way people of color situate themselves—or fail to do so—in the world. It is an absence not as a lack or deprivation in relation to whiteness, but as a radical break from predetermined conditions of recognition that forms a new ground for self-determination. In the next section, I discuss how the temporal structure of racialization renders people of color absent in the present, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s description of arriving “too late” in the world. THE ABSENCE OF THE PEOPLE: BETWEEN “TOO LATE” AND “TOO EARLY” Fanon’s phenomenological analysis of the formation of the racialized subject begins with a troubled relation between one’s black body and the world: “In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema,” or a structuring of the self as a body in the spatiotemporal world. 19 When confronted with the collective white gaze, expressed as the white boy’s outcry “Look, a Negro!” Fanon discovers the meanings attached to his black body beyond its corporeality. While many readers of Fanon tend to focus on the phenomenology of racial embodiment or on corporeality, 20 I would like to draw attention to the temporal dimension. His temporal account of the racialization process, despite its brevity, is illuminating. He writes, Too late. Everything had been predicted, discovered, demonstrated, and exploited. My shaky hands grasped at nothing; the resources had been exhausted. Too late! But there again I want to understand. Ever since someone complained that he had arrived too late and everything had already been said, there seems to be nostalgia for the past. . . . “You have come too late, much too late. There will always be a world—a white world—between you and us: that impossibility on either side to obliterate the past once and for all.” Understand-

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Boram Jeong ably, confronted with this affective ankylosis of the white man, I finally made up my mind to shout my blackness. 21

The sense of belatedness in Fanon’s arrival in the world expresses a painful recognition of the impossibility to resist, get past, or overturn the imposed meanings of blackness. As he writes, “The evidence is there, unalterable. My blackness was there, dark and unarguable. And it tormented me, pursued me, disturbed me, angered me.” 22 Fanon describes this feeling of powerlessness as an overdetermination; the relationship of his body to the world is defined not only by the corporeal schema but also by a “historico-racial schema” that throws him back in the place of his ancestors who were enslaved and colonized. 23 Accordingly, he is not invited to constitute the world but is “interpellated” to reconstitute himself as a racialized subject in accordance with external (over)determinations. This failure of bodily schema in racial interpellation has an ontological implication, what we might call “temporal dissonance” that predetermines one as unaligned with the world. The “unfamiliar weight” or the burden of “corporeal malediction” that is placed on his body is derived from the impossibility of obliterating the past. The feeling of “too-lateness” arises from the irreversibility of colonial history and the continuous domination of this past over his racialized body in the present. Unable to assert one’s being apart from the irrevocable past, he cannot advance in time: He no longer belongs to the present. In George Yancy’s words, the Negro has always already done something wrong by virtue of being a Negro. 24 The meaning of the black body is “always already” there, so that one can never arrive soon enough to speak for oneself. The temporal aspect of racialization is crucial since it is a fundamental impediment to resistance. For Fanon, resistance is based on the possibility of recognition, and since racialized black subjectivity is grounded in the past, there is little chance for recognition: “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.” 25 In this failure of recognition, the present is defined by whiteness as a norm that predetermines what blacks are supposed be. Whiteness as the present state of race leaves a person of color with two options: either conform to their expectations about people of color or assimilate to white norms. Neither option gives you the right to belong. If the “too-lateness” concerns the overdetermination by the past and the impossibility to belong in the present, it necessarily relates, strangely enough, to the sense of arriving “too early”; absence in the present implies both “no longer” and “not yet.” Fanon writes, “Don’t expect to see any explosion today. It’s too early . . . or too late.” 26 I take being “too early” to mean a sense of rejected future. For a black person, the possibilities of seeing oneself otherwise are not yet actualized. With whiteness as a center, there is no alternative future. According to Fanon, “there is but one destiny for the

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black man. And it is white.” 27 As Didier Fassin puts it, racial ascription is not only an imposition of an identity but also a deprivation of possible alternative identifications. 28 Since whiteness centers its norms as the only basis for recognition in the present, its projected future does not include any other political or ontological possibilities that allow nonwhites to belong. In Alia Al-Saji’s words, “white subjects have already used up these possibilities” and have moved on, while leaving the colonized people with “a closed past, incapable of development on its own terms and cut off from the creativity that gives rise to an open future.” 29 While Fanon describes the racialization of Africans under colonialism, I wish to elaborate the experience of temporal dissonance by people of color upon the “discovery” of their race under the white gaze. As long as they are overdetermined by color, the people do not belong in the present. In the following, I develop how to affirm the present absence of the people by imagining a futurity that is not bound by whiteness as “the now.” PEOPLE OF COLOR AS A “PEOPLE YET TO COME” We have examined the notion of “people of color” in terms of externality—a lack of self-determination and its absence in the present. In what follows, I propose that we rethink the term “people of color” through Deleuze’s concept of “a people to come” (un peuple à venir), which appreciates the being of the people who cannot be accounted for in the dominant language. Deleuze introduces the concept of “people to come” in his second book on cinema. In classical cinema, such as Soviet films, “the people are there, even though they are oppressed, tricked, subject, even though blind or unconscious.” 30 In modern political cinema, however, the people are no longer represented as united, collective political subjects. Deleuze writes, “If there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet . . . the people are missing.” 31 According to him, the absence of people is obvious to oppressed and exploited nations that undergo a “collective identity crisis,” being in a state of perpetual minorities. But this does not indicate a renunciation of cinema as political art but the new basis on which modern political cinema is founded. The absence also informs a necessary change in the form of struggle: If the people are missing, if there is no longer consciousness, evolution or revolution, it is the scheme of reversal which itself becomes impossible. There will no longer be conquest of power by a proletariat, or by a united or unified people. . . . The death-knell for becoming conscious was precisely the consciousness that there were no people, but always several peoples, an infinity of peoples, who remained to be united, or should not be united, in order for the problem of change. It is in this way that third world cinema is a cinema of

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Boram Jeong minorities, because the people exist only in the condition of minority, which is why they are missing. 32

Deleuze observes two things here: first, the limitations of “tyrannic unity” that subjects different peoples to an abstract ideal rather than making them subjects. Recognizing the absence of people is to acknowledge the limits of a totalizing principle under which the people used to be unified. As discussed earlier, the “people” understood as one, homogeneous entity erases its internal differences. Second, Deleuze speaks of the myth of a united people organized against “the oppressor” or “the colonizer.” The ways power operates on colonial consciousness make the struggle not for a reversal of power relations, but for a production of new subjectivity through continuous resistance; it is no longer sufficient to form a collective identity of the people in opposition to “the enemy.” What then could be done “in order for the problem to change”? Rather than adopting an imposed, united subjectivity or reversing power relations, Deleuze advises the displacement of the scheme through the invention of a people. He writes, “The moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been people here,’ the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle.” 33 Drawing on Kafka and the Quebecois filmmaker Pierre Perrault, Deleuze defines the condition under which postcolonial subjectivity is produced as impossibility—the impossibility of writing in the dominant language and the impossibility of living under domination: “It is as if modern political cinema were no longer constituted on the basis of a possibility of evolution and revolution, like the classical cinema, but on impossibilities, in the style of Kafka: the intolerable.” 34 Kafka invented what Deleuze calls a “revolutionary writing” in his use of the German of Prague intermixed with Czech and Yiddish. This “minor” use of the major language resists its oppressive quality by revealing the poverty of the language of the colonizer while deliberately choosing not to enrich it. 35 Perrault, in his depiction of the colonized person who comes up against an impasse in every direction, imagines a new people through crisis. The invention of a people concerns “not the myth of a past people, but the story-telling of the people to come.” 36 The strength of Deleuze’s notion “people to come” lies in the affirmation of absence that defines the condition of the people, who breaks from the here-and-now predetermined by dominant power relations. The concepts of “the intolerable” and “crisis” that Deleuze brings together here shed a different light on our discussion of temporal dissonance. If Fanon emphasized the failure of recognition in the production of racialized subjects on the basis of temporal discrepancy, Deleuze demonstrates how the affirmation of absence declares the impossibility of living under present domination, while breaking

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away from dominant logic and language. 37 It marks the passage from the people who arrived too late to the production of a “people yet to come.” Here resistance does not lie in the recognition from or the assimilation with the oppressor, but in the invention of a people that is not yet in the present. “PEOPLE OF COLOR” RECONSIDERED: RESISTANCE THROUGH REFUSAL Deleuze’s conceptualization of colonial subjectivity as “a people to come” provides insights into the formation of racialized subjects. It reveals the temporal structure of absence in terms of “not yet” or “to come.” It acknowledges crisis as a condition for the new forms of struggle. What is shared across different peoples of color is absence, the lack of the right to belong to the present. Understood in terms of absence, the notion of people in “people of color” is a name for numerous peoples who are unnameable in the dominant language of the present that is centered on white normativity. This affirmation of absence is not a resignation to white-imposed absence but a refusal to make one’s presence recognizable in the terms that are invented deliberately to deny their presence; it is not about overcoming temporal dissonance but affirming it while taking presence away from whiteness and racialized temporality. The struggle of people of color is that of asserting their right to fully belong by detaching the dominion of whiteness over the present rather than making a place in the white space. Defined as such, the notion of “people of color” would resist racial ascription and refuse white identification. Perhaps a distinction between two concepts of people would be helpful; the people of color—as opposed to a people—could remain reactionary, defined in opposition to and understood in proximity to whiteness, in reproducing the logic of white domination. A people of color understood as “a people yet to come” concerns an invention of new forms of subjectivity based on self-determination of the peoples themselves. It reframes the question of racialization as a productive condition of any process of subject formation, rather than the one that concerns only nonwhite people. These two concepts of people are related to two kinds of refusal; understanding the notion of people of color as “people to come” takes a conscious refusal of the present racial identifications. It puts one in identity crisis as well as a battle with oneself. It rejects a hasty integration or recognition through white-identified assimilation. This form of refusal is not a denial of racial identity or an attempt at “deracialization” as a form of reluctance to negative implications of the people of color. The attempt to deracialize combines well with the assimilationist ideology. Assimilation, as a search for recognition on whites’ terms, is a strategy to feel belonging to the present that

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is condemned to fail. This form of refusal leads to a deeper subordination as well as a perpetuation of racist ideology. There is no doubt that the notion of “people of color” is necessary for building coalitions among communities of color to resist white supremacy. However, the term should be adopted with critical awareness given the externality of its organizing principle. Speaking through their absence, a people of color invents itself in the now as a people to come, by refusing both the colonial past that they are identified with and the white future ascribed to the existing people of color. As Jarrett Martineau and Eric Ritskes write, the freedom realized through refusal is “the freedom to imagine and create an elsewhere in the here; a present future beyond the imaginative and territorial bounds of colonialism.” 38 NOTES 1. Unknown author, quoted in Giora, Our Mind, 5. 2. The term “colored people,” although it is regarded as a derogatory term now, was also used as a term of racial pride, as in the name of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) (Oxford Dictionary). It is also worth noting that in South Africa “coloured”—formerly known as “Cape Coloured”—refers to a person of mixed European and African or Asian ancestry (see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Coloured). 3. Vidal-Ortiz, “People of Color,” 1037. 4. Ibid. 5. Marable, “Problematics of Ethnic Studies,” 56. 6. Alcoff, “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black–White Binary.” 7. Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness,” 48. 8. Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” bk. I, chap. 5, 163. 9. Khiari, “The People and the Third People,” 88. 10. Olson, “Conclusion,” 127. 11. “Many people, notably U.S. Whites, critique the use of the term because it presumes that Whites have no color, effectively missing the point that whiteness studies has tried to bring forth during the past decade or so—that the invisibility of whiteness is marked, even if in very subtle ways, by the politicized use of the term people of color” (Vidal-Ortiz, “People of Color,” 1038). 12. Arisaka, “Asian Women,” 214. 13. Ibid., 216. 14. Ibid., 217. 15. Alcoff, “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black–White Binary,” 7. 16. Tuan, Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? 17. Emily S. Lee examines how the immediate association of the Asian American identity with upward class mobility affects the formation of the group identity of Asian American women, who are more likely to be tradition-bound, isolated, poor, and thus failing as a model minority. Lee, “Ambiguous Practices of the Inauthentic Asian American Woman.” 18. In this sense, David H. Kim describes the model minority myth as “one of the greatest of the most recent inventions of White supremacy as a political system” that allows a partial incorporation of Asians while normatively defining them as unthreatening and maintaining racial hierarchy. Kim, “Shame and Self-Revision in Asian American Assimilation,” 110. 19. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110. 20. See, for example, Alcoff, “Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment”; Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness”; Fassin, “Racialization.”

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21. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 100–101, translation modified: “Trop tard. Tout est prévu, trouvé, prouvé, exploité. Mes mains nerveuses ne ramènent rien; le gisement est épuisé. Trop tard! Mais là aussi je veux comprendre. . . . Vous arrivez trop tard, beaucoup trop tard. Il y aura toujours un monde—blanc—entre vous et nous. . . . Cette impossibilité pour l’autre de liquider une fois pour toutes le passé. On comprend que, devant cette ankylose affective du Blanc, j’aie pu décider de pousser mon cri nègre” (Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 128–130). 22. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 116. 23. “I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92). 24. Yancy, Look, a White!, 2. 25. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 90. 26. Ibid., xi. 27. Ibid., xiv. 28. Fassin, “Racialization,” 423. 29. Al-Saji, “Too Late,” 6. 30. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 216. 31. Ibid., 215–16. 32. Ibid., 219–20. 33. Ibid., 217. 34. Ibid., 219. 35. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 23. 36. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 223. 37. James R. Martel finds in Fanon’s account of racialization the sense of refusal beyond the acknowledgment of failed recognition. According to Martel, in his insistence on being a subject who is black while refusing the “misinterpellated” subject, Fanon “brings down the apparatus of interpellation” (Martel, Misinterpellated Subject, 101). 38. Martineau and Ritskes, “Fugitive Indigeneity,” 4.

WORKS CITED Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68. Alcoff, Linda M. “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black–White Binary.” Journal of Ethics 7, no. 1 (2003): 5–27. ———. “Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment.” Radical Philosophy 95 (May/ June 1999): 15–26. Al-Saji, Alia. “Too Late: Racialized Time and the Closure of the Past.” Insights 6, no. 5 (2013): 2–13. Arisaka, Yoko. “Asian Women: Invisibility, Locations, and Claims to Philosophy.” In Women of Color and Philosophy, edited by Naomi Zack, 209–34. New York: Blackwell, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. ———. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952. Fassin, Didier. “Racialization: How to Do Races with Bodies.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, edited by Frances E. Mascia-Lees, 419–34. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. Giora, Rachel. Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Khiari, Sadri. “The People and the Third People.” In What Is a People? by Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière, 87–100. Translated by Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

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Kim, David H. “Shame and Self-Revision in Asian American Assimilation.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily S. Lee, 103–32. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Lee, Emily S. “The Ambiguous Practices of the Inauthentic Asian American Woman.” Hypatia 29, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 146–63. Marable, Manning. “The Problematics of Ethnic Studies.” In Color-Line to Borderlands: The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies, edited by J. E. Butler, 42–64. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. Martel, James R. The Misinterpellated Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Martineau, Jarrett, and Eric Ritskes. “Fugitive Indigeneity: Reclaiming the Terrain of Decolonial Struggle through Indigenous Art.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 1 (2014): 1–12. Olson, Kevin. “Conclusion: Fragile Collectivities, Imagined Sovereignties.” In What Is a People? by Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière, 107–31. Translated by Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “On the Social Contract.” In The Basic Political Writings, translated by Donald A. Cress, 153–252. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011. Sexton, Jared. “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.” Social Text 28, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 31–56. Tuan, Mia. Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador. “People of Color.” In Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, vol. 1, edited by Richard T. Schaefer, 1037–39. Los Angeles: Sage, 2008. Yancy, George. Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.

Chapter Two

Multiplicitous Selves Being-between-Worlds and Being-in-Worlds Mariana Ortega

Here I would like to think of Gloria Anzaldúa’s account of mestizaje with its movement of both multiplicity and oneness in light of María Lugones’s description of world-traveling and Heidegger’s account of Dasein as beingin-the-world. 1 Such thinking together with Anzaldúa, Lugones, and Heidegger leads me to a notion of multiplicitous selfhood as amasamiento, an act of kneading three different visions of self. While the Heideggerian view of Dasein offers an important general explanation of selfhood, it nevertheless does not capture the experience of marginalized, in-between selves that Latina feminist phenomenological descriptions so powerfully depict. Examining these three thinkers together thus discloses important similarities and differences between their accounts. The view of multiplicitous selfhood that arises out of this thinking is meant to capture a general sense of selfhood while at the same time also emphasizing the lived experience of selves in the margins. Following Anzaldúa, Lugones, and Heidegger, I describe the multiplicitous self as being-between-worlds and being-in-worlds. First, I briefly describe some elements shared by both the Heideggerian explanation of Dasein and the notion of the new mestiza and other selves described by Latina feminists. I also point to a key difference between the Heideggerian view and Latina feminists’ visions of self, namely, that the self in the borderlands, or the self that world-travels, constantly experiences ruptures in her everyday experiences that lead to a more thematic or reflective orientation toward activities. Lastly, I introduce the notion of multiplicitous selfhood as being-between-worlds and being-in-worlds. In so doing, I bring to light the intersectionality and flexibility of this self and explain both her multiplicity and her oneness, neither elevating the sense of multiplicity such 15

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that the sense of being one self disappears, nor prioritizing oneness such that multiplicity is sacrificed or erased. While the account of multiplicitous selfhood offered here is to be understood as a general account of self—that is, all of us are multiplicitous selves—here I pay particular attention to those multiplicitous selves whose experience is marked by oppression and marginalization, those selves that have not figured prominently in the pages of philosophical discourses. Even though all of us are multiplicitous, those who are multicultural, queer, or border dwellers and whom Anzaldúa names los atravesados experience more of what she describes as “psychic restlessness” and “intimate terrorism” due to their marginalization and oppression. That is, these selves’ multiplicity is sharper, sometimes piercing, thus leading to a sense of alienation and of Unheimlichkeit or uncanniness that makes their lives more vulnerable to injustice. Through engagement with the work of Anzaldúa and Lugones, I would like to draw attention to the experience of these atravesados. I am aware, however, that different social locations yield different ways of understanding one’s marginalization or belonging and that there is not a simple dichotomy between marginalized/nonmarginalized or oppressed/oppressor. Selves need to be understood in their complexity and in terms of the different roles they play in the matrix of power relations such that each of us can be understood variously as oppressors, oppressed, or resisting. 2 It is my hope that the intertwining of Latina feminism and Heideggerian phenomenology discloses a better understanding of the complexity of the experience of these selves who remain at the margins not only of traditional philosophical investigations but also of society. Despite the fact that Anzaldúa and Heidegger are writing from very different perspectives and political views, and with different aims—Anzaldúa’s writing is a deeply personal act and has an interdisciplinary orientation, while Heidegger’s writing is connected to a systematic, philosophical attempt at carrying out an ontological investigation—Anzaldúa’s notion of the new mestiza crisscrosses in various ways with Heidegger’s description of Dasein in that both accounts describe the self as always in process, thrown, and anxious. Both thinkers are also cognizant of the dangers of the dichotomy between subject and object, Heidegger appreciating how such a dichotomy misses the intimate relationship between self and world, and Anzaldúa warning us of the reductive aspect of dichotomous thinking, not just in terms of our selfhood but also in terms of our political possibilities. Given this critique of the subject/object duality, they are also deeply aware of the interrelatedness between self, world, and other selves. In addition, the Heideggerian account as well as Anzaldúa’s and other Latina feminist phenomenologist accounts take seriously the interpretative or hermeneutic dimension of the self. 3

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Despite there being some significant similarities between the accounts of self provided by Heidegger and Latina feminist phenomenologists, it is necessary to keep in mind crucial differences. No difference is greater than the political stances of the writers I am discussing here, Heidegger having chosen to support an unforgivable political position and Latina feminists choosing to write in defense of those who are marginalized. 4 This difference alone may be enough for some to reject a project such as the present one or to claim that we should not engage such disparate theorists. However, I hold on to the view that examining the work of Latina feminists together with Heidegger’s account of the self may prove to be helpful, since Heideggerian and existential phenomenology in general need to take into consideration the lived experience of those in the margins. Not doing so would leave us with existential accounts of self that go beyond the substantial, epistemic subject and all the problems that such a view of the subject entails but that, nevertheless, do not do justice to the lived experience of those who are marginalized. Another crucial difference between these thinkers is that writers such as Anzaldúa, Lugones, and other Latina feminists fully engage with the situatedness and particularities of the self. Instead of providing a general account of the self’s existential structures, like Heidegger does, Latina feminists find themselves fully engaged with concrete and particular aspects of the self’s existence, what Heidegger regards as ontic characteristics that, despite playing an important role in his account, do not hold as much interest for him as ontological characteristics do. It is this full recognition, engagement, and elaboration of the situatedness of the self that makes these accounts such powerful theories “in the flesh,” as Cherrie Moraga would say. In my view, one of the reasons for the great power of Latina feminist phenomenologies is their description of the painful and conflicting moments of living in liminality. Paradoxically, while a life at the borderlands can give rise to what Anzaldúa calls la facultad, an unconscious capacity or a “sixth sense” about danger, it can also lead to a more reflective everyday existence due to these everyday tears or ruptures of norms and practices. One of the main sources of anguish for the new mestiza is precisely that, unlike Heidegger’s Dasein, she does not have a nonreflective, nonthematic sense of all the norms and practices of the spaces or worlds she inhabits. Thus, she does not always navigate her daily existence primarily in terms of know-how, as we have seen Heidegger claims that Dasein does. While she may indeed have a sense of norms from one culture, she may not have a sense of the norms across borders, thus having a very different experience than that described by phenomenologists such as Heidegger. 5 Considering the fact that the multiplicitous self occupies various social locations and is immersed in various cultures, she may hold contradictory norms. In the case of someone who has crossed over to another culture, she may have an understanding of the norms and practices of the context with

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which she identifies, but not of those customary of her new surroundings. She may consequently not feel at ease. “Ease” is the term that Lugones uses to explain the sense of familiarity the self has when fluent in the language, norms, and practices of her culture. This ease is the result of a shared history with others. 6 If we recall Anzaldúa’s account of the new mestiza, it is clear that she is not at ease. Rather, a great deal of her experience in the borderlands is one of discomfort, distress, pain, and sometimes paralysis. Thinking about the experience of the new mestiza together with the Heideggerian description of Dasein reveals an important difference. The ruptures in her everyday existence, given her multiple social, cultural, and spatial locations, prompt her to become more reflective of her activities and her existence, what we may describe as a life of not being-at-ease. While all selves may experience not being-at-ease occasionally, multiplicitous selves at the margins experience it continuously. To illustrate the way norms and practices may be altered as one moves from one culture to another or as one crosses borders, I have previously used the everyday example of norms regarding utensils. While in Nicaragua, I followed the practice of eating cake with a spoon; this practice was disrupted in the United States, where I was expected to use a fork, thus causing me to be more reflective about eating. 7 There are numerous other examples of ruptures of everyday norms and practices that I experienced in the wake of my relocation to the United States. 8 Two other “everyday” examples that were nevertheless significant to me come to mind: greeting people by kissing them on the cheek, and standing up to greet teachers as they enter the classroom. In the U.S. cultural context in which I arrived, the aforementioned practices were not expected from me. As I was given a fork to eat the cake, as I got looks of surprise or even uncomfortable and unfriendly looks when I approached people to kiss their cheek, and as I was looked at with mocking or confused glances while I got up to greet teachers, I stopped relating to the world in terms of a practical orientation or know-how that, according to Heidegger, is the primary way the self is in the world. Suddenly, having to think about using a fork rather than a spoon to eat cake, having quickly to move my body away from people whom I was greeting, and quickly sitting down and realizing that I had not done what was expected of me brought about a host of reflections about my actions. I became more engaged in a mode of “knowing-that” or a reflective mode and didn’t feel familiarity with my environment, thus not being-at-ease. In my view, then, being-at-ease is a function of one’s ability to be nonreflective about everyday norms in the sense that Heidegger indicates and of having familiarity with the language, as well as sharing a history with people in the sense that Lugones describes. However, there are different senses of not being-at-ease, including what I regard a thin sense of not being-at-ease, the experience of minimal ruptures of everyday practices, and a thick sense

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of not being-at-ease, the experience of a deeper sense of not being familiar with norms, practices, and the resulting contradictory feelings about who we are given our experience in the different worlds we inhabit and whether those worlds are welcoming or threatening. While I interpret the Heideggerian account of a practical, nonthematic everyday orientation to the world as indicating a sense of being-at-ease, this does not mean that in this account human beings are always being-at-ease. Heidegger provides an important account of instances when equipment breaks down and the self engages in a more thematic and reflective stance. 9 He also provides elaborate descriptions of more existentially profound moments of anxiety, being-toward-death, and resoluteness. My point, however, is to note that the experiences of the selves described by Anzaldúa, Lugones, and other Latina theorists include a lived experience of constantly not beingat-ease due to the numerous ruptures or tears of everyday norms and practices, the numerous deeper existential moments that they experience, the confusions and contradictions about their selves, and the unwelcoming, threatening nature of their experiences given their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, ethnicity, and other social identities. The anxiety that Heidegger describes can itself be considered a rupture in the sense that Anzaldúa describes—anxiety disrupts Dasein’s existence under the mode of the they—and thus we can see the importance of this type of experience in both the Heideggerian and the Anzaldúan accounts. Yet the experience of the selves described by Latina feminists shows a life of constant ruptures and a persistent breaking down of equipment, both in terms of everyday norms and practices and in terms of deeper existential and societal issues. A thin sense of not being-at-ease is the result of ruptures of everyday norms of practices that are usually transparent and taken for granted by those familiar with the culture and environment, while a thick sense of not beingat-ease arises from ruptures in everyday norms, practices, and experiences that are more meaningful for the self and thus lead to existential crises regarding identity and other features of the self. This thick sense of not beingat-ease becomes even more pronounced when the self is in a condition of marginalization and oppression. While Heidegger does consider the disruption of everyday practices and existential moments prompted by anxiety, his account would be enhanced by the recognition of and engagement with the experiences in a life of constant ruptures prompted by marginalization and a life at the borders and borderlands—ruptures that Anzaldúa, Lugones, and other Latina feminists so vividly describe. Even though it is necessary to realize the importance of the fact that multiplicitous selves continually experience a life of not being-at-ease, it is also important to understand that a life of complete being-at-ease is not necessarily what writers such as Anzaldúa, Lugones, and Heidegger would find desirable. Heidegger denounces the everyday way of being of Dasein in

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the mode of the they as it robs the self from accountability, while Anzaldúa recognizes the creative potential of a life of not being-at-ease despite the tremendous pain associated with it. Lugones, for her part, agrees with Anzaldúa since complete being-at-ease “tends to produce people who have no inclination to travel across ‘worlds’ or no experience of ‘world’ traveling.” 10 MULTIPLICITY, BEING-BETWEEN-WORLDS, AND BEING-IN-WORLDS The intertwining of insights from Latina feminist phenomenologists and Heidegger leads me to think of the multiplicitous self as being-between-worlds and being-in-worlds. Being-in-worlds is to be understood as a key existential characteristic of the multiplicitous self and is meant to capture this self’s complexity. While Anzaldúa employs both the terms “plurality” and “multiplicity,” I prefer multiplicity and use the term in its adjectival form, thus referring to a multiplicitous self. What I regard as a possible distinction between the terms “multiplicity” and “plurality” informs different ways of interpreting the self. In my view, the term “plurality” suggests multiple selves, while the term “multiplicity” suggests a complexity associated with one self. In an effort to follow what I consider a mestizaje of multiplicity and oneness in Anzaldúa’s account of selfhood, I appeal to a multiplicitous self as being-in-worlds and being-between-worlds, a singular self that occupies multiple locations, is informed by her various social identities, and occupies a space of liminality. 11 To say that being-in-worlds is an existential characteristic of the multiplicitous self is to say that the multiplicitous self has a sense of how she fares in worlds—it constitutes an existential dimension of this self. Here I do not mean to provide a list of all the existential or ontological characteristics of the multiplicitous self in the way Heidegger does with Dasein. Rather, I would like to underscore the existential dimension of the life of the multiplicitous self by rethinking Lugones’s idea of “world” with the aid of Heideggerian existential phenomenology. I also wish to enhance Heidegger’s ontological project by way of both Anzaldúa’s and Lugones’s thinking. Thus, while the multiplicitous self inhabits one world in the traditional sense (the collection of entities that is in the world), this self is in many worlds, worlds understood in light of both Lugones’s view of “world” and Heidegger’s understanding of being-in. For Lugones, a “world,” a term that she writes in quotes in order to differentiate her definition of the notion from the traditional meaning of it, refers to an actual world rather than a possible world. In her view, it does not mean the collection of things in the world, a worldview, or a culture. In

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Lugones’s sense, “world” can be understood as a place inhabited by “flesh and blood people”; an actual society, given its dominant or nondominant culture’s description and construction of life in terms of the relationships of production, gender, race, sexuality, class, politics, and so forth; a construction of a small portion of society; an incomplete, visionary, nonutopian construction of life; a traditional construction of life; 12 or at the very least “a community of meaning” 13 in which meanings are a result of what Lugones calls an “ongoing transculturation, interworld influencing and interworld relations of control and resistance to control” rather than determination by ossified cultural codes. 14 A world in this sense is thus incomplete, and it is not monistic, homogeneous, or autonomous. 15 Worlds are intertwined and stand in relation to powers with each other. 16 As I understand Lugones’s notion of “world,” worlds are always open to interpretation and reinterpretation. As she says, she does not provide a fixed definition of the term but attempts to give us a sense of its various meanings. Adding an ontological dimension to Lugones’s understanding of “world” by way of Heidegger’s account of being-in-the-world brings to light the fact that the world understood as an actual society, given dominant or nondominant construction of life, constructions of a small portion of society, visionary constructions of life, communities of meaning, and so forth, is inextricably linked to the self and vice versa. That is, when we think about worlds—here I do not place quotation marks around the term although I agree with Lugones that the term does not refer to the collection of all things—we have to think about the ways such worlds are connected to the self and the ways the self is in them, the way the self fares in them. Losing this connection allows for the possibility of not only understanding the self as apart from worlds but also of providing theories that are not connected to lived experience. Given the importance of lived experience for writers such as Anzaldúa and Lugones, I would like to underscore the existential, ontological dimension of the self. Being-in-worlds captures such a dimension as well as the multiplicity of the self that both of these writers have brought to light. As multiplicitous, the self has various social identities and the possibility of being in various worlds. For example, as multiplicitous, I am in many worlds—the Latino world, the Nicaraguan world, the lesbian world, the Latina lesbian world, the Spanish-speaking world, the academic world, among others, these worlds crisscrossing and overlapping in my many experiences. While I am in specific spaces, say the university where I work, I am being-inworlds in the sense that I have a sense of how I, as a Latina, fare in that space. Moreover, I am also in the world of middle-class white selves, the world of primarily white students, the world of teachers, and so forth. As noted previously, for Anzaldúa the self is in various worlds while, at the same time, traveling from world to world. The multiplicitous self is thus also being-between-worlds and is deeply aware of the experience of liminality.

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These notions of being-in-worlds and being-between-worlds are not to be understood as being static or excluding one another. I can be in various worlds and at the same time be in-between worlds. I may be in some worlds at a particular time in my experience and then have travel to other worlds. Yet I constantly remain in-between some worlds. How long I stay in worlds and how much world-traveling I engage in is contingent not only on my choices but also on my particular social identities and locations and the social, cultural, historical, and economic relations that influence those locations and my experience of them. If I use the example of my workplace, I feel deeply this being-betweenworlds as I occupy a space and participate in norms that are part of a world of primarily middle-class whites who might not have any sense of the Latino world in general. Consequently, I may occupy the same spatial location but may have different ways of being in that location due to the fact that I have access to different worlds. As a Latin American born in Nicaragua, I occupy this location differently than a white U.S.-born citizen does. My experience may include apprehension or worries about not understanding the norms and practices associated with the particular location. I may experience different senses of not being-at-ease. 17 My experiences while being a teacher in a primarily white environment not only include ruptures of everyday practices of teaching and norms and conventions associated with middle-class white environments but also experiences connected to racism, sexism, and homophobia that deeply disrupt my sense of self and well-being. Since there is overlap between worlds, some of these worlds will share norms, meanings, and points of view, while in other cases there will be minimal overlapping. Power relations at work in these various worlds are established differently and construct the multiplicitous self in various ways. They will also inform whether the self has to world-travel constantly. Even when “crossing,” when traveling to another world, the self is in-between. Moreover, as Ofelia Schutte writes in her powerful essay on cultural alterity and North–South cross-cultural communication, there will be cases in which there will be incommensurability, and some elements will be lost in crosscultural communication. 18 In other words, something might be lost or misunderstood as we travel from world to world. Complete translation is not possible, and the self will, in some sense, always be an outsider. Occupying certain spatial locations connects the multiplicitous self to different worlds. Yet spatial location is not the main element involved in being-in-worlds. As I have previously noted, the sense of “world” that I am appealing to is informed by Lugones’s definition as well as the Heideggerian understanding of the term that, as we will see, is connected to the idea of dwelling and existing. It is not merely concerned with ontic material conditions but extends to the ontological or ways of being of the self. That is, dwelling has both an ontological and ontic dimension and thus conveys a

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sense of how the self is and a sense of the self’s connection to specific material conditions. Consequently, I may not be actually residing in a particular place or experiencing a specific culture, say Managua and aspects of Nicaraguan culture, to have access to the world of Nicaraguans, but I may have access to this world given my previous experience with it. Or I may have access to the world of Latinas given that being Latina is one of my social identities. 19 Being-in-worlds is meant to convey the condition of the multiplicitous self as being able to inhabit as well as access various worlds. It is also intimately connected to being-between-worlds, given that this self is not always in one world or another and, instead, can be in-between worlds to different degrees, sometimes ready to cross over—even while crossing, remaining in in-betweenness and liminality. For many multiplicitous selves, being-between-worlds is in fact an everyday way of being, as the borderlands, according to Anzaldúa, can become a “home” to the new mestiza. In other words, for many multiplicitous selves, their condition of in-betweenness is highlighted and felt acutely given different conditions of marginalization. It may also be highlighted due to what I regard as geographic ruptures— sudden movements to other lands because of economic, cultural, or political conditions, movements that may turn multiplicitous, in-between selves into fugitive selves, exilic selves, wounded selves—selves marked primarily by these geographic ruptures that, of course, are not merely related to the land and earth but to our flesh and blood. Multiplicitous selves, then, are beingbetween-worlds and being-in-worlds in different ways. In what follows I would like briefly to elaborate on the notion of being-in-worlds vis-à-vis Heideggerian phenomenology. BEING-IN-WORLDS AND HEIDEGGER’S PHENOMENOLOGY Heidegger breaks down the notion of being-in-the-world and provides an explanation of the separate elements of worldhood, world, and being-in. “World” in the Heideggerian sense does not mean the totality of things in the world that are objectively there and not as functional equipment (ontic sense). It does not mean the being of entities that one may find in a particular world—such as the world of the mathematician, the world of the teacher (ontological sense). “World” in the Heideggerian sense is to be understood in yet another ontic sense as “that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to live,” 20 an understanding that captures the interrelatedness between self and world and thus does not just signify an objective world. 21 According to Heidegger, “world” is where Dasein dwells. In other words, the term “world” already involves the sense of the way human beings exist in the world by way of their activities and choices, and the sense of how they fare in the world that arises from such activities and choices.

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I see this Heideggerian understanding of world as dwelling, which captures the crucial relatedness of self and world, as connected to the way Latina feminists such as Lugones and Anzaldúa understand the notion, given that they are also interested in giving an account of a relational, situated self. As Heidegger says, “‘world’ may stand for the ‘public’ we-world, or one’s ‘own’ closest (domestic) environment.” 22 Lugones and other Latina feminists, however, are more specific as to what these domestic environments are, and they add particularities and political considerations to them. As we have seen, Lugones considers worlds as actual societies and communities of meaning connected to the production of and the relationship between gender, race, sexuality, class, politics, and so forth. I think it is helpful to read Heidegger through Lugones here. That is, when engaging with Heidegger’s account of dwelling in the world, we should keep in mind and be more explicit about specific issues connected to the intersection or intermeshedness of gender, race, sexuality, class, politics, ability, and so on, and how such social locations inform the way we are in worlds. Another element that is encompassed by the Heideggerian account of being-in-the-world is being-in. Rather than occupying space the way a book does inside a bag or tables do inside a room, being-in is connected to the self’s activities when existing in the world, activities that, as previously noted, have a nonreflective or nonthematic practical orientation toward objects in the world. 23 Heidegger thus effectively redefines what being in the world means for humans. We are not objects standing next to other objects inside a room—rather, as humans, we are always situated, living our lives through a series of choices and practical interactions with things that are available to us and interacting with other people. This Heideggerian sense of being-in is integral to my conception of being-in-worlds, since I understand multiplicitous selves as always connected to things and to other selves in the world. I also take multiplicitous selves as having a practical orientation toward objects. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, selves as described by Anzaldúa, Lugones, and other Latina feminists— multiplicitous selves that are marginalized—may not find themselves primarily nonreflectively and practically oriented toward objects in the way that Heidegger describes. His understanding of being-in does not fully capture their experience, an experience of recurrent thin and thick senses of not being-at-ease due to constant ruptures of everydayness. While Heidegger’s description of Dasein highlights a sense of being-at-ease resulting from a practical orientation in the world guided by the nonreflective use of equipment that is “ready-to-hand,” multiplicitous selves such as the new mestiza and the world-traveler experience an arduous life of not being-at-ease in the worlds that they travel to. However, as noted above, not being-at-ease may also lead to constructive possibilities by way of a more critical awareness of everydayness, creative transformations, and increased world-traveling.

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The extent to which a multiplicitous self is being-at-ease in different worlds is deeply important. Even though all of us are multiplicitous selves, our experiences are greatly affected by relations of power influencing the construction, understanding, and regulation of our various social identities. Not all of us will experience the type of “intimate terrorism” that Anzaldúa describes. Even though all of us are being-between-worlds and being-inworlds, our experiences in various worlds will differ. We cannot forget the disparity in the experience of a multiplicitous self that occupies dominant social locations and that of a multiplicitous self who is at the margins and is oppressed. While it is certainly the case that all of us will experience breaks in our everyday practices—we will feel uneasiness, anxiety, and even “intimate terrorism” at some point in our lives—there are multiplicitous selves whose lives are marked by these feelings given various economic, global, cultural power disparities and given the key fact that they remain between worlds. INTERSECTIONAL, FLEXIBLE, AND TACTICAL SELFHOOD So far I have described the multiplicitous self in terms of being-in-worlds and being-between-worlds. In the following, I describe this self in light of the important notion of intersectionality introduced by women of color writers. Recognition of the multiplicity of the self requires an understanding of the complex ways the self’s various social identities intersect or intermesh, recognizing the manner in which different axes of oppression are intertwined, and considering this self’s flexibility. The multiplicitous self is intersectional, flexible, and tactical, and needs to be understood by way of an intersectional approach. The multiplicitous self has multiple social identities that are connected to race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other social markers, and she has to negotiate such identities while being-between-worlds and being-in-worlds. As a self in process or in the making, the multiplicitous self is continually engaged in these negotiations, which include sometimes having to strategically deploy certain identities in certain worlds. This ability to negotiate different identities in different contexts grants the self a flexibility that opposes the fixity of traditional conceptions of selfhood. Anzaldúa explains it best when she states, Only by remaining flexible is [the new mestiza] able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move towards a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. 24

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The multiplicitous self is a self in process that is flexible and decentered and does not necessarily need to be fully integrated. In terms of social identities, this self can shift or, as I prefer to see it, highlight different identities in different contexts. Of course, this highlighting of different identities in different contexts is not merely a willful action that does not have a connection to particular material circumstances. As embodied and situated in specific locations with specific histories and relations of power, the multiplicitous self tactically highlights different identities insofar as those identities are real possibilities. That is to say, the multiplicitous self cannot change identities as if they were articles of clothing. Even articles of clothing are restricted, as certain garments would not fit our bodies and some would not be appropriate depending on weather conditions. As noted, this decenteredness and flexibility of the self, however, does not mean that there cannot be an identity that becomes more salient for the multiplicitous self at a particular time in her life or in the context of some worlds. Most importantly, this decenteredness and flexibility do not mean that the multiplicitous self always has the opportunity willfully and tactically to deploy certain identities over others. Due to the fact that the experience being underscored here is that of marginalized members of society, in many cases the multiplicitous self will not have the opportunity to highlight certain identities, especially under conditions of extreme marginalization or when such identities attempt to resist oppression. In various worlds, the marginalized are treated as invisible, “pliable, foldable,” “file-awayable, classifiable,” or disposable. 25 However, for Latina feminist phenomenologists, it is precisely in the state of inhabiting the borderlands, in the state of liminality, of beingbetween-worlds, that possibilities of resistance arise, precisely because it is while being in-between that the multiplicitous self can recognize alternative visions of identity and of worlds. The multiplicitous self then should not be understood by way of additive analysis. Rather, this self has experiences shaped by the intersection/intermeshedness of various social identities. I am not the sum of my social identities—member of the middle class + woman + Latina + professor + other identities. The intersection and intermeshedness of these identities continually inform my experiences as I am being-in-worlds and being-betweenworlds. Moreover, understanding the multiplicitous self as flexible or “mobile” means recognizing this self’s decenteredness or not having an a priori central identity. Let us then understand the multiplicitous self as an embodied, situated self in process that is being-in-worlds and being-between-worlds and that is characterized by intersectionality and flexibility. It is my hope that my account of multiplicitous selfhood as being-in-worlds and being-between-worlds captures Latina voices that disclose the complexity and multiplicity of the self and that urge us to pay attention to a lived experience that paradoxically points to multiplicity and oneness.

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ONENESS AS EXISTENTIAL CONTINUITY While the previous discussions engage issues connected to multiplicity, I now turn to the question of oneness. When considering the oneness of the multiplicitous self, I immediately think of the obvious fact that this self is embodied and consider this embodiment in terms of what Merleau-Ponty calls a synthesis, a “nexus of living meanings,” rather than an assemblage of body parts that are mechanically coordinated. 26 Anzaldúa’s discussion of the new mestiza is a compelling reminder of the bodily dimension of the self as she describes experiencing the psychic unrest as well as bodily pain of her life in the borderlands. She even states that writing is a “blood sacrifice.” 27 “You must plunge your fingers into your navel, with your two hands,” she says, calling attention to the fact that we experience through the body. 28 For her, the body does not merely represent a collection of organs; it is a link to the world. The oneness of the multiplicitous self, then, can be thought of in terms of embodiment. Yet Anzaldúa herself makes the comment that “one’s own body is not one entity,” given that one’s body is also all the different organisms living in it. 29 Here I would like to think of oneness in terms of the sense in which I can consider myself an “I” and in which I am aware of my own being, not only by way of my embodiment but by way of the temporal dimension of my existence, what I regard as existential continuity. What accounts for the oneness or continuity of the multiplicitous self is a key and complicated issue, especially when one is committed to a view that is mindful of multiplicity but rejects traditional accounts of subjectivity, which may appeal to notions such as a transcendental ego to explain the unity of experience. From the outset, I would like to be clear that an appeal to the oneness of the self is not an attempt to resuscitate a traditional type of subjectivity or to long for the unity of a Kantian transcendental ego that is outside experience and that makes experience possible. Instead of appealing to a perfectly unified self, I appeal to the continuity of experience that the multiplicitous self has, as multiplicitous and complex as this self is. This continuity of experience provides the multiplicitous self with a sense of being an “I” and an awareness of the self’s own being. As such, it is an existential continuity. It allows for a sense of “oneness” and “ownness,” despite the fact that the multiplicitous self occupies multiple locations and may thus identify with various social identities. While shifting from a discussion of social identity to a consideration of what it means for the multiplicitous self to experience the sense of being an “I,” I would like to make a further connection between Latina feminist phenomenology and Heideggerian existential phenomenology. I appeal to Heideggerian notions to explain the oneness of the multiplicitous self, to show how a multiplicitous self can be understood as having a continuity of experience and thus a sense of being an “I.”

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Heideggerian notions of temporality and mineness are helpful ontological elements that allow us to understand the multiplicitous self’s continuity of experience and thus to be concerned with her own being. Having a sense of a continuity of experience is key for the multiplicitous self, since not having such a sense of continuity would render this self’s experiences as merely unrelated atomistic moments. The question of how to show the continuity of experience, of how to connect individual moments of experience as a whole, so as to understand them as happening to one self, is a famous and difficult issue. As William Wilkerson (in an unpublished manuscript) notes, there have been two major common trends to explain such continuity, synthesis (Kant) and association (Hume). However, given the problems with these two accounts, Wilkerson appeals to a different approach and is inspired by Henri Bergson’s view that the whole precedes the parts. That is, rather than asking the question of how discrete parts can be experienced as a whole, we need to recognize that the whole is given first. A notable example of another philosopher who holds this view is Heidegger. One way to understand this approach is by considering Heidegger’s explanation of hearing the sound of a motorcycle. According to Heidegger, we first hear the motorcycle, not all the individual sounds that together make the overall sound. 30 Although this example is used by Heidegger to show that humans are already in a world in which they have numerous practical connections to things that are part of an equipmental whole (in fact, this provides the background for experiencing the whole first), it can provide a sense in which we first have a flow of experience rather than adding particular, discrete moments of this experience after the fact. The self has the experience and understands it as her own; discrete moments can be analyzed in a more theoretical way later. That there is this sense of continuity does not mean that particular experiences comprising this sense are perfectly unified, consistent, or fully integrated. As we will see, the self still experiences moments of ambiguity and contradiction. In my view, the principal ontological element that accounts for the multiplicitous self’s continuity of experience is temporality. Described by Heidegger as “the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been,” temporality is the key ontological element of the self. 31 In Heidegger’s discussion of this fundamental ontological characteristic, the past, the present, and the future—the three dimensions of time—are intertwined rather than understood in the traditional linear view as a sequence of “nows.” Temporality makes it possible for the self to project toward the future while being in a particular present situation and being informed by a particular past, and it thus grounds the continuity of the present, past, and future. This phenomenon is not to be understood as being prior to experience but as coextensive with it. As Heidegger notes, “We therefore call the phenomena of the future, the character of the having-been, and the Present, the ‘ectases’ of temporality.

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Temporality is not, prior to this, an entity which first emerges from itself; its essence is a process of temporalizing the unity of the ectases.” 32 Applying this Heideggerian sense of temporality to the multiplicitous self, we can understand this self as a temporal being that projects itself toward the future while at the same time being concerned with its present and being informed by its past, thus having a continuity of experience that makes it possible for it to be an “I.” As noted, this temporality is not a feature over and above the self. It is part of the multiplicitous self’s experience. Moreover, even though there is a prioritizing of the future as the self always projects herself toward the future, this notion of temporality is not a linear one in which the self is always understood as forward moving. Rather, there is an intertwining of the past, present, and future that is important for understanding the multiplicity of social identities informing the life of the multiplicitous self. In virtue of this phenomenon of temporality, the multiplicitous self has a flow of experience that she can recognize as her own. This recognition that a stream of experience is understood as one’s own, a way of being in which I experience events as happening to me or as mine, what Heidegger calls mineness (Jemeinigkeit), is yet another ontological feature that is key in understanding the oneness of the multiplicitous self. While I previously held that this ontological feature accounted for the self’s “togetherness,” 33 I now understand it as a way of being of the self that arises from the type of temporality described above. The notion of mineness needs to be understood within the context of an ontological account that rejects overly materialistic and epistemic accounts of selves. Mineness has to do with the individual character of the self in the sense that it registers the self’s awareness of its own being, or how the self is faring. Mineness thus captures the existential dimension of being an “I” that is always situated in particular contexts. According to Lawrence Hatab, mineness points to “the existential meaningfulness of Dasein’s endeavors.” 34 As he states, “Mineness is a contextual specificity of existential mattering that is not equivalent to an ego or egoism, or a metaphysical self, but simply those meanings indicated in first-person pronoun usages. The upshot of mineness is that being matters to each Dasein in its mode of existence.” 35 Appealing to this ontological characteristic is not a call to the type of individuality that may be attributed to a Cartesian epistemic subject that has the possibility of finding itself as a solus ipse. 36 Moreover, it does not preclude the way the self is relational and always connected to a social milieu. What mineness entails is one’s experience of being aware of one’s being in any particular circumstance, and thus it captures an existential dimension of the self. For example, as I sit here writing in front of my computer, I am aware of my own being and that it is me who is writing these words. In other words, as existing, making choices, and carrying out numerous activities, I am aware of

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myself and I am also aware of how I am faring in the particular world I am in. It has to do with what Heidegger describes as Befindlichkeit, an immediate rather than reflective sense of how we fare in the world. The multiplicitous self that inhabits multiple social locations always has mineness or the awareness of how she is faring in particular worlds. Given that this self is being-between-worlds and being-in-worlds, like the new mestiza, she may have a sense of how she fares in multiple worlds, say the Latino world and the U.S. white world. This self may experience a sense of ambiguity or contradiction considering her multiple social locations. Following Lugones’s famous example, this self may feel playful in the Latino world but not in the Anglo world. 37 There are numerous other examples connected to bi- or multicultural experience, but this kind of ambiguity does not necessarily result from the fact that the multiplicitous self may be bi- or multicultural. It may have to do with daily facets of the multiplicitous self’s experience, for example, seeing oneself as an assertive woman but seeing oneself as not assertive in a male-dominated work environment. How does mineness play a role in these moments of ambiguity or contradiction? Mineness is part of the self’s experiences. The multiplicitous self has mineness as she is experiencing the sense of being playful in the Latino world; she also has mineness as she experiences the sense of not being playful in the U.S. white world. The sense that it is my own being that is an issue remains in both cases. While Lugones interprets this experience differently as pointing to what she calls an ontological pluralism or a plurality of selves, I take the experience as still pointing to a multiplicitous self, a self that can interpret itself differently in different worlds but that is still an “I” that experiences her own being as an issue. The complicated aspect of the experience is that in one context I am playful, and in another I am not playful, and thus there may arise a sense of confusion, ambiguity, or even contradiction about the type of person that I am. This is especially the case when the attribute or characteristic in question is considered central for one’s character. However, the sense of mineness remains despite the complexity of this situation. I am still aware of my own being both at times when I see myself as playful in one world and when I see myself as not playful in another world. It is when I entertain both interpretations at the same time, or when I am in one world understanding myself as playful but remembering myself as not playful in another world, that the confusion and contradiction arises. Yet mineness is still informing my experiences. The way to understand this latter case is that one attribute or aspect of myself is highlighted or enacted in one world but not in the other. This may be due to various reasons, including the manifold power relations that are in place in the different worlds. The point here is that while I am a multiplicitous self that is dealing with norms and practices of different worlds, I am still ontologically directed toward or con-

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cerned with my being, even while in the midst of ambiguities and contradictions that might arise from being-between-worlds and being-in-worlds and the traveling between various worlds. But let’s consider the multiplicitous self’s contradictory experience of finding herself as having different attributes in different worlds (i.e., playful in one world, not playful in another). This experience complicates the idea that the self has a continuity of experience rather than having to actively connect experiences via some transcendental ego or another mechanism of association. The difficulty arises due to the fact that the experience of the self as playful in one world but not in another may be seen as a break in the continuity of experience. This point may even lead to the view that there are different flows of experience and thus a plurality of selves, a playful self and an unplayful self. While theorists like Lugones seem to hold a similar view to this, this reading does not accurately assess the experience. A more constructive way of understanding this experience that is common for multiplicitous selves is that rather than understanding the experience as a break in continuity, it may be seen as the multiplicitous self having a flow of experience that includes disparate or contradictory elements. Thus I may be in the Latino world, in which the attribute of feeling playful is highlighted, and at the same time I am aware of being seriously unplayful in the U.S. white world. Yet these are all part of the same flow of experience in which the sense of mineness persists. Rather than a complete break in the continuity of my experience, we can understand the uneasiness, confusion, and feeling of contradiction that arise in this situation as a deeper instance of not being-at-ease in that world or a thick sense of not being-at-ease. In this case of having a thick sense of not being-at-ease, which can be rather painful and confusing, the uneasiness has to do not only with not knowing the norms and not having a sense of shared history in this particular world (a thin sense of not being-at-ease) but with the additional experience of being confused as to the kind of person that I am—am I playful or am I not playful? This confusion arises from the fact that I hold memories of myself connected to the attribute in question while I have traveled to other worlds. Having these memories creates a deep sense of contradiction and confusion in the present experience of understanding myself as playful in the Latino world but not in the U.S. white world. As described earlier, different attributes or aspects of the multiplicitous self, say playfulness, are highlighted more in some worlds than in others. While the experience is confusing and may even lead one to wonder about who one is—the playful person or the unplayful person—or whether we are more than one person, we are both. Yet these different attributes are highlighted or negotiated differently in different worlds. This thick sense of not being-at-ease arises particularly in connection with attributes or characteristics that are considered important for the multi-

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plicitous self. Even though, as pointed out previously, the multiplicitous self is mobile, flexible, and tactical, there are identities or characteristics of the self that may be regarded as more salient in one’s life or as being indicative of one’s self (despite the fact that the multiplicitous self is decentered). Consequently, when those identities or traits are undermined in different worlds, there arises a sense of contradiction and confusion, even an existential crisis or, to use Anzaldúa’s words, “intimate terrorism.” As opposed to a thin sense of not being-at-ease, which involves ruptures in everyday norms and practices that complicate the multiplicitous self’s experiences and lead to a more reflective being-in-worlds, not being-at-ease in a thick sense leads to existential dilemmas regarding one’s sense of self or identity. While here I am differentiating between both thin and thick senses of not being-at-ease, I understand that these two senses may be intertwined in different contexts such that there is the possibility that continuous ruptures of everyday norms and practices may also lead to existential crises regarding one’s identity. It is important to point out, however, that the contradiction that arises in these situations involving the thick sense of not being-at-ease is not necessarily negative. If we think back to Anzaldúa’s description of the new mestiza, we may recall that encountering contradictions may lead to productive or transformative moments. It may also lead to the realization that we can embody contradictory attributes without necessarily having to choose one or the other as being the defining feature of our self. We can be both playful and unplayful; encountering the contradiction does not have to lead to the view that we are multiple selves, a playful one and an unplayful one. Rather, various identities and characteristics of our self are highlighted in some worlds due to the different ways structures of power are organized or to the way we actively and tactically negotiate them given our circumstances. One of the features of mestiza consciousness, as Anzaldúa calls it, and differential consciousness, as Sandoval understands it, is precisely the ability to hold disparate, contradictory aspects of oneself at the same time, without having to reconcile, unify, or integrate them. Here we must remember the oftenquoted words of Anzaldúa: The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. 38

Anzaldúa does not ignore or avoid the new mestiza’s complexity and multiplicity. We need to learn from her as we explore the experience of the multiplicitous self in all its facets, in its moments of uneasiness or in its moments of creativity and transformation. Despite’s this self’s multiplicity,

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temporality and mineness allow for an existential continuity of experience that captures a sense of oneness despite the confusing, ambiguous, or contradictory moments of a life in and between worlds—an instance of a mestizaje of multiplicity and oneness. NOTES 1. This chapter is a slightly revised version of chapter 2 of Ortega, In-Between. 2. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 200. I follow María Lugones’s rejection of the traditional oppressor/oppressed dichotomy and her view (inspired by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa) that subjects are oppressing, being oppressed, and resisting within different contexts. As she states, “All subjects can then be understood as active contributors to, collaborators in, creators of oppressive or resistant practices even when the logics of oppression constitute some subjects as passive. That is, resistance and oppression vie as constructions of everyday life. One way of putting the point is to think of particular subjects as oppress-ing (or collaborat-ing) or be-ing oppressed and as resisting.” 3. For a more detailed discussion of the similarities between Latina feminist phenomenological views such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s and the Heideggerian view of self, see Ortega, InBetween, 51–58. 4. It is important to be explicit about Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism rather than hide this fact or defend him. I engage some Heideggerian phenomenological notions about the self, but in doing so I do not wish to endorse his political commitments. Rather, I wish to critically engage his work and go beyond it. 5. Ortega, “‘New Mestizas,’” “‘World’-Travelers,” and “‘Dasein,’” 9. 6. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 90. 7. Ortega, “‘New Mestizas,’” “‘World’-Travelers,” and “‘Dasein,’” 10. 8. Here I purposely choose examples of “everyday” norms and practices since one of the points of Heidegger’s analysis is to describe the self in everydayness. 9. Heidegger, Being and Time, 102–7 [72–76]. 10. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 90. 11. For a detailed explanation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s view of self as a mestizaje of multiplicity and oneness, see Ortega, In-Between, chap. 1. 12. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 87. 13. Ibid., 144. 14. Ibid., 26. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 21. 17. It is important to note that not all Nicaraguans or white U.S.-born citizens will have the same experiences in a particular location. I do not wish to homogenize groups. I wish to emphasize the fact that we might have different experiences in specific locations depending on our social identities and backgrounds as well as depending on our familiarity with dominant norms and practices. 18. Schutte, “Cultural Alterity.” 19. Given the definition of world used in this work, we have to remember the world of Latinas or any other world as incomplete and subject to reinterpretation. 20. Heidegger, Being and Time, 93 [65]. 21. Heidegger pays a great deal of attention to this third understanding of world as that wherein Dasein lives, although he is also ultimately interested in understanding “world” as “worldhood,” an ontic-ontological concept that is prior to the three understandings of world that he presents. 22. Heidegger, Being and Time, 93 [65]. 23. Ibid., 107 [77]. 24. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 79. 25. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 97.

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26. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 175. 27. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 73, 75. 28. Ibid., 164. 29. Anzaldúa and Keating, Interviews/Entrevistas, 158. 30. Heidegger, Being and Time, 207 [163]. 31. Ibid., 374 [326]. 32. Ibid., 377 [329]. 33. Ortega, “‘New Mestizas,’” “‘World’-Travelers,” and “‘Dasein.’” 34. Hatab, Ethics and Finitude, 172. 35. Ibid., 17. 36. For a more in-depth account of the Heideggerian account of self and a discussion of the individual character of Dasein that explains the notion of mineness, see Ortega, “Dasein Comes after the Epistemic Subject.” 37. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 86. 38. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 79.

WORKS CITED Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Anzaldúa, Gloria, and AnaLouise Keatin. Interviews/Entrevistas. New York: Routledge, 2000. Hatab, Lawrence. Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral Philosophy Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translate by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Lugones, María. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2003. Ortega, Mariana. “Dasein Comes after the Epistemic Subject, but Who Is Dasein?” International Philosophical Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2000): 51–67. ———. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016. ———. “‘New Mestizas,’ ‘“World”-Travelers,’ and ‘Dasein’: Phenomenology and the Multivoiced Multi-cultural Self.” Hypatia 16, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 1–29. Schutte, Ofelia. “Cultural Alterity: Cross-Cultural Communication and Feminist Theory in North-South Contexts.” Hypatia 13, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 53–72.

Chapter Three

The Intersections of Race, Gender, and Criminality A Black Woman’s Phenomenological Account Shaeeda A. Mensah

I recently signed into Instagram and came across a post with the following request: “don’t scroll without retweeting & typing r.I.p.” Below those words appeared a large square that had been divided into nine smaller squares. Each square had a picture of a Black person whose death resulted from police violence. The photos included images of two Black boys (Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin), six Black men (Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Mike Brown, Freddie Grey, Alton Sterling, and Sean Bell), and one Black woman (Sandra Bland). The image immediately reminded me of a Facebook post made by an acquaintance in 2012. In the post, she told a story about her daughter learning that Tamir Rice was killed by police after playing with a toy gun in a park. Her daughter, she went on, was the same age as Rice at the time. With tears running down her face, her daughter asked her, “Could this happen to me?” My acquaintance did not go on to say how she answered her daughter’s question. But if we take the Instagram photo as an indication of our understanding of state violence, it is likely that she told her daughter that it was unlikely that what happened to Rice would happen to her. Yet, I speculate, she may have added that it might very well happen to a Black boy or man that she knows. In what follows, I will argue that analyses of state violence have overwhelmingly emphasized the experiences of Black males. Coupled with that analysis, I will argue, is the presentation of Black women as safer and better off than Black men, given that they are not the direct targets of state violence. Here I will argue that Black girls and women have been largely portrayed as 35

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the collateral damage of state violence, with Black women’s impact being cast as the result either of their relationship to Black boys and men or of their position as individuals who are occasionally and unintentionally harmed by tactics that take Black men and boys as their targets. The narrative that locates Black women and girls as the collateral damage of state violence, articulated in theoretical and personal accounts as well as scholarly discussions, is compelling. Such accounts map onto the lived experiences of many Black women. Yet, I will argue that this is only one account of Black women’s experiences with state violence. Building on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality, I will point to the necessity of seeing Black women’s experiences as both similar to and distinctive from that of Black men. In so doing, I will call for the need to address the similarities that exist between Black men’s and Black women’s experiences with state violence, as well as the tendency to rank Black men’s experiences as more oppressive than Black women’s experiences when those experiences differ. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, to provide an account of the conditions that render state violence a possibility; and, second, to contextualize the ways Black women are assumed not to be the subjects of state violence via a discussion of treating race and gender as mutually exclusive categories. I contend that the hypervisibility of the state violence experienced by Black men leaves Black women vulnerable to state violence. THE DANGEROUS BLACK MALE AS A FIGMENT OF THE WHITE IMAGINATION Our commonsense understanding of innocence is that a person is innocent until he has done something that negates this status. The disassociation of a person with innocence is predicated on the fact that he has committed an offense, namely broken a law. We generally refer to that person as guilty or a criminal. Thus, a person who has not broken a law is innocent, and a person who breaks the law is guilty. While this line of reasoning is taken to be selfevident, I maintain that a very different form of logic is employed for the Black male subject. The condition of being evaluated on the basis of one’s action is a condition that is not available to all subjects. In the white imaginary, in particular, the Black male subject is wholly excluded from the realm of innocence. He is always classified as guilty, over and above whether he has committed a crime. Writer and novelist Brit Bennett refers to the Black male body as one that “morph[es] into weapons [in the presence of white subjects], and the imagined danger becomes more powerful than fact.” 1 Alternatively, one might understand the guilt of the Black male through the idea that his very being poses a threat, perpetually intimidating or fear inducing.

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In the chapter “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon relays an encounter he has with a white male child. 2 The boy says to his mother, “Look! A Negro!” The child is noted as having made this proclamation a total of three times. Next, the child proclaims, “Maman, look, a Negro; I am scared!” 3 Some might be inclined to attribute the utterance made in response to the appearance of Fanon to the child’s immaturity, but to do so would be a mistake. The mother intervenes by saying the following, “Ssh! You’ll make him angry. Don’t pay attention to him, monsieur, he doesn’t realize you’re just as civilized as we are.” It is important to note that the mother’s two sentences are directed at two distinctive audiences. She is speaking to her son when she utters, “Ssh! You’ll make him [Fanon] angry.” She is speaking to Fanon when she says, “Don’t pay attention to him [her son], monsieur, he doesn’t realize you’re just as civilized as we are.” 4 In stringing these sentences together, she affirms her son’s fear and portrays her own by saying that Fanon will be angered by her son’s statement. She also fails to see that she, by her assumption of Fanon’s anger, also does not conceive of Fanon as civilized in the ways she sees herself and her son. Though in a different geographical location, Black men in the United States have expressed experiences that bear a striking resemblance to Fanon’s. In the wake of the death of Trayvon Martin, former president Barack Obama publicly expressed the following points: There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the door of cars. That happens to me, well at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse or nervously holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. This happens often. 5

George Yancy in Black Bodies, White Gazes (2004) offers an account of the Black male experience that bears striking resemblance to Obama’s statement. 6 There he writes of his experiences of hearing car doors lock as he passes by them, of being followed around stores by white security guards, and of having white cashiers be careful not to touch his hand when he makes a purchase at a department store. 7 In each of these accounts, the Black male subject has not committed an act that would generically be conceived of as threatening or criminal, yet it is made clear that Black males induce white fear. This is because the presumption of Black male guilt precedes all action. As Yancy explains, “it is as if [the Black male] body has always already committed a criminal deed.” 8 He attributes this idea to the fact that the Black male body is read through

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structural and historical forms of knowledge that cast the Black male as an “object of suspicion.” 9 The reality of always being considered a threat or perpetually being conceived of as a criminal is reflective of how Blackness is conceived of by the white subject. According to Fanon, “not only must the black man be black, but he must be black in relation to the white man.” In relation to the white subject, he explains, the Negro is “an animal, . . . bad, . . . wicked, . . . ugly. [They are] savages, morons, and illiterates.” 10 A similar sentiment is expressed by Tommy Curry in his 2017 book The ManNot: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. 11 Drawing on the work of Fanon, Curry describes whites as having “negrophobia,” or a fear of Blackness. 12 On his reading, white subjects conceive of Black males as existing outside the realm of the human. As nonhumans or subhumans, Black men are thought to lack both morality and empathy. 13 Seen this way, Black boys and men are both disposable to and in violation of the social order. 14 Curry is careful to point out that this is the condition not only of Black men but also of Black boys. Black boys, he argues, are seen as children who, if allowed to live, will inevitably grow up to be dangerous Black men. In this way, violence inflicted on a Black boy amounts to destroying a “beast” cub before its full maturation. 15 For Fanon, the white gaze overpowers him and renders him an object not only to the white subject but also to himself. 16 Yancy offers a different account of the power of the white gaze. He rejects the idea that his understanding of his “self” is subsumed by the white gaze, but it is made clear that in society, the definition of the Black male offered by the white subject will be taken and trusted over the ways the Black male defines himself. 17 The line of distinction between Fanon and Yancy’s articulation is how for each the Black male comes to define himself. But what is consistent in their accounts is the fact that the definition of the Black male under the white gaze perpetually supersedes how the Black male defines himself. In support of this idea we need only consider the fact that whites can, and often do, use their fear as a basis for inflicting violence on Black male bodies. Consider, for example, the fact that Darren Wilson’s testimony about his encounter with Mike Brown played a vital role in the Department of Justice decision not to hold him criminally responsible for the fact that he killed Brown. Wilson, who was the same height as Brown but eighty pounds lighter, described himself as having felt like a five-year-old who was holding on to the Incredible Hulk. 18 Wilson went on to describe Brown as resembling a demon who could look through him. In November of the same year, a grand jury declined the opportunity to bring criminal charges against Wilson, even in light of numerous accounts of Brown having held his hands up in surrender before being shot six times. It is with this example in mind that I maintain that in encounters between a white subject and a Black male, the Black male is what or who the white subject says he is. 19

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ON THE JUSTIFIED MISREADING OF BLACK ACTIONS The presumption of Black male guilt has important implications for their subjection to punishment, in the forms of both imprisonment and subjection to violence. Their assumed guilt and criminality can be and is often used as a basis for the justification of Black male subjection to punishment. In the previous section, I focused on Black male existence as the basis for their presumed guilt. Here I want to draw on how these assumptions result in misconceived, but accepted, interpretations of Black male action. Misreading Black male action allows for whites to make claims of acting in self-defense, with little recourse for their actions. To develop this point, I want to return to Fanon’s encounter with the little white boy. During the encounter with the child and his mother, Fanon describes himself as beginning to tremble as a result of his experience of being cold. But the child interpreted Fanon’s trembles as a physical illustration of his anger and outrage. What resulted was that the boy also began to tremble, but his trembling was the result of his fear of Fanon. Trembling, he ran to his mother’s arms and proclaimed, “Maman, the Negro’s going to eat me.” 20 In this moment, Fanon is falsely accused of intending to eat the child. This accusation is launched against him because the child, who is white, misinterprets Fanon’s actions. What is crucial to remember, though, is that his interpretation would be taken as an acceptable basis for acting in self-defense. At times, self-defense takes the form of making an accusation against a Black boy or man; at other times, it results in the infliction of violence on the body of a Black boy or man. Yancy recounts an experience of having almost been shot by a police officer while walking home with a telescope. Having mistaken the telescope for a gun, the officer warned Yancy of the fact that he had considered killing him. The officer proclaimed, “I almost blew your brains out.” 21 It was inconceivable that a Black child would be carrying a telescope, and so it was justifiable for the officer to have assumed that the telescope was a weapon. Yancy’s experience is not an isolated account. Bryan Stevenson tells a story of being held at gunpoint after having sat in his car, which was parked outside of his apartment, for an extended period of time. The officer performed a background check on Stevenson and also searched his car. Upon failing to find anything, the officer informed Stevenson that he was lucky. Stevenson maintains that he was lucky, because many Black boys and men don’t live to tell of encounters like his. 22 Similarly, Freddie Gray was a Black man who did not live to tell of his encounter with Baltimore, Maryland, police officers. Gray was pursued by police for a reason that has never been explained. Gray began to run, and his running was later said to have been the motive for police arresting him. Gray died while being transported to a Baltimore police precinct. The fact that Gray ran was used by officers to justify his guilt. 23 Accordingly, the possibility that Gray may have been

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scared is precluded. To be scared is to be seen as a potential victim, and Black men and boys are often denied this possibility. The ability of white subjects to justify various forms of violence on the Black male body is made possible by the fact that the words of whites are generally considered epistemically reliable. Compared to most nonwhites, whites are presumed to be individuals capable of producing reliable forms of knowledge. The Black subject, on the other hand, lacks epistemic confidence and, accordingly, is conceived as producing unreliable forms of knowledge, if he is conceived as capable of producing knowledge at all. 24 Thus, the white interpretation of Black male actions, in particular, supersedes the Black male’s account of his actions or intentions. This reality renders Black males particularly vulnerable in interactions with the police state. The decision in the 2013 case Floyd v. The City of New York resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court declaring that individuals could be pulled over or stopped and frisked by police if there was “reasonable suspicion” for doing so. The court declared that the notion of “reasonable suspicion” was an objective standard on the grounds that “the test for whether a stop has taken place in the context of a police encounter is whether a reasonable person would have felt free to terminate the encounter. To proceed from a stop to a frisk, the police officer must reasonably suspect that the person stopped is armed and dangerous.” 25 While the court’s decision asserts that reasonable suspicion is objective rather than subjective, I maintain that the opposite is the case. It is unclear who is conceived of as a reasonable person. Given what I have described as the epistemic confidence granted to white subjects, they are likely to be those who are described as reasonable. And if, as I have asserted, the Black male is equated to a criminal, he will perpetually be presumed armed and dangerous. During Black males’ encounters with white police officers in particular, sudden movements or having a wallet, cell phone, or keys are often enough to induce a version of fear that justifies the death of a Black boy or man. It is for this reason that the growing tendency for white individuals to call the police on Black individuals is so alarming. It is indicative of the fact that when Blacks commit everyday actions they are assessed as committing an act that is illegal, and the fact that a white person is calling the police means that the white person’s account is likely to be believed over that of a Black person. Given that the Black male body is conceived of as inherently guilty, it is largely inconceivable to think of Black men as victims. While highly problematic, the criminal justice system is predicated on the dichotomy of those who are offenders and those who are victims. In this way, Black males who are stopped and frisked for things like driving an expensive car or standing in front of their home are not classified as victims. 26 In some ways, this is not particular to the Black male experience. A lot of people who commit crimes are unrecognizable as victims. But what is particular to the Black male experience is that their crime is the crime of being a Black male, a crime that is

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the result of their identity, which they cannot control, rather than their actions. Taken as a criminal by virtue of his existence, the Black male can be, and often is, treated in ways that are identical to the treatment of individuals who have committed criminal acts. Even when they have not committed a criminal act, they are treated in ways that are identical to a person who has committed a criminal act. Thus, Black men and boys are always and perpetually subject to punishment, sometimes in the form of imprisonment and at other times in the form of subjection to violence or death. BLACK WOMEN AS THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE OF STATE VIOLENCE In her 2017 publication “Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Unknowability,” Kristie Dotson points to the recent tendency to refer to Black males as an endangered species. 27 Yet, she points out, there has never been a concomitant notion of Black women as an endangered species. 28 It is not that Dotson is interested in arguing for a complementary narrative of Black girls or women as an endangered species; 29 given the fact that both Black males and females are subject to racism, she asks why it is that Black boys and men, and not Black girls and women, have been cast as an endangered species. What could justifiably be taken as a response to the aforementioned questions about endangerment is provided by Tommy Curry in his 2017 book, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. According to Curry, subjection to the practices of imprisonment and police violence are experiences that are a response to the intersections of Blackness and maleness. The emancipation of slaves, he argues, stood to potentially (and radically) disrupt the model of Black subordination to white men and women. 30 The emancipation of slaves brought about the awareness that Blacks would be embedded into the sexual contract of the patriarchal race. Black men would have thereby gained access to patriarchal power based on their sex, and white women would have lost their access to patriarchal power, which had been predicated on their race. Put differently, the potential of Black men having access to patriarchal power stood to dislodge white women’s access to patriarchal power. In order to ensure that Black males were denied access to patriarchal power and thus remained outside of the sexual contract, both theoretical and physical tactics were employed to reinforce Black male subjugation to both white men and white women. Curry situates lynching as one of the first responses to the particular threat of Black maleness. Curry, like many other scholars, links lynching to the myth of the black male rapist, or the notion that Black men were hypersexual and posed a threat to white women’s safe-

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ty. The myth was multifunctional in that it both resulted in the subordination of Black men and reenforced white male patriarchy. The supposed threat of the Black male rapist led to white women turning to their male counterparts for protection. Curry contends that the imprisonment and murder of Black men, particularly by police officers, should also be understood as a reinstantiation of the practice of lynching. Like lynching, both tactics function to ensure that Black men are denied access to patriarchal power. He casts the prison as serving the purpose of ensuring male sexual repression, a repression that ultimately results in the “manufacturing of the Black male body as a purely sexual object/ product within the walls of the prison.” 31 Curry also situates Black male subjection to police violence as similar to lynching in that it is also predicated on a myth, the myth of the Black male criminal. 32 If, Curry argues, lynching, mass incarceration, and police violence are responses to the intersections of maleness and Blackness, then it is a mistake to think of such practices as racist. Racism, he writes, is an experience that is “shared not only by [Black men’s] female counterparts but also by various ethnic and religious groups that have become racialized.” 33 Tactics employed against Black men as a result of both their gender and race are more appropriately described as misandrist, according to Curry. 34 Returning to state violence in particular, his ability to cast lynching, mass incarceration, and subjection to police violence as misandrist rather than racist requires that he situate subjection to the aforementioned experiences as exclusive to Black boys and men. To do so, Black girls and women are presented as being less vulnerable to violence than Black boys and men since they are not subjected to the same violent practices to which Black boys and men are subjected. While granting that racialized women are repressed and discriminated against in patriarchal societies, racialized Black men, Curry concludes, are “marked for extermination.” 35 Curry not only casts Black boys and men as worse off than Black girls and women, he also denies the possibility that Black girls and women might share in many of the experiences of Black boys and men. This sentiment is expressed by other scholars, including George Yancy. 36 In the introduction to Our Black Sons Matter: Mothers Talk about Fears, Sorrows, and Hopes, Yancy makes the following proclamation: Returning to pregnancy as one of the most profound and mutually rich forms of relationality, I argue that the knowledge that mothers possess when they learn that they will give birth to Black sons carries an additional weight. Given the “threat” to white America that Black sons pose, imagine what it means for a mother to rub her abdomen knowing that she will give birth to a Black boy, a Black son. Perhaps there is a profound moment of hoping that it is a girl. 37

Like Curry, Yancy ignores the possibility that Black girls and women might have experiences with state violence that are identical or similar to those of

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Black men. In hypothesizing that Black mothers would prefer to have a daughter rather than a son, Yancy implies that Black mothers have good reason to worry more about their sons than their daughters, who may not suffer the consequences of the presumed threat Black boys and men pose to the safety of others, and as a result will fare better in navigating the racial stratification of the United States. I take Curry and Yancy’s perspectives to be consistent with the tendency to think of Black women as the collateral damage of state violence. Within the philosophical tradition, “collateral damage” is a term that is tied only to war theory. The term refers specifically to unintended harms caused to objects and persons during a war. Thus a crucial component of things and people identified as collateral damage is that they were not the targets of the harms they suffered. In her essay “The Social Impact of Mass Incarceration on Women,” Beth Richie gives explicit attention to the number of ways that Black women are indirectly impacted by mass incarceration. She explains that the magnitude of the imprisonment of Black men has made things “increasingly difficult for the women ‘at home.’” 38 She goes on to explain that the societal tendency to employ the legal and criminal justice systems to resolve health, economic, and social problems has led to the overburdening of Black women, who overwhelmingly serve as caretakers in Black families. This overburdening, Richie explains, is directly tied to the constant threat of the possible arrest and detention of a family member, chaotic trials, long prison sentences, expensive visits and phone calls from correctional facilities, confusing parole hearings, probation requirements that may involve making a change in household arrangements if more than one family member has a felony conviction, and the ever-present risk of arrest. 39

The high rates at which Black men are imprisoned, and at other times subjected to police violence, because of the development of what she describes as the “build of the United States ‘prison-nation’” have meant that Black women have been left to balance the responsibilities of protecting their children from the dangers of society, sheltering their children from discriminatory and aggressive policing practices, as well as keeping themselves and their children outside of the United States child protective apparatuses. 40 While the points offered by Richie are in reference to mass incarceration, Black women have offered similar accounts with regard to Black male subjection to police violence. In the essays collected in Our Black Sons Matter, thirty mothers of Black sons in the United States offer insights about how their lives have been and continue to be shaped by their keen awareness that Black boys and men are continually associated with criminality and, as a result, are at risk of being

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subjected to state-sanctioned violence, whether at the hands of the police or those of a white subject whose irrational fears will be accepted as a justifiable basis for making a claim of self-defense. In her essay “Anger,” Jacki Lynn Baynks writes about the discrepancy between her understanding and her doctor’s understanding of why she has high blood pressure. The doctor, she explains, believes her elevated pressure is due to her diet. But Baynks maintains that the actual cause of her condition is anger, in particular her inability to speak freely and openly “about Black sons being targets.” 41 Newtona Johnson describes herself and other mothers of Black sons as constantly experiencing “maternal trepidation.” She uses the term to describe the “fibers of fear, frustration, pain, and guilt” that mothers of Black sons experience. This trepidation is what she says rendered her highly sympathetic to Michelle Maltais’s simultaneous feeling of both joy and fear about the fact that her baby boy would eventually become a “Black man” whose safety could never be ensured. 42 Carol Henderson echoes a division between Black men and women’s experiences with state violence in “Sacrificial Lambs.” There she writes, “The primal recognition of Black male pain and the pain of the women who love our Black men as husbands and brothers—and birth them as sons—is the haunting echo we hear in our cultural memory of African American people.” 43 As Rahiel Tesfarmariam states, being Black women means having to “bury bullet-filled sons [and] accept collect calls from imprisoned lovers.” 44 The fact that Black women have been rendered collateral damage speaks volumes about the value, or what might be better described as the devaluation, of Black women’s lives. Accordingly, Black women’s reduction to the status of collateral damage is reflective of their standing in the United States. If we compare the collateral damage of the war on terror, the loss of “innocents” in the Middle East and elsewhere, to the collateral damage to the lives and well-being of women and children as a result of “the war on crime,” we will find some support for Curry’s and Yancy’s characterization of the differences between Black men and Black women’s social/political standing in the United States. We see why they might identify Black women and girls as indirect rather than direct targets of state violence. However, the narrative of Black women as collateral damage only partially captures Black women’s experiences with state violence. INTERSECTIONALITY AND THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF KORRYN GAINES The narrative of Black men as the direct targets of state violence and Black women as collateral damage, I maintain, is true, but partial. One way to

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understand this point is through a consideration of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion of “intersectionality.” Building from the work of other Black feminist scholars like Anna Julia Cooper (1989), 45 Frances Beale (1969), 46 Deborah King (1988), 47 and Fannie Barrier Williams (2002), 48 Crenshaw introduced the notion of intersectionality in her 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Gender: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” 49 Considering the ways Black women’s lives are shaped by their often simultaneous subjection to racial and gender oppression, Crenshaw advanced the claim “that many of the experiences Black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into women’s lives in ways that cannot be wholly captured by looking at race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately.” 50 Here Crenshaw is referring to the tendency to employ a single-axis framework in analyzing race and gender oppression. Under the single-axis framework, the tendency has been to look at a single issue as the basis for oppression or discrimination. This single issue has often been either race or gender. The ability to focus on a single category of difference requires that all other issues be seen as irrelevant to oppression or discrimination. What results is a focus on the experiences of individuals who are presumed to be privileged in all ways except one. To focus on gender exclusively has often meant focusing on heterosexual, middle-class, white women. In so doing, the idea has been that their oppression is based solely on their gender. In the case of race, this has been achieved by focusing on the experiences of Black men, in general, and heterosexual, Black, middle-class men in particular. Seen as privileged by the other social constructions that constitute their lives, race is viewed as the single factor responsible for their oppression. In this way, the focus is on “pure” rather than “hybrid” forms of oppression, with the assumption that if pure forms of oppression are addressed, those with hybrid forms will also benefit. But it is this latter point that has continued to prove problematic for those who experience hybrid forms of oppression. Black women are not merely oppressed by their race or by their gender but by the intersection of their experience of raced and gendered oppressions. Thus, as Crenshaw explains, Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways. . . . Black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men. Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double-discrimination—the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And

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On the basis of Crenshaw’s assertion, Black women often have experiences that are similar, and I would argue at times identical, to that of Black men. Accordingly, the failure to acknowledge Black women’s subjection to state violence is at best odd and at worst disastrous. It is the result, I argue, of an overemphasis on the differences between the experiences of Black men and women with inadequate attention paid to the similarities between their experiences. On August 1, 2016, police arrived at the door of Korryn Gaines, a twentythree-year-old Black woman. They came to serve Gaines with a bench warrant for her failure to appear in court. Her request to appear in court was the result of an earlier traffic stop. She had been pulled over by a Baltimore County police officer because she was driving a car that was not legally registered. When officers arrived at her home to serve her on August 1, Gaines did not answer the door when they knocked. The officers retrieved a key to the apartment from the rental office and, upon opening the door, found that it was chained closed. In response, an officer kicked down the front door. Upon entering the home, Gaines was seen in her apartment with her fiancée, Kareem Courtney, her five-year-old son, and their one-year-old daughter. Once inside the apartment, the officer saw that Gaines was pointing a gun in his direction. She went on to threaten to kill the officer if he did not leave her home. Courtney exited the apartment with their daughter through a window. Police established a barrier around Gaines’s apartment building and evacuated the area. After a six-hour standoff, Gaines was shot by Baltimore County officer Royce Ruby Jr. Ruby maintained that he shot Gaines because she raised her gun, pointing it at his fellow officers. Once in the apartment, Ruby fired at Gaines three more times, claiming that Gaines had once again raised her shotgun and that he feared for both his life and the life of Gaines’s fiveyear-old son, Kodi, who had been in the apartment through the entirety of the six-hour standoff. 52 In the wake of her death, there was speculation that Gaines had both responded strongly to the officer in March 2016 and had refused to surrender to police in August 2016 because of mental health issues. Gaines did in fact have mental health issues. Her mother identified Gaines as having been diagnosed with both depression and anxiety. Nonetheless, to attribute her response to police to her mental illness is to close off the possibility of considering that her response to encounters with police in both March and August of 2016 were rational responses. The difficulty with considering this possibility lies not in the fact that she suffered from two forms of mental illness, but rather that her response does not align with the narrative of Black women as the indirect targets of state violence. The logic of Black women as

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collateral damage suggests that Black men, and not Black women, are the direct targets of state violence. Thus, if Gaines had been a Black man and not a Black woman, her actions would have been seen as rational on the grounds that many police stops of Black men end in death. But Gaines was not a Black man; she was a Black woman. Accordingly, it is difficult to consider the possibility that she was justifiably afraid for her life when she was pulled over by a police officer in March. She does not fit the criteria of the individuals that society, including members of Black communities, deems justifiably fearful of police. The result, I maintain, is that her death has been cast as coincidental, individual, an exception to the rule, with the rule being that Black men and boys are killed by the police. This line of reasoning is shortsighted, faulty, and functions to marginalize Black women’s experiences in movements such as Black Lives Matter. Black girls and women are, and have historically been, subjected to many of the same forms of state violence as Black men and boys. MOVING BLACK WOMEN FROM THE MARGIN TO THE CENTER IN ANALYSES OF STATE VIOLENCE While discussions of U.S. mass incarceration have overwhelmingly focused on the incarceration of Black boys and men, Black women are also directly impacted by mass incarceration. The launching of the war on drugs resulted in major increases in rates of women’s imprisonment. From 1980 to 2004, women’s imprisonment rates increased by 386 percent, nearly double that of men’s imprisonment rates. This increase had particular impacts on Black women, whose imprisonment rates increased by 800 percent, compared to non-Black women’s rate increasing by 400 percent. While always overrepresented in prisons, during this period Black women became an overwhelming majority of the female prison population. What emerged was a distinction between “good girls” and “real criminals.” 53 Juxtaposed with “good girls,” who were white women and whose victimization constituted their criminality, Black women were cast as “real criminals” whose incarceration was “an inevitable consequence of their own behavior and choices rather than as a function of poverty and broader changes in criminal justice policy.” 54 Similar to Black men, I maintain, Black women are often punished on account of their identity. More specifically, Black women are criminalized for their failure to meet hegemonic notions of womanhood and motherhood. A basis for understanding this claim is presented by Ellen Feder in her essay “The Dangerous Individual(’s) Mother.” 55 Feder’s essay offers an analysis of the attempted launching of the Violence Initiative. The initiative, led by Frederick Goodwin, aimed to medicate 100,000 inner-city children with supposed biomedical or genetic defects that

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could be linked to violence in adulthood. 56 The initiative was predicated on a study of rhesus monkeys conducted by Stephen Suomi. In the study, Suomi found that the violence and personality traits of offspring were dependent on the type of mothering they encountered in early life. Thus, the root of propensity for violence and aggression was identified as poor mothering. 57 Hence, the study was as much about dangerous Black men as about the women who produce them, what Feder calls “The Dangerous Individual(’s) Mother.” As the mothers of the dangerous Black man, Black women are cast as threats to society. Black women come to occupy the status of “monsters” that are thought of as being at the root of crime. Cast under the controlling images of “welfare queens,” “Black matriarchs,” and “jezebels,” stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality and approaches to mothering situate them as threats to the populace. 58 Such a threat, I argue, is responded to in ways that bear striking resemblance to the assumed threat posed by Black men. This includes subjection not only to mass incarceration but also to police violence. Sandra Bland was pulled over by Waller County State Trooper Brian Encinia. Encinia told Bland that he had pulled her over because she had failed to use her turn signal before changing lanes. Bland explained that she had changed lanes to move out of the way of the state trooper’s vehicle. Encinia instructed Bland to put out her cigarette, although smoking a cigarette is legal. When Bland failed to put out her cigarette, Encinia demanded that she exit her car. She refused, stating that she had the right to remain in her car unless he was placing her under arrest. Encinia threated to Taser her, and Bland began to exit her car. Upon opening her door, Encinia reached into her car, pulled her out of the car, and then told her she was under arrest. 59 Though out of view of the dash cam in Encinia’s police car, Bland can be heard saying, “You’re a real man now. You just slammed me, knocked my head in the ground.” 60 On July 13, 2015, three days after her arrest, Waller County Jail officials claim that they found Bland dead in her cell. Officials maintained that she killed herself with a noose that she formed from a plastic bag. On October 26, 2015, sixteen-year-old Shakara was instructed by her teacher to put her phone away. When she failed to move at the speed expected by the teacher, she was told to go to the principal’s office. Believing she had not done something serious enough to warrant being sent to the principal’s office, Shakara apologized for her actions but did not leave the classroom. In turn, the teacher called an administrator, who called Ben Fields, an armed officer from the Richard County Sheriff’s Department. 61 A video recording shows that Shakara was sitting calmly when Officer Fields arrived and was instructed by Fields to go to the office. When she did not move, he grabbed her by her neck in an attempt to pull her from her desk. When this failed, he flipped the desk that Shakara was still lodged in. Afterward, Shakara and her nineteen-year-old classmate, Niya Kenny, were both

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charged with disturbing the peace. 62 As is often the case when Black men are subjected to police violence, neither Casebolt nor Fields, both of whom were white, were held legally or criminally responsible for their actions inflicting violence on Black women. It is within the context of Black women’s systematic subordination that I argue that the events surrounding the arrest of Chikesia Clemons should also be considered. Clemons was pinned to the ground by three officers at a Waffle House in Saraland, Alabama, in April 2018. The officers were called to the Waffle House when Clemons refused to pay fifty cents for plastic utensils and asked for the number of the Waffle House corporate office. Witnesses maintain that Clemons was using profanity and threatened to inflict harm on at least one of the employees at the Waffle House. When police arrived, they requested that Clemons exit the restaurant. When she did not follow their orders, she was pinned to the ground by all three male officers. Each of the recounted experiences highlights the ways the intersections of Black women’s race and gender function to exclude Black women from the feminine protections often allotted to white women. The intersections of Black women’s race and gender place Black women at the margins of notions of female fragility and render them incapable of being seen as anything other than immense threats to the American populace. Accordingly, I maintain, in encounters with the police state, Black women are often conceived of as Black subjects, more generally, rather than as Black women, the result being that Black women are often subject to many of the same experiences as Black men. WHEN BLACK WOMEN ENTER, THE RACE ENTERS Many have argued, and will likely continue to argue, that Black men have emerged as the focus of analyses of mass incarceration and police violence because the rates at which Black men are impacted far outweigh those of Black women. In a recent conversation, another philosopher suggested that Black women’s experiences would be addressed once Black men’s experiences were addressed. Priority, he asserted, had to be given based on quantity. Numbers, I maintain, are important. But their importance need not be considered in isolation from quality. My argument concerns the need to critically interrogate what has emerged as a tendency to use quantity to detract from quality. The fact that fewer Black women are impacted than Black men, I purport, ought not to be used as a basis for largely ignoring Black women’s experiences with state violence. Furthermore, even if one were to prioritize quantity, important questions remain about when Black women’s experiences with state violence, given that they are minority experiences when compared to Black men, will be addressed.

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I speculate that at the heart of the matter of state violence is the worry that attention to the question of gender will detract from the issues of race and racism, that attention to #sayhername will mean less attention will be allotted to the male victims of mass incarceration and state violence. This is a sentiment, though, that is grounded in patriarchal notions of individualism. Whereas racial movements led by Black men have often viewed gender as distracting, Black women in general and Black feminists in particular have been adamant that attention to gender need not result in a failure to attend to race. As early as 1892 Anna Julia Cooper declared that “only the black woman can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’” 63 It is in giving attention to the intersections of race and gender that space is made to think about racial progress. To attend to the experiences of Black women is to also attend to Black men and children. Juxtaposed to the assumption of the radically individual male, Black women view themselves and are often seen as intrinsically linked to Black men and children. Thus, to attend to the experiences of Black women is to attend to the Black race. It is Black women who have been at the forefront of not only #sayhername but also the mostly malefocused Black Lives Matter movement, even at the same time that Black men have been slow to align with Black feminist attempts to expand the movement to include women of color. Attention to the intersections of race and gender does not detract from racial justice; it pushes it forward in ways that are not possible without attention to intersectionality. NOTES 1. Bennett, “Tamir Rice and the Color of Fear.” 2. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. 3. Ibid., 91. 4. Ibid., 93. 5. O’Brien, “Obama: ‘Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Me 35 Years Ago.’” 6. Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes. 7. Ibid., 21. 8. Ibid., 4. 9. Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism,” 846. 10. Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, 93–96. 11. Curry, Man-Not. 12. Ibid., 7. The notion of negrophobia is explored in direct relation to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in Hill, “Negrophobia.” 13. Charles Mills advances a notion that is similar to the subhuman in his The Racial Contract. There he employs the language of “subperson” to refer to racialized subjects. He defines subpersons as “humanoid entities who, because of racial phenotype/genealogy/culture, are not fully human and therefore have a different and inferior schedule of rights and liberties applying to them” than white subjects (56). 14. Curry, Man-Not, 103. 15. Ibid., 131.

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16. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89. 17. Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 847–48. Yancy maintains that “despite what I think about myself, how I am for-myself, her perspective, her third-person account, seeps into my consciousness. I catch a glimpse of myself through her eyes and just for that moment I experience some form of double consciousness, but what I see does not shatter my identity or unglue my sense of moral decency. Despite how my harmless actions might be constructed within her white racialized framework of seeing the world, I remain capable of resisting the white gaze’s entry into my own self-vision” (Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 22). See also Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism.” 18. Sanburn, “All the Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown.” 19. See Curry, Man-Not, 36: “Black men live in a world where any accusation against them is thought to be evidence of their guilt.” 20. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 93. 21. Yancy, “Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze.’” 22. Stevenson, “Presumption of Guilt,” 3. 23. See Aldama, “Violence, Bodies, and the Color of Fear,” for a fuller analysis of how the police use Black actions such as reaching into their pockets or running as a justifiable basis for Black deaths. 24. Dotson, “Theorizing Jane Crow,” 425. 25. Cited in Zack, White Privilege and Black Rights, 49. In “Tamir Rice and the Color of Fear,” Bennett points to the fact that a reasonable belief can be mistaken, and the error in judgment does not qualify as a means of rejecting the reasonability of the author’s actions. 26. Examples of Black subjects having the cops called on them for performing actions that most people do on a daily basis are countless. On July 4, 2018, Adam Bloom called the police on a Black woman because he believed she was not allowed in a community pool. This year, a philosophy Ph.D. candidate at Yale called the police on a Black woman who was napping in a community room at her apartment complex. She called the police with the accusation that the student garnered unauthorized access to the common area. A woman who has been deemed “Permit Patty” called the police on an eight-year-old Black girl who was selling water. She was accused of selling water without a permit, even though children often set up stands in communities and sell drinks without a permit. A Black firefighter had police called on him while he was conducting safety inspections. Though he was in uniform and had a fire engine, it was not believed that he was in fact a firefighter. In April 2018, two Black men had the police called on them for sitting in a Starbucks. They were accused of trespassing when, after a staff member requested that they purchase something, they told that staff member that they would do so when the third member of their party arrived. Five Black women had the police called on them when they were accused by white golfers of golfing too slowly. Also see Harris, “Stories, the Statistics, and the Law.” 27. The notion of the Black male as an endangered species was originated by Walter Leavy in an August 1983 issue of Ebony magazine. The idea is also taken up by Jewelle Taylor Gibbs in Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species and Michael Robinson in Educating the Endangered Species: The Black Male. As recently as 2009 the term has been taken up in essays such as Wedding and Parks, “African American Males: An Endangered Species in the 21st Century?” 28. Dotson, “Theorizing Jane Crow,” 425. 29. Ibid., 428. 30. Curry, Man-Not, 170–73. 31. Ibid., 85. 32. Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters, Body Count, advanced the idea that Black urban communities are “criminogenic communities.” They defined criminogenic communities as “places where the social forces that create predatory criminals are far more numerous than the social forces that create decent, law-abiding citizens.” They also warned of a coming wave of crime that would be greatest in Black inner-city neighborhoods but would also develop in other areas and ultimately spill into “upscale center districts, innering suburbs, and even the rural heartland” (quoted in Curry, Man-Not, 113). They argued it was the result of the cultural and moral failures of poor urban communities. Crime on this reading was the result of moral poverty, or

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“the poverty of being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach them right from wrong. It is the poverty of being without parents and other authorities who habituate you to feel joy at others’ joy, pain at others pain, happiness when you do right, remorse when you do wrong” (quoted in Curry, Man-Not, 113). 33. Curry, Man-Not, 131. 34. One educational theorist describes misandry as “an exaggerated pathological aversion toward Black males that is created and reinforced in societal, institutional, and individual ideologies, practices, and behaviors including scholarly ontologies (or understandings of how things exist), axiologies (or values such as ethics, aesthetics, religion, and spirituality), and epistemologies (or ways of knowing)” (Smith, “Toward an Understanding of Misandric Microaggressions,” 267). 35. Curry, Man-Not, 174. 36. Yancy, “Introduction.” 37. Yancy, “Introduction,” 8. Yancy ends the statement by saying, “which is not to say that Black girls/women are not burdened by suffering and pain, especially on multiples axes,” but his statement appears rather to suggest that Black girls/women are not burdened—or are not as burdened as Black boys/men. 38. Richie, “Social Impact of Mass Incarceration on Women,” 146. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Baynks, “Anger,” 171. 42. Johnson, “War Within,” 93. 43. Henderson, “Sacrificial Lambs,” 85. 44. Tesfarmariam, “Importance of God in Our Lives as Black Women.” 45. Cooper, Voice from the South. 46. Beale, “Double Jeopardy.” 47. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness.” 48. Williams, New Woman of Color. 49. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” 50. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1244. 51. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 149. 52. During the encounter, Kodi was shot twice by the Baltimore County police. One of the bullets struck him in the face and the other bullet struck him in the elbow. One of the bullets passed through Gaines and entered Kodi. 53. McCorkel, Breaking Women, 83. 54. Ibid., 79. 55. Feder, “Dangerous Individual(’s) Mother.” 56. Breggin and Breggin, “Biomedical Programme for Urban Violence Control.” 57. Feder, “Dangerous Individual(’s) Mother,” 73. 58. See Collins, “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images.” 59. Bland was not told why she was being arrested. 60. Ford, “New Video Shows Sandra Bland’s Arrest.” 61. Fields was functioning as a “school resource officer” at Shakara’s high school, Spring Valley High School. 62. Kenny was charged with disturbing the peace because she recorded the incident. 63. Cooper, Voice from the South, 32.

WORKS CITED Aldama, Arturo. “Violence, Bodies, and the Color of Fear.” In Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State, edited by Arturo Aldama, 1–18. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baynks, Jacki Lynn. “Anger.” In Our Black Sons Matter: Mothers Talk about Fears, Sorrows, and Hopes, edited by George Yancy, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, and Susan Hadley, 171–74. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

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Beale, Frances. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 146–56. New York: New Press, 1995. Bennett, Brit. “Tamir Rice and the Color of Fear.” New York Times, December 31, 2015. https:/ /www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/magazine/tamir-rice-and-the-color-of-fear.html. Bennett, William, John J. DiIulio Jr., and John P. Walters. Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win America’s War against Crime and Drugs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Breggin, Peter R., and Ginger Ross Breggin. “A Biomedical Programme for Urban Violence Control in the US: The Dangers of Psychiatric Social Control.” Changes: An International Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy 11, no. 1 (March 1993): 59–71. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Mammies, Matriarches, and Other Controlling Images.” In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed., 69–96. New York: Routledge, 2000. Cooper, Anna Julia. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including “A Voice from the South” and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Blah. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, no. 2 (1989): 139–67. ———. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–99. Curry, Tommy. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017. Dotson, Kristie. “Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Knowability.” Social Epistemology 31, no. 5 (2017): 417–30. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Feder, Ellen. “The Dangerous Individual(’s) Mother: Biopower, Family, and the Reproduction of Race.” Hypatia 22, no. 2 (2009): 60–78. Ford, Dana. “New Video Shows Sandra Bland’s Arrest.” CNN, July 21, 2015. https:// www.cnn.com/2015/07/21/us/texas-sandra-bland-arrest/index.html. Gibbs, Jewelle Taylor, ed. Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species. Westport, CT: Auburn House, 1988. Harris, D. “Stories, the Statistics, and the Law: Why ‘Driving While Black’ Matters.” Minnesota Law Review 8, no. 2 (1999): 265–326. Henderson, Carol. “Sacrificial Lambs.” In Our Black Sons Matter: Mothers Talk about Fears, Sorrows, and Hopes, edited by George Yancy, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, and Susan Hadley, 83–86. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Hill, Brandon. “Negrophobia: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and America’s Fear of Blackness.” Time, August 29, 2014. http://time.com/3207307/negrophobia-michael-brown-eric-garnerand-americas-fear-of-black-people/. Johnson, Newtona. “The War Within: Respect and the Predicament of Mothering Black Sons.” In Our Black Sons Matter: Mothers Talk about Fears, Sorrows, and Hopes, edited by George Yancy, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, and Susan Hadley, 93–98. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. King, Deborah. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 88–111. McCorkel, Jill. Breaking Women: Race, Gender, and the New Politics of Imprisonment. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. O’Brien, Michael. “Obama: ‘Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Me 35 Years Ago.’” NBC News, July 19, 2013. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/obama-trayvon-martin-could-have-been-me-35-years-ago-flna6C10689411. Richie, Beth. “The Social Impact of Mass Incarceration on Women.” In Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, edited by Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, 136–49. New York: New Press, 2002.

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Robinson, Michael. Educating the Endangered Species: The Black Male. N.p.: Strategic Achievement, 2007. Sanburn, Josh. “All the Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown.” Time, November 25, 2014. http://time.com/3605346/darren-wilson-michael-brown-demon/. Smith, William A. “Toward an Understanding of Misandric Microaggressions and Racial Battle Fatigue among African Americans in Historically White Institutions.” In The State of the African American Male, edited by E. M. Zamani-Gallaher and V. C. Polite, 265–77. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010. Stevenson, Bryan. “A Presumption of Guilt: The Legacy of America’s History of Racial Injustice.” In Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment, edited by Angela Davis, 3–30. New York: Pantheon Books, 2017. Tesfarmariam, Rahiel. “The Importance of God in Our Lives as Black Women.” Washington Post, July 13, 2012. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/the-importanceof-god-in-our-lives-as-black-women/2012/07/13/gJQAwPeOiW_blog.html?utm_term=.ca 705d8f1f4a. Wedding, Danny, and Carlton W. Parks Jr. “African American Males: An Endangered Species in the 21st Century?” PsycCRITIQUES 4, no. 8 (2009). Williams, Fannie Barrier. The New Woman of Color: The Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893–1918. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. ———. “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism: A Philosophical Analysis.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, no. 8 (2008): 843–76. ———. “Introduction.” In Our Black Sons Matter: Mothers Talk about Fears, Sorrows, and Hopes, edited by George Yancy, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, and Susan Hadley, 1–12. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Zack, Naomi. White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Chapter Four

The Veil, Race, and Appearance A Political Phenomenology Hourya Bentouhami

“The world is made of the very stuff of the body,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty tells us. 1 This means that the world is what we see, and that we can only access things by what we perceive through our senses, what we organize through our bodies. Political phenomenology refers to the way our most intimate geography—the circle of familiarity with our body—is invested with policies and government initiatives. Those policies decide which people can move about or not, what we are allowed to see or not, who can work or not, and under what conditions of appearance. This intimate geography thus reveals what it is to have a hindered, limited body and, conversely, a body that has the freedom to move and feel that it exists within a shared world. The main idea underlying the political phenomenology of racism is that all visible perceptions are social and political constructions. This article explores how the veiled woman has become a monstrous category of the visible that offends sensibilities and causes revulsion in eyes and stomachs: when seeing these veiled women, people feel struck, touched in their very existence, whether in a classroom, a train, a restaurant, a subway, on a school trip, or on a beach. In the secular French Republic, which continuously redefines its principle of laïcité according to a racial order of appearances, it is not so much the manifestation of religious objects that is considered repugnant as it is Islam itself. Here, the veil acts as a phobogenic object that obstructs the ordinary field of the nation’s vision. Phenomenology studies appearances and what it is in these appearances that constitutes an event for the body, in so far as one’s body is of the world and not merely in the world. Each person is a being that escapes all efforts to relegate him or her to categories. Because of this excess of meaning, ideally a person cannot be 55

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reduced to the sum of her organic components. Yet with racism, it is precisely these components that operate as somatic markers of one’s unworthiness: skin, hair, nose, mouth, genitals. One of the ways racism functions is by producing metonymic beings who are reduced to their parts. In this case, women wearing head scarves are reduced to “moving veils,” according to the term of the head-scarf-wearing feminist Ndella Paye of Mamans Toutes Égales. 2 This position may seem naive, but in reality it is invested with hostility 3 and leads to the question “What assures us that these women are indeed human beings, and more specifically that they are women?” This phenomenology of gendered racialization shifts Descartes’s classic question of perception when he asked, “What do I see from the window beyond hats and cloaks that might cover artificial machines, whose motions might be determined by springs?” 4 For him, the only way we know that they are real human beings is that we judge them to be so; that is, in order to perceive what the eyes alone cannot see, everything comes down to our mind’s faculty of judgment. The human being perceived from a walking hat is a deduction by the mind. What about the veil? It would seem that perceiving the veil defies all intellectual rationality and operates by subtraction, by embodying humanity in a very particular way depending on a certain sexual and racial order, namely, that of femininity. Thus the veil is that which denies femininity and hence humanity, as that femininity can only be incarnated when a person has the ability to know how to appear in a gendered way. Femininity must be hypervisible, constantly presented to a grasping gaze: submission to the scopic drive, part of what one might call a certain phenomenology of the erotic encounter. Therefore, the veiled woman, according to her detractors, 5 withdraws from the visible order of the arrangement of the sexes and from a performativity of the feminine. A disorder of the visible then arises caused by the veil, which supposedly reveals an “abnormal” interiority: the refusal of seduction, that is, the refusal in a heteronormative society to correspond to what is expected of a woman, namely, that which in sexual agency suffices to make one believe that the sexual encounter is a game and not predation. This nondesire postulated by the hijab is considered an aberration of reason and an attack on the regulated Western eroticism of heterosexual relationships. Today, wearing a veil is considered at best a form of bad taste in clothing and at worst insanity or a stain on a society marked by what some have called the nouvelle laïcité, 6 that is to say, a secularism that seeks to establish an order of appearances even in the public sphere, even though laïcité 7 is not intended to apply there. In this essay, I would like to precisely explore how this new laïcité is defined in terms of a racial order of appearances. This is something specific to France, compared to the secularism of the Englishspeaking world, which is more a theory of dispositions. Proof can be found in the way France insists on ordering Muslims to be discreet and insists on the

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refusal of what France considers to be conspicuous religious symbols or “ostentatious signs.” This paper will examine how the foreclosure of the head scarf is expressed in the field of the visible. The bodies of veiled women are literally hunted, pursued bodies that obstruct the field of the visible. This field is never politically or sexually neutral: these veiled bodies are considered impediments to pleasure, literally, as they prevent others from eating, swimming, or playing calmly (such as for children at day care). What is at stake, once again, is the ethnicizing construction of civility, of a national character in the imaginary of perception, of what may constitute the horizon of the visible. What does it mean to perceive a face or a veiled woman’s body? In what way does the hijab function as a marker of social repudiation within a society that has established laïcité as its way of regimenting the social order of appearances? Who can appear? Under what conditions and in what ways? These questions are largely tributary of colonial blindness and its reactivation in the form of sexual Orientalism, in Todd Shepard’s terms. 8 Finally, in the light of the metamorphosis of the coloniality of power, I would like to focus on the recent disciplinarization of veiled bodies in the sphere of care work, in order to analyze how the head scarf is been progressively encoded as a professional flaw after having long been considered in this labor sphere as the mark of a racialized competence. LAÏCITÉ AND THE NATIONALIZATION OF APPEARANCES In the framework of a new theory of laïcité, wearing the veil is interpreted as defiance, as the inability to submit to the requirements of homo duplex: 9 the separation between private and public life and their respective conditions of appearance. As a result, it seems that there has been a nationalization of appearances in France, in the sense that the visible is governed by norms and imperatives as part of an ostentatious adhesion to a national identity, which was previously ethnicized (i.e., atheist and at the same time, paradoxically, Christian, which has been reformulated as France’s de facto common heritage). It seems to me that in France, the concept of laïcité is based on a theory of appearances: Why does laïcité place so much emphasis on one’s visible presentation, on physical image? How is it that a person’s appearance has become evidence of his or her attitude, a disposition, that is supposed to confirm or deny their attachment to, or even an aptitude for, laïcité? In the English-speaking world, secularism does not place so much emphasis on the visibility of religious beliefs, which is why the head scarf is not an object of obsession with the same intensity and the veil is not viewed as an obstruction of the visible. The liberal vision of Anglo-Saxon secularism refuses the relegation of religion to the privative sector and poses few limitations to the

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manifestations of religious beliefs in both private and public sectors. Thus, in England or Scotland, there is an established religion keeping links with the state. Similarly, in the United States, it is not uncommon to see the walls of legal courts ornamented with the sentence “In God we trust.” Since religion is not dedicated to the private and invisible realm, and in spite of the growing context of institutional Islamophobia, 10 it is possible to see veiled women mayors, nurses, and doctors in public institutions, something unthinkable in France. In those countries, what is valued in agents’ attitudes is their making decisions that are neutral, in the sense of impartial: denominational or ethnic neutrality is therefore not demanded prior to a person’s action. Clothing alone, moreover, is not enough to define an aptitude, whether the aptitude to be a citizen, a worker, a volunteer, or anything else. Conversely, in French laïcité, neutrality is a requisite of universal republicanism, and all civil agents must erase any visible signs of personal religious beliefs in order to bring about equality, independent of religious or ethnic identity. However, this way of viewing the universal based on representations of the political dignity of the citizen (and even more so of the civil servant) in a context that is largely gendered, sex differentiated, classist, and racialized has given rise to a specific kind of strategy of the visible, which is typical of a racializing phenomenological policy. It should be noted that this hypothesis of a policy of racial regulation of the visible is based on the idea that there is something in Islam that obstructs the gaze, that produces an excess of visibility, by reminding people that Islam exists here in the national territory as a component of French identity. This visibility seems to require regulation in terms of degree or intensity. Such regulation ranges from discretion to ostentation and corresponds to several moral degrees of adhering to or disavowing French republican values, ranging from secret, quiet faith to a proselytizing faith that encourages conversion. The preponderant idea is that at the ordinary sight of a veil, some people feel threatened by this damn thing that “assaults” them. This is why Electricité De France, for example, suggests that its veiled employees adopt a “small colored scarf” rather than a “big gray scarf.” The employee guide at La Poste differentiates between jobs in contact with customers, which assumes the agent must be neutral, to those in the back office, where workers are free to wear visible religious symbols. To understand this desire to govern the visibility of Islam, we must start from the following question: What does it mean to see a veil for those who do not know anything about the field of meanings and of belonging of this piece of clothing, which tends to be overinvested religiously? The related emotions are often fear, disgust, incomprehension, and moral disapproval, while other physiological symptoms affecting organic capacities are the inability to breathe 11 and problems with appetite. 12 Some teachers have even said that they felt assaulted by the sight of a hijab during class. In addition, there is the idea of Islam as a foreign culture, as an immigrant religion (and

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not simply a religion of immigrants), and that the veil is therefore an allogeneic, non-national marker to be excluded from public visibility and as impossible for representing the values of France. 13 The reason given is that the head scarf is a stigma by which one denounces oneself as submissive, backward, uneducated, unable to think, and in the care of others (as I shall show in the third part). In this perspective, the veil functions as proof for the assimilationists’ prosecution, in the sense that what constitutes one’s identity is precisely what will be considered as proof against the person: proof of one’s helplessness, or submission to fathers, brothers, and the like. Sara Ahmed says that whiteness is “understood primarily as ‘the behind,’” insofar as we do not notice what is not in our field of perception and it can “go unnoticed.” 14 The fact of being an “avowed” Muslim, that is to say veiled, is accompanied by the precedence of the national narrative that has always defined us as incapable beings, as passive victims it would be better to save, or at worst to sanction, or even more strangely who must be saved by sanctioning, as shown by the expulsion of veiled girls from schools. What does it mean to wear the head scarf? It means that people see you coming, they are expecting you, and you literally end up expecting yourself: the image people have of the woman and the fantasies around the veil precede her and saturate the field of her perception to the point that she is no longer able to come into the world in a bizarre or odd form that does not meet social expectations. There is, therefore, something of an ordeal in constantly being looked at and examined, characteristic of what Elsa Dorlin calls the phenomenology of prey: feeling constantly hunted, the prey never stops looking back at those staring at it, to prevent being attacked. 15 In this sense, what is fully real is this attention given to what rejects me, denies me. This may happen in an everyday interaction, for ordinary violence is implicitly authorized by legislative, regulatory, and administrative procedures to such an extent that the attack can come from anywhere. This was what Fanon considered as the very constitution of a paranoid being, always on the alert, tense, and which produces “an exhaustion of attention” (Dorlin’s phrase). What laïcité provides as a political discourse is a script of feelings, that is to say, a language and a prescription of what one is supposed to feel at the sight of a head scarf. This nourishes, or at least legitimates in return, forms of ordinary violence against veiled women, such as the woman whose veil was pulled off by a laughing white woman at a busy shopping center. 16 But what is it specifically about the veiled woman that strikes the senses of the French nation and which provokes such disgust and such laughter? We owe to Joan Scott the idea that French-style laïcité 17 is based on a theory of appearances that primarily results from the imaginary of social signs and of eroticization linked to the difference between the sexes. These are the very essence of the French spirit to such a point that any person who refuses this game of seduction thereby shows hostility to everything that makes up

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Frenchness and its licentious side, ranging from aristocratic gallantry to the sexual revolution of May 1968. The veil would thus seem to deny the possibility of erotic encounter, of seduction and therefore equality. In itself, it is not only the marker of the inequality of the sexes but also of the inequality of sexual desire. In this view, wearing the veil means to refuse the game of cat and mouse, the fantasized hunt, to hole up in a space inaccessible to the erotic chase. To deliberately want to withdraw from this game therefore means refusing to belong to the egalitarian ideal of the French nation that is based on the difference of the sexes, which itself is paradoxically visible in this register of the hunt. Joan Scott has clearly shown how this mythification of seduction as a resolution of sexual difference and as a response to inequality dehistoricizes and justifies gender inequalities by resorting to a supposed “historical” tradition preceding democracy and going back to aristocratic times. Gender inequality is skillfully redefined as a special form of equality in which women would even be endowed with power superior to men in the pretended game of evasion. The seduction thus understood implies, however, a submission obtained by force or cunning, but it takes the name of “amorous consent” in the “aristocratic” republicanism that devotes the rules of civility to that of law (pleasure even, because there is no legal obligation, such as a marriage contract). As she says, this idea places the visible pleasures of sexuality, the pleasures of bodies offered, in a framework that is not one of the law but of ritual: it is thus part of the French “romantic lifestyle” and more generally of a French-style arrangement between the sexes that goes beyond the framework of a strictly sexual scenario. The most surprising thing is that this discourse of sexual liberation, of the heteronormativity of sexual behavior, and of the eroticization of domination colludes with the rhetoric borrowed from feminism—even though they are contradictory. This rhetoric inserts the wearing of the veil into the framework of its own history of emancipating women’s bodies through the liberation of clothing. This was the case, for example, of historian Christine Bard, the author of Une histoire politique du pantalon (A Political History of Trousers), who during her Senate hearing stated that women had demanded the right to wear trousers and to allow the body to breathe by uncovering some of its parts hitherto kept hidden. 18 The reference to liberation through clothing quickly introduces confusion and ends up making liberation necessarily one that requires unveiling. This vision of France carries with it the nostalgia of a largely imagined past about French gallantry, which is predominantly based on an ethnicization of erotic desire and an erotic reinvestment of the difference between the sexes. In this line of argument, there is something about a veiled woman that strikes at politeness and proper civility, and thus deserves to be hidden because of its abjection. Veiled women are then reproached with what they are

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accused of, in a timely contradiction: the head scarf is blamed for effacing women and making them invisible. Scott thus describes what “conservatives” considered implicitly as the sexual incompatibility of Islam with the French Republic. The veil is thus supposed to be the sign of this sexual incompatibility, and Islam in general should be uninhabitable sexually. To understand this association between the theory of appearances and the theory of an agreement on the difference between the sexes, we must understand how laïcité itself has become a discourse of equality of the sexes, which it was not historically, as Florence Rochefort has shown. 19 On the contrary, the distinction between the church and the state was made according to a gender pact that held women at a distance. Instead, we should see how the equality of women has been constructed fallaciously as a problem of visibility, rather than as a political problem involving social relations of the sexes in the economic, political, and domestic spheres. In this discourse of the sexual incompatibility of Islam and the Republic, we find the Orientalist, colonial, and virile fantasy of tearing away the veil reactivated. What does this fantasy correspond to? It no longer refers to a woman stricto sensu, but to the figure of the elusive Elsewhere that uncovers and reveals itself to us. It cannot be the object of a poetic enunciation or of an incarnate sensibility. Everything is done so that the very idea of flesh, a body that feels, studies, works, and dreams, is effaced. The Oriental woman is incapable of pleasure, and for that reason she is de facto excluded from all that is involved with the dignified pursuit of enjoyment: the very idea of pleasure is denied to her, such as shopping downtown with the family, enjoying a gourmet meal in public, or enjoying the summer sun on a beach. REACTIVATING SEXUAL ORIENTALISM The gesture of unveiling Muslim women has historical thickness: conflicts over the head scarf date back to the colonial era, during which the hijab had military stakes for the conquest of minds and indigenous bodies—especially in Algeria for France. The fantasy of ripping off the veil, penetrating private spaces, conquering the bodies of women, as well as humiliating the men, is a patriarchal strategy of military conquest in other forms, whose effective counterpart is the ever-present possibility of rape. As Todd Shepard says, colonial history is sexual history, a political history of sexuality, of predation, of eroticism. 20 Increasingly, critical historiography has examined the history of unveiling women in the colonial period in Algeria in order to explain the historical depth of the colonists’ emancipatory policy, which occurred through the visible unveiling of Muslim women as a public spectacle. Indeed, it is often referred to as the “battle of the veil,” with its particularly

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eloquent images deciphered in Burning the Veil. 21 In this famous battle, we see white women, supporters of French Algeria, unveil other Algerian women in a popular, jubilant, highly orchestrated spectacle. Yet Orientalist discourse has also provided a link between eroticism and veiled women in terms of images, certainly through pornographic postcards, 22 but also through what has been seen as a wall to be torn down by “colonial civility.” That wall is precisely the ethos of the Muslim whose refusal of the encounter, of choosing to look away, was perceived as a form of insubordination even in the very way of avoiding the encounter. According to Fanon, “In the case of the Algerian, therefore, there is not, in the street or on a road, that behavior characterizing a sexual encounter that is described in terms of the glance, of the physical bearing, the muscular tension, the signs of a disturbance to which the phenomenology of encounters has accustomed us.” 23 What is the conception of public space, as it is understood today, to describe a certain French identity, a certain French ethos of occupying public space? The French Senatorial Committee on Women’s Rights considered public space to be “any space in which encounters can happen, whether fortuitous or planned, where one can experience the Other and where difference, even one’s own difference, is protected by anonymity.” 24 In view of this definition, what the Muslim ethos fails in, and even more so the woman wearing a hijab, is the impossibility of experiencing the Other except in the form of predation. Thus the supposed sexual submission of veiled women seems to be the imaginary counterpart of the threat of sexual aggression by migrant Muslims in the public space of a popular festival, as seen in the speeches against migrants on December 31, 2015, in Cologne, Germany. 25 Generally speaking, in the phenomenological terminology of Lévinas, the veiled woman not only causes the failure of the sexual encounter, she also fails in the ethical encounter since she makes it difficult for the person seeing her to be disarmed, challenged by the face of the Other. The veil is therefore a form of solipsism that nullifies one’s ethical responsibility to the world. Thus the head scarf is incapable of protecting women, contrary to what veiled women say (according to them, the veil protects them from sexual assaults, insistent staring, and sexual harassment in the street). But even more so, the veil prevents them from taking care of others properly. Ordinary political discourse implies that veiled women not only do not know how to defend themselves, but they also constitute other nonveiled women as sexually available. They also endanger those they want to care for (such as their children), which makes them bad mothers: “they are bad helpers” on school outings. 26 Moreover, they are also bad caregivers for a specific reason that enables us to understand political phenomenology: they cannot see, they lack attention for others because they are only attentive to the purity of their being. In short, all their attention is religiously invested in concern for them-

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selves. In other words, in ordinary political discourse, the refusal to attribute agency and a narrative of self, which is specific to veiled women, corresponds to another violence, that of the progressive refusal to allow them to care for others, in particular in public, within the framework of public service (or a “public service mission”), as revealed in the Baby Loup case. 27 I would therefore like to focus on the economy of visibility in care work by women wearing head scarves. 28 MAKING CARE WORK INVISIBLE AND RELEGATING VEILED WOMEN TO THE DOMESTIC SPHERE In care work, the veil is experienced as a threat within the specific production relationships that are relations of self-production, in other words, the relations of reproduction. What is at stake is the possibility to stay alive, with dignity, and to be presentable to others in terms of decency, or civility, which makes it clear that a person is the only master of his or her appearance. It has often been said that the way we appear is a construction, something that reveals a kind of mastery, but we forget that the conditions for how one appears are translatable, in political economy terms, to the material and gendered conditions of appearance. A host of low-status workers assure this decency and dignity of our appearance in public. In fact, already during colonization (of Muslim countries) and up to the present (in the former metropolis), these workers have often been veiled women, who may have been considered unable to take care of their own appearance but were considered qualified to care for others and their public appearance. On the contrary, we are currently witnessing a metamorphosis of gender colonialism, since not only are veiled women “banned” from public spaces but they are also disqualified for the work of care for which, until not so long ago, they were considered competent because of their head scarf, associated with discretion and domestic devotion. I will therefore focus here on the economy of the visible within so-called affective work, to see how the veil is progressively constructed as an inability to take care of oneself and above all to take care of others. As noticed before, this rearrangement of the visible and the invisible has to do with the dynamic legacy of colonialism and racialization. The history of racial capitalism is also based on a phenomenology, on a regulated order of appearances. A racial and sexual division of labor corresponds to a racial and sexual division of appearances. Appearing is a form of work whose organization also has its roots and its imaginaries in colonization and, as such, constitutes one of the oldest phenomena of globalization. Since veiled women were assimilated to foreigners and immigrants, their employability depended largely on a racialized discourse about their competence in care work or cleaning. In short, the

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construction of a noticeable alterity through a visible sign may be either incriminating or exculpatory evidence for veiled women: the hijab may be regarded as a sign of maternal competence or, on the contrary, as a sign of a “bad mother.” Indeed, until relatively recently, the veil as a marker of religious affiliation, as a confessional marker, served as a kind of visible certificate of competence in service work, in particular cleaning. In the service industry, in which recruitment can be done based on an ethnicization of professional skills, the supposed docility of “avowed” (i.e., veiled) Muslim women could work in their favor in jobs that demand precisely that: effacing and invisibility. In this sense, a conversion about the semantics of the hijab as a subaltern professional skill, while risky, would be timely and may work toward integrating the veil into the working world. There is something in the veil that harkens to domestic confinement and being relegated to motherly duties, as part of an essentialization of a supposed Muslim culture in which women are expected to be veiled and dedicated to care work. This set of imaginary perceptions of the veiled woman functions as a sort of comfort or confirmation of these women’s ability to take care of the cleaning, the cooking, the children, the elderly—in other words, everything related to the sacrificial self-giving of femininity, characterized by the naturalization of gendered moral and physical attributes. Having a veiled housekeeper, or a veiled cook in school canteens, could be conceived of and did not seem to call into question the racial, social, and gendered order of appearance. On the contrary, it helped confirm the legitimacy of that order. In fact, since the Baby Loup affair and the recent opinion of the European Court of Justice on the wearing of religious symbols at work, 29 the veil has become a religious symbol working against Muslim women. 30 The head scarf is often only allowed in jobs where women are structurally invisible: either because of schedules that mean they never or rarely encounter customers, or by the fact that customers are served remotely, out of sight. In fact, call centers are a real haven for veiled women, without which some of them would be unable to work at all. This example is interesting because it shows how service to the customer that is invisible—because of technology—can be a reprieve for Muslim women from the order to unveil themselves. This invisibility, which is a technical characteristic of remote customer service, de facto maintains the illusion of not being veiled, making it impossible to imagine that women doing care work may be French and veiled. In between the lines, we can see a privilege of the nonveiled in this racialized context of appearance at work. We must read these privileges in care work not only as a phenomenological primacy to be able to appear according to one’s selfnarrative, but also in terms of the material conditions of existence in the broad sense, such as career advancement and having a valued position (one

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with contact with customers or in public relations). I would certainly agree with Sara Farris that the order to unveil occurs within a global capitalist rationale that demands the end of “the incongruence of hidden female bodies as exceptions to the general law according to which they should circulate like ‘sound currency.’” 31 The underlying idea is that “for femininity to operate according to its function under capitalism, the female body has to be exposed in order to circulate ‘according to the market paradigm.’” 32 Only recently has the veil become an obstacle to the commodification of the body in policies regarding care and affective work. The ideological construction of the veil, and more generally of Islam, as a ban on appearing thus reveals changes in the process of commodifying nonwhite women in fine-grained detail. CONCLUSION What is it in the appearance of Islam, in its identification visible for all to see, that is so dangerous? Hannah Arendt suggests that what is threatening about appearing in public space is a concern to maintain order in the broad sense. She takes an episode in imperial Rome in which a decree was proposed for slaves to wear a uniform so that they could be distinguished from free people. However, the Senate retracted and considered visibility to be dangerous, because the slaves would have been able to recognize each other and thus measure their strength in view of a possible rebellion. Note that the slaves’ strength did not come from their number, which was proportionately small, but from their public appearance as a community. She concludes that “what the sound political instinct of the Romans judged to be dangerous was appearance as such, quite independent from the number of people involved.” 33 According to Arendt, the fact that I appear to myself will never be enough to confirm my reality. Plurality, no matter how numerous it is, is essential to appear and exist politically, which is the only way to exist. In this approach to the head scarf, I have tried to show how ordinary racism, which informs everyday behavior and interactions, finds its context of intelligibility and legitimacy in the framework of policies of the social repudiation of Muslim bodies, which are not authorized to appear and exist politically. It is these public policies and public discourses that authorize forms of what are called “everyday” racism, such as insults, harassment, molestation, and angry outbursts. These forms of racism may confine a person to social death were it not for the capacities for resistance of many of these women, who persist in appearing in, in encumbering, the field of vision of the civil space of the French laïque republic.

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NOTES My greatest thanks to Cédric Molino-Machetto for his close reading of this paper. 1. Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty Reader, 354. 2. Paye, “Stop! Mon corps ne vous appartient pas.” Mamans Toutes Égales is an association of mothers who opposed the Châtel Circular of 2012 forbidding mothers wearing the hijab to accompany their children on school field trips. 3. Mbembe, Politiques d’inimitié. 4. Descartes, “Meditations,” 233. 5. The various positions taken against veiled women are great in number and cover a large gamut of the political world, beyond the usual left–right split. 6. “La nouvelle laïcité” was advanced in a 2003 report by François Baroin, politician of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire party (on the right). This new laïcité refers to the idea that secularism is now threatened by Islam, which is supposed to have replaced the Catholic Church in attacking laïcité. Moreover, since 1980, Islam is supposed to have been waging a cultural war that, according to Baroin, has been done so well that laïcité has become a value defended by right-wing parties. Traditionally, it was a left-wing value, yet the left has supposedly accepted the fact that ethnic-religious communities are closing in on themselves, and the left has given up defending laïcité. 7. Strictly speaking, laïcité designates in France the separation of the church and the state inaugurated by the Law of December 9, 1905. Formulated in an anticlerical state context, the law affirms the neutrality of the state vis-à-vis all the cults, the respect for the freedom of conscience, and notably the autonomy of school institutions from confessional authority. This implies that civil servants are exempt from any religious tutelage, in order to promote the equality of all before the law. 8. Shepard, Mâle décolonisation. 9. This expression is taken from Balibar in Saeculum. 10. Following his accession to power as president, Donald Trump decided to limit the entry of people from “Muslim countries.” This controversial decision is known as the “Muslim ban.” 11. Catherine Kintzler mentioned the notion of a “respiration laïque” (the image of laicité as allowing liberation, as if one can finally breathe freely) during her testimony before the Senate Committee on Women’s Rights. Délégation Sénatoriale aux Droits des Femmes, “La laïcité garantit-elle l’égalité femmes-hommes?” 42. 12. This allusion refers to a fine-dining restaurant owner who refused to served two veiled women in Tremblay-en-France in the region of Seine Saint Denis on August 27, 2016. 13. On this, see Sayad, L’immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité. 14. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness.” 15. Dorlin, Sans defense. 16. This attack occurred on December 15, 2015, at the 4 Temps shopping centre at La Défense, near Paris. See the story in the newspaper Le Parisien, http://www.leparisien.fr/ courbevoie-92400/la-defense-agressee-a-cause-de-son-voile-15-12-2015-5375011.php. 17. Scott, De l’utilité du genre, in particular the chapters “Sécularité ou sexularité? La laïcité ou l’égalité des sexes 2010” and “La séduction une théorie française.” 18. Délégation Sénatoriale aux Droits des Femmes, “La laïcité garantit-elle l’égalité femmes-hommes?,” 46. 19. Rochefort, Le pouvoir du genre. 20. Shepard, Mâle décolonisation. 21. McMaster, Burning the Veil. 22. See Taraud, Mauresques and La prostitution coloniale. 23. Fanon, “Alergia Unveiled,” 44. 24. “Tout espace de rencontre, qu’elle soit fortuite et programmée, où l’on peut faire l’expérience de l’Autre et où la différence, même sa propre différence, est protégée par l’anonymat”; original definition by Ilaria Casillo, “Espace public,” in Dictionnaire critique et interdisciplinaire de la participation, by the National Research Group on Participatory Democracy and Public Participation in Decision-Making (Saint-Denis la Plaine: GIS Participation du

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Public, Dé cision, Dé Mocratie Participative, 2013), cited in Délégation Sénatoriale aux Droits des Femmes, “La laïcité garanti-elle l’égalité femmes-hommes?,” 42. 25. See the position taken by Algerian author Kamel Daoud, who considers the sexual harassment/attacks in Cologne, Germany, to be due to/done by migrant Muslims, who carry within them the sexual disease of Islam: that which makes women, even more so white women, into sexual prey. Daoud, “Cologne, lieu de fantasmes.” 26. Here reference is made to the Châtel circular of 2012 forbidding veiled women from accompanying children on school field trips. 27. In 2008, a female Muslim employee at the private day-care center Baby Loup returned from her summer vacation wearing a veil. The management decided to fire her following her refusal to not wear the veil at work. The employee felt she had been the victim of discrimination and so took the case to the Prud’hommes (sort of ombudsmen for labor issues). A long legal battle ensued, which ended with the decision to uphold the judgments by the other courts. See Hunter-Henin, “Religion, Children and Employment.” 28. This aspect of work is often forgotten when speaking about the political discourse of banning veiled women, despite the fact that employment is one of the essential means of beingin-the-world: one of the consequences of penalizing veiled women who appear in the public space is precisely that they will be relegated to the domestic sphere. On this forgetting of employment in critical theory, see Moujoud, “Métiers domestiques, voile et féminisme.” 29. Opinion of the European Court of Justice on March 16, 2017, following the cases of two women who were fired in France and in Belgium for wearing the veil. The ECJ stated that private companies have the right, under certain conditions, to forbid the wearing of the veil. To do so, they must have specified this ban in their internal regulations, among other things. See also Hennette-Vauchez and Valentin, L’affaire Baby Loup; Hennette-Vauchez, “La régulation juridique du fait religieux.” 30. In the wake of the Baby Loup affair, many companies such as EDF and La Poste created laïcité manuals for internal use in order to regulate when and if the veil can be worn as well as any other symbols of religious affiliation. 31. Farris, “Femonationalism and the ‘Reserve’ Army of Labor,” 199. 32. Ibid. 33. Arendt, Human Condition, 218 n. 53.

WORKS CITED Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of W hiteness.” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Balibar, Etienne. Saeculum: Culture, religion, idéologie. Paris: Galilée, 2012. Daoud, Kamel. “Cologne, lieu de fantasmes.” Le Monde, January 29, 2016. https:// www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2016/01/31/cologne-lieu-de-fantasmes_4856694_3232.html. Délégation Sénatoriale aux Droits des Femmes. “La laïcité garantit-elle l’égalité femmeshommes?” Report no. 101 (2016–2017), November 3, 2016. Descartes, René. “The Meditations.” In The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes, translated by J. Veitch, 206–80. New York: Tudor, 1901. Dorlin, Elsa. Sans defense. Paris: La Découverte, 2017. Fanon, Frantz, “Alergia Unveiled.” In A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Farris, Sara. “Femonationalism and the ‘Reserve’ Army of Labor Called Migrant Women.” History of the Present 2, no. 2 (2012): 184–99. Hennette-Vauchez, Stéphanie. “La régulation juridique du fait religieux: comment lire l’interdiction du voile au prisme du critical race feminism.” In Critical Race Theory: Une introduction aux grands textes fondateurs, edited by Hourya Bentouhami and Mathias Möschel. Paris: Dalloz, 2017. Hennette-Vauchez, Stéphanie, and Vincent Valentin. L’affaire Baby Loup ou la nouvelle laïcité. Paris: LGDJ, 2014. Hunter-Henin, Myriam. “Religion, Children and Employment: The Baby Loup Case.” International Comparative Law Quarterly, July 2015. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2626417.

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Mbembe, Achille. Politiques d’inimitié. Paris: La Découverte, 2016. McMaster, Neil. Burning the Veil: The Algerian W ar and the “Emancipation” of Muslim Women, 1654–1962. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Edited by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Moujoud, Nasima. “Métiers domestiques, voile et féminisme: Nouveaux objets, nouvelles ruptures.” Hommes et migrations 1300 (2012): 84–94. Paye, Ndella. “Stop! Mon corps ne vous appartient pas,” Mediapart, March 23, 2015. Rochefort, Florence, ed. Le pouvoir du genre: laïcités et religions, 1905–2005. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2007. Sayad, Abdelmalek. L’immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité: 1. L’illusion du proviso ire. Paris: Raisons d’Agir, 2006. Scott, Joan. De l’utilité du genre. Paris: Fayard, 2012. Shepard, Todd. Mâle decolonization: L’“homme arabe” et la France, de l’indépendance algérienne à la révolution iranienne. Paris: Payot, 2017. Taraud, Christelle. La prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc (1830–1962). Paris: Payot, 2003. ———. Mauresques: Femmes orientales dans la photographie coloniale (1860–1910). Paris: Albin Michel, 2003.

Chapter Five

Challenging Conceptions of the “Normal” Subject in Phenomenology Christine Wieseler

In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty seeks to clarify the characteristics of the “normal” subject, locating normality at the level of the individual. This is opposed to what many disability activists and theorists hold to be a central tenet: Normality and disability are not traits of individual bodies but are instead the results of social values, attitudes, and practices that enable some types of bodies and disable others. 1 For this reason, the social model of disability makes a distinction between impairment and disability; the former “refers to the biomedical condition of an individual, and disability refers to the disadvantages that people with impairments face as a result of inaccessibility and unjust discrimination more generally.” 2 The term “ableism” is used to indicate oppression of disabled people. As philosopher Joel Michael Reynolds puts it, “Ableism refers to the assumption that the ‘normal’ able body is better than abnormal bodily forms and to the social ramifications of that assumption.” 3 To Merleau-Ponty’s credit, he goes beyond the objective body—in terms of the social model, impairment—by considering implications of bodily alterations for being in the world. 4 However, he stops short of attending to ways that worlds privilege certain bodies while marginalizing others. In this paper, I will use disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s notion of material anonymity, which obtains when there is an ideal fit between a body and its social and physical environment, to clarify how the assumptions of Merleau-Ponty and some of his successors limit the applicability of their accounts. I argue that Merleau-Ponty and others who adopt his approach implicitly take material anonymity as a given for “normal” subjects. 5 In omitting consideration of race and gender when discussing 69

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healthy, ill, and disabled subjects, philosophers Havi Carel, Shaun Gallagher, and S. Kay Toombs develop phenomenological accounts that tacitly assume the white, cisgender, male, nondisabled subject is standard or “normal.” They do not examine the structures that make it possible for some people to pay minimal attention to their bodies while compelling others to scrupulously attend to their bodies. I show that philosophers of race and feminist philosophers provide an important corrective by examining social constraints in relation to lived experiences. These structures are significant whether we are considering nondisabled or disabled people’s experiences, an insight that phenomenologists of illness have overlooked. In the first section, I explain concepts of Merleau-Ponty and GarlandThomson that are relevant for my critique. Section two provides examples of philosophers who adopt Merleau-Pontian approaches and assume that the “normal”/healthy subject does not need to attend to his body in everyday activities; they claim that it is only when an individual acquires a serious illness or impairment that he needs to explicitly attend to bodily comportment. Insofar as Carel, Gallagher, and Toombs do not thematize ways that gender and race matter for embodied subjectivity, I argue that they assume that the “normal” or healthy subject attains material anonymity. Since social norms and practices related to gender and race shape how others treat us and our experiences of our bodies—regardless of our health and ability status—I contend that it is essential for phenomenologists of illness to consider these social categories to avoid making unwarranted generalizations from the experiences of those whose bodies are privileged in regard to race and/or gender. Section three provides examples in which sexism and racism prevent material anonymity and illustrates why it is important to simultaneously examine how norms related to race, gender, and ability impact lived experience. BEING IN THE WORLD, FITTING, AND MISFITTING In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty adopts Heidegger’s notion of being in the world with some important modifications. Like Heidegger, he conceives of being as prior to reflection and knowledge claims. 6 However, rather than treating the body as an afterthought, as I would argue Heidegger does, 7 Merleau-Ponty considers embodiment to be central to being in the world. 8 He calls the body “the vehicle of being in the world” and “our anchorage in the world.” 9 He asserts: If the subject is in a situation, or even if the subject is nothing other than a possibility of situations, this is because he only achieves his ipseity by actually being a body and by entering into the world through his body. . . . [M]y existence as subjectivity is identical with my existence as a body and with the

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existence of the world, and because, ultimately, the subject that I am, understood concretely, is inseparable from this particular body and this particular world. 10

Merleau-Ponty contends that, ontologically, we are initially involved in the world as embodied beings. The particular body that one has/is matters for subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes the objective body from one’s own body. 11 The former captures the body as it can be measured and described. The second refers to one’s body as it is lived. The current discussion will focus primarily on one’s own body. Since Merleau-Ponty conceives of the body as central for being in the world, he explores how certain types of bodily alterations—such as illnesses and injuries—impact being in the world. I have argued elsewhere that his primary interest in examining case studies of people with illnesses and injuries is to gain a better understanding of the “normal” subject by way of contrast. 12 Nonetheless, his insights regarding the significance of illness and injury for being play a key role in enabling philosophical work on phenomenology of illness. 13 Garland-Thomson’s notions of “material anonymity,” “fit,” and “misfit” are closely related to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of being in the world insofar as they entail the assumption that being is situated, embodied, and dynamic. Both theorists begin with lived experience, which enables them to account for embodied subjectivity insofar as they refuse biologically or culturally deterministic assumptions. However, Garland-Thomson attends to the significance of bodily particularities in relation to social context to a greater degree than Merleau-Ponty does. I will use her insights to highlight important limitations within his approach to phenomenology. While this would be significant in itself, it matters even more due to Merleau-Ponty’s extensive influence on theorists concerned with embodiment. Garland-Thomson states, “A fit occurs when a harmonious, proper interaction occurs between a particularly shaped and functioning body and an environment that sustains that body.” 14 When there is an adequate fit between a person and her environment, one has what she calls “material anonymity,” in which one is “suited to the circumstances and conditions of the environment, of satisfying its requirements so as not to stand out, make a scene, or disrupt through countering expectations.” 15 In other words, one does not experience the material aspects of the environment as hindering one’s projects, and one conforms to the prevailing expectations for how one should be in the world. While material anonymity involves a supportive physical environment, it also entails fitting with social expectations. When there is a lack of fit between one’s body and its environment, the built and natural world stand out as obstacles to one’s projects. The body that does not fit social expectations or physical constructions simultaneously

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stands out. Garland-Thomson calls this occurrence a “misfit,” which she characterizes in the following: A misfit, conversely, describes an incongruent relationship between two things: a square peg in a round hole. The problem with a misfit, then, inheres, not in either of the two things but rather in their juxtaposition, the awkward attempt to fit them together. When the spatial and temporal context shifts, so does the fit, and with it meanings and consequences. 16

A misfit lies not within the characteristics of one’s body or the environment; it occurs when they do not mesh. Garland-Thomson uses the term to indicate not only this disjunction but also the individual who experiences it: “to misfit renders one a misfit.” 17 Since I believe this second application of the term introduces unnecessary ambiguity, I will limit my usage to incompatibility between bodies and their milieus (i.e., social and physical environments). While Garland-Thomson attends primarily to the role of disabling environments in creating misfits for bodies with impairments, she acknowledges that being marginalized on the basis of race and/or gender may be considered a type of misfit in the following: “Although misfit is associated with disability and arises from disability theory, its critical application extends beyond disability as a cultural category and social identity toward a universalizing of misfitting as a contingent and fundamental fact of human embodiment.” 18 I take her claim to be that misfitting is always a possibility, even if, I would add, misfits are more likely for some people than others. This is consistent with Garland-Thomson’s examples: “A misfit occurs when world fails flesh in the environment one encounters—whether it is a flight of stairs, a boardroom full of misogynists, an illness or injury, a whites-only country club, subzero temperatures, or a natural disaster.” 19 Her primary focus is on vulnerability—the potential for suffering—that she claims manifests when the environment does not sustain one’s body and projects. These types of misfits are difficult to ignore. Garland-Thomson suggests that fitting as a nondisabled person is similar to being in a dominant position in terms of race and gender insofar as material anonymity is attained. She contends, “Like the dominant subject positions such as male, white, or heterosexual, fitting is a comfortable and unremarkable majority experience of material anonymity, an unmarked subject position that most of us occupy at some points in life and that often goes unrecognized.” 20 Her description of material anonymity or fitting applies to bodily features beyond typical structure, function, and health that have social significance. This implies that one can also attain material anonymity if one’s body and environment are an adequate fit in regard to social expectations related to gender, race, and sexuality. It is difficult to notice one’s own material anonymity. Often those who are privileged in this way do not notice until those

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experiencing misfits draw attention to the phenomenon of material anonymity. One manifestation of inhabiting a privileged social identity is that one might not be required to think about the effects of categories such as race, gender, and dis/ability. Garland-Thomson’s notion of material anonymity can be used to highlight the implicit assumptions that Merleau-Ponty makes about what types of subjects count as “normal” or typical. Although he acknowledges that one’s body is essential for enabling or preventing one from being open to the world, his exploration of how bodily particularities and social norms impact one’s situation is limited. To put the point differently, Merleau-Ponty sometimes does not recognize that he is generalizing the experiences of particular bodies that fit well enough to attain material anonymity. 21 Merleau-Ponty claims that just as the phenomenal forces at work in my visual field obtain from me, without any calculation, the motor reactions that will establish between those forces the optimum equilibrium, or as the customs of our milieu or the arrangement of our listeners immediately obtains from us the words, attitudes, and tone that fits them—not that we are trying to disguise our thoughts or simply aiming to please, but because we literally are what others think of us and we are our world. 22

On Merleau-Ponty’s account, embodied subjectivity always exists in relation to objects and others. This is a crucial insight. In this quotation, he suggests that just as one’s body typically makes adjustments without calculation in order to get the best visual or motor grasp of the surroundings, so too one’s milieu influences embodied subjectivity. Although I would agree that this does occur to varying degrees in many cases, Merleau-Ponty does not consider instances in which one finds it uncomfortable, onerous, or impossible to fit with one’s milieu. He centers the experiences of those who are able to obtain material anonymity rather than those who misfit. While discussing divergences between Heidegger’s description of Dasein and the multicultural self, philosopher Mariana Ortega shares an experience of not readily knowing what to do in a new milieu: In Nicaragua, I followed the norm of eating cake with a spoon. In this country the norm seems to be that one eats cake with a fork. Many times I was offered a piece of cake and then given a fork, or when I proceeded to get utensils, I was a little taken aback—“which utensils do I take? A spoon or a fork? Why a fork?” All of the sudden, I was no longer relating to the world by means of non-reflective understanding or know-how. . . . Now, imagine experiences that deal with more important, agonizing, cultural norms than simple use of utensils, such as norms related to our bodies, our sexuality, our educational possibilities, our relationships with others, etc. 23

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Although she is responding to Heidegger, her point that not everyone is familiar and comfortable with the norms of their social context provides a different kind of example from the one Merleau-Ponty characterizes above. As Ortega suggests, cultural norms contain not only the possibility of relatively minor faux pas but also have significant implications for our bodies and relationships with others. In the following section, I show that Merleau-Ponty and others drawing on his work assume material anonymity to be the standard way of being rather than a privileged way of being that only a minority of the population experiences on a consistent basis. Garland-Thomson seems to vacillate on this point; in some parts of her article she uses mis/fitting to refer specifically to dis/ability, and in others she broadens the scope to include mis/fitting across additional axes. If an inclusive notion of misfitting is adopted, then material anonymity is the exception rather than the rule. In adopting these notions, I am not assuming that meanings and experiences of being marginalized along multiple categories of social identity are identical or separable. Rather, I am highlighting the implicit assumptions about gender and race that plague accounts attempting to theorize health or disability status without regard to gender and race. Disability theorists have tended to center white disabled people’s experiences, and critical race theorists have often either omitted consideration of intersectionality or tried to separate race and disability. 24 Ableism, racism, and sexism reinforce each other, and practices informed by them hierarchize and mark bodies as in or out of place. 25 Phenomenologists will be better able to describe lived experiences by taking this into account. MERLEAU-PONTY AND SOME OF HIS SUCCESSORS Merleau-Ponty acknowledges some types of variation among subjects categorized as “normal” or “pathological,” but this does not include the ways that bodily features that count as markers of race and gender matter for being in the world. Perspectives arising from the starting point of disabled people’s lived experiences add to the trenchant critiques of Merleau-Ponty that feminist philosophers and philosophers of race have developed. 26 Disability theorist Jackie Leach Scully asserts, “Criticism of phenomenology’s neglect of the gendered body applies equally well to its treatment of other types of phenotypic variance.” 27 Although she acknowledges that Merleau-Ponty discusses individuals with impairments, she shares my contention that his main goal in doing so is to elucidate “normal” experience. 28 Scully maintains that the divide between “normal” and “pathological” encourages homogenization of experiences within the category of “normal.” 29 As feminist disability theorist Alison Kafer states, “there is no mention of ‘the’ body that is not a

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further articulation of a very particular body.” 30 The problem arises when phenomenologists uncritically generalize from the embodied experiences of a privileged few. The trend of assuming that material anonymity is typical is present within the work of Merleau-Ponty’s successors who are focused on developing phenomenological accounts of impairment and illness as well. This matters because, even though these theorists are working to better describe the experiences of people with illnesses and impairments, they are still tacitly assuming a white, cisgender, male, able-bodied subject as standard or “normal” and making implicit assumptions about the race and gender of disabled subjects. Here I will briefly discuss three examples. Toombs asserts that, in illness, “Habitual acts (such as walking, running, lifting, sitting up, eating, talking, and so forth), which were hitherto performed unthinkingly, now become effortful and must be attended to.” 31 She develops her discussion of the effects of illness on one’s own body in more detail: Illness precipitates a fundamental change in the relation between self and body. In the first place the body can no longer be taken-for-granted or ignored. It must be explicitly attended to in various ways. Consequently, rather than being simply lived unreflectively, the body becomes an object for scrutiny. With objectification comes alienation. As an object, the body is suddenly perceived as a “thing” which is exterior to the self, as something Other-thanme. 32

Here Toombs attends to the individual’s perception of his or her body. This quotation suggests that when one’s body is functioning well and one is not experiencing pain, then the body recedes phenomenologically into the background. If we combine her insights with those of Garland-Thomson, we might arrive at the conclusion that objectification is the opposite of material anonymity. Surely, it is often the case that illness makes one more aware of one’s body, especially in situations in which one must find new ways to or is unable to accomplish certain tasks. It is important to detail the ways illness and impairment shape being in the world, and this is something Toombs’s work does exceptionally well. Although she focuses on experiences of illness, she notes that there are other factors that may lead one to sense the body as other. 33 Nonetheless, Toombs does not elaborate on ways that social identity is relevant for the experience of bodily otherness, among ill and healthy individuals alike. There is much more to be said about ways that social expectations—including those related to gender and race—create misfits and the corresponding imperative to attend to one’s body, regardless of one’s health and ability status.

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Gallagher takes a similar position to that of Toombs. Like Merleau-Ponty, he uses a case study of a person with an impairment in order to characterize the normal subject by way of contrast. With respect to moving around the world, the normal and healthy subject can in large measure forget about her body in the normal routine of the day. The body takes care of itself, and in doing so, it enables the subject to attend, with relative ease, to other practical aspects of life. To the extent that the body effaces itself, it grants the subject a freedom to think of other things. The fact that Ian, who lacks proprioception, is forced to think about his bodily movements and his posture much of the time demonstrates the degree to which, in the normal subject, this is not the case. 34

This quotation shows that Gallagher assumes that healthy, nondisabled people are able to forget about their bodies—in other words, that they attain material anonymity. Though he uses the feminine pronoun, Gallagher makes claims here regarding the “normal and healthy subject” that I would suggest are not the default in the case of many normal and healthy female subjects’ lived experiences. He does concede that body image may affect body schema when one is engaging in some types of novel activities that involve movement, stating: “in cases of learning dance or athletic movements, focusing attention on specific body parts can alter the established postural schema.” 35 However, Gallagher thinks that it is exceptional for bodily awareness to “interfere with the performance of the body schema.” 36 He uses examples in which individuals’ choices lead to increased bodily awareness but does not take into account the possibility that social norms may play this role. Gallagher’s account may accurately describe many of the experiences that able-bodied men and women have of movement. Yet I would venture to say that there are more men than women and more white people than people of color in sexist and racist societies who would agree with Gallagher’s assertion that “with respect to moving around the world, the normal and healthy subject can in large measure forget about her [or his] body in the normal routine of the day.” 37 This description seems most applicable to those whose bodies are privileged through social norms and the built physical environment. Carel contends that when there is a disjuncture between the objective and one’s own body, one is forced to attend to one’s body, as in the cases of anorexia and phantom limb. When the objective and one’s own body are “in harmony,” on the other hand, she suggests that “the healthy body is transparent, i.e., taken for granted. Thus, transparency is the hallmark of health and normal function. We do not stop to consider any of its processes because as long as everything is going smoothly, it remains in the background.” 38 As I have shown, this type of claim is common among philosophers who engage in phenomenological approaches to illness and impairment. 39 While there is

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a limited sense in which this type of claim seems accurate—we pay more attention to our bodies when they prevent us from engaging in activities or cause us pain (and we have not adjusted to this) than when they facilitate our aims and do not hurt—there are varying degrees to which it is possible for any given individual to take his body for granted or have it remain in the background. 40 As exemplified in the work of Toombs, Gallagher, and Carel, philosophers developing phenomenological accounts of illness and impairment tend to focus on one axis of social identity as it is embodied. It is easy to understand why they would take this approach, given the complexity and range of experiences related to disability. Yet it is not possible to completely separate the effects of the multiple ways one is categorized upon lived experience. Norms related to race and gender play a significant role in influencing the degree to which one is likely to be able to take one’s body for granted or, at the other end of the spectrum, to be compelled to attend to its every move and potential interpretation. Perhaps it is useful to expand what it means for everything to be “going smoothly” beyond an individualistic perspective. In order to further illustrate the inadequacy of assuming that healthy and “normal” subjects attain material anonymity, as I have argued Merleau-Ponty, Toombs, and Gallagher do, in the next section I will turn to examples in which these types of subjects are compelled by norms related to gender and race to pay undue attention to their bodies. My purpose is to provide counterexamples to the claim that being able to take the body for granted is a universal experience among those who are considered healthy and nondisabled and to begin to consider the implications this has for phenomenological approaches to illness and disability. SEXISM AND RACISM PREVENT MATERIAL ANONYMITY There are cases in which it is inadvisable to ignore one’s body because, in instances of misfitting, doing so may result in misunderstandings or even violence. This is easy to overlook if we only attend to privileged embodiment. Philosopher Emily Lee observes, “Racism and sexism hinge on the visible features of the body, even though the visible features of the body are completely arbitrary.” 41 As a result, she concludes that “to understand the lived level of the discrimination one must understand the meaning that the visibly different bodies have attained.” 42 Thus it is necessary for phenomenologists concerned with chronic illness and impairment to consider the accounts of those who are nondisabled and healthy but experience misfits rather than material anonymity due to social constraints. Race and gender impact the lived experiences of healthy subjects, and they are likely to matter for experiences of illness and impairment as well.

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Philosopher Iris Marion Young draws on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of one’s own body in order to consider how women and men come to embody gender norms. She notes that while boys tend to be socialized to use their bodies in ways that maximize their strength when accomplishing physical tasks, girls are often cautioned to be careful and avoid getting hurt when engaging in these same tasks. Young observes that when engaging in tasks requiring strength and coordination (e.g., throwing, running, climbing, and swinging), men tend to use their entire bodies while women tend to only engage the parts of their bodies that are absolutely necessary. 43 By all indications, she has nondisabled cisgender people in mind in this discussion of gendered movement. Questions remain about how disabled people’s experiences are shaped by social norms related to gender. 44 On Young’s account, feminine comportment requires self-monitoring when engaging in any of these activities, meaning women are unlikely to ignore or take their bodies for granted, as Toombs claims. 45 Philosopher Sandra Bartky also uses phenomenology in order to describe experiences of being a (white) woman in a sexist society. It is a fine spring day, and with an utter lack of self-consciousness, I am bouncing down the street. Suddenly I hear men’s voices. Catcalls and whistles fill the air. . . . The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object. . . . I must be made to know that I am a “nice piece of ass”: I must be made to see myself as they see me. 46

Prior to the catcalls and whistles, Bartky was able to enjoy the spring day without paying undue attention to her body. She notes that the men could have taken pleasure in looking at her without humiliating her and compelling her to see herself through their eyes. Their actions serve as a reminder of her subordinate status in society. Bartky cannot, in Gallagher’s words, “forget about her body” due to gender norms rather than anything intrinsic regarding her body. 47 Bartky’s experience is likely to resonate with many nondisabled cisgender women. So far, my discussion in this section has focused on ways that norms related to femininity encourage nondisabled women to attend to the appearance and movements of their bodies. Consideration of norms related to race adds to the difficulties facing the position that healthy, “normal” subjects’ bodies tend to remain in the background and to the evidence that these descriptions are really most fitting of nondisabled, white, cisgender men. My claim is not that embodied experiences of being a nondisabled white woman or nondisabled Black man are equivalent to each other, much less that these experiences are the same as being a disabled person; rather, I contend that racism, sexism, and ableism marginalize bodies insofar as they create misfits,

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and it is important to figure out how social norms impact one’s own body whether one is nondisabled or disabled. Philosopher George Yancy provides an illustration of some of the ways that Black men are compelled to attend to their every movement. He recounts a recurring experience he, a Black university professor, has of sharing an elevator with a white woman in which he interprets her gestures to indicate fear that he will harm her or steal her purse. Yancy is placed in a double bind insofar as there is no good response, only gestures that are, at best, likely to be interpreted in ways that reinforce stereotypes or, at worst, are seen as manifesting the violent intentions he is assumed to harbor. He states: It is through her gaze that I become hypervigilant of my own embodied spatiality. On previous occasions, particularly when alone, I have moved my body within the space of the elevator in a noncalculative fashion, paying no particular attention to my bodily comportment, the movement of my hands, my eyes, the position of my feet. . . . I now begin to calculate, paying almost neurotic attention to the proxemic positioning of my body, making sure that this “Black object,” what now feels like an appendage, a weight, is not too close, not too tall, not too threatening. 48

Yancy illustrates how racial and gender norms, which are structural, influence how he experiences and is compelled to comport his body. In this example, he perceives his body through this white woman’s gaze and his interpretation of what her smile means. Yancy’s hypervigilance is a response to the normalization of white people inflicting violence upon Black people for even the slightest perceived transgressive manner of comportment. We might wonder what difference ability status makes for Black men’s own bodies. This is a question philosopher Tommy Curry explores. He states, “The disabled Black male population would benefit from policies and community interventions that recognize the specific racist and sexual stereotypes imposed on the Black male body, as well as the implicit biases that are not mediated by physical and mental disability in this population.” 49 Curry focuses on examples of disabled Black men who were perceived as threatening. On September 23, 2015, a caller reported to a 911 dispatcher that a man had shot himself—an apparent suicide attempt—and fallen out of his wheelchair. Rather than attempting to provide assistance, police who responded to the call fatally shot Jeremy McDole. This disabled Black man with a selfinflicted gunshot injury lying on the ground was not “recognized by the police as a vulnerable person.” 50 Curry argues that McDole should have been perceived as a person needing help, but he was instead seen as a threat due to biases against Black men. Curry calls for intersectional 51 philosophical and empirical work in order to develop a better understanding of disabled Black men’s experiences.

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Whether attending solely to race, gender, or ability status, single-axis analyses fail to apprehend what they are intended to describe. Ableism and racism have historically been intertwined in attempts to justify slavery and colonialism. Indeed, they still work in tandem to create misfits. Andrea Ritchie—a writer, lawyer, and activist—asserts, “Actual or perceived disability, including mental illness, has thus served as a primary driver of surveillance, policing, and punishment for women and gender-nonconforming people of color throughout US history.” 52 After conducting interviews with numerous disabled people, Lisa Iezzoni and Bonnie O’Day observe a pattern, stating, “Several black interviewees with mobility difficulties recounted falling, or being assaulted without people rushing to their aid. Their stories contrast starkly with those of white interviewees, who sometimes complained about crowds gathering, anxious to help.” 53 One Black woman with multiple sclerosis reports that she fell when she was getting off of a train, and several people walked over her before anyone offered her help. 54 These examples demonstrate the importance of further investigation regarding how norms related to race and gender matter for experiences of being disabled. Merleau-Ponty, Toombs, Carel, and Gallagher assume that being a healthy, “normal” subject is sufficient to allow one to take the body for granted—in other words, that this is determined at the level of the individual body. However, as the preceding examples demonstrate, social expectations can prevent one from being able to ignore one’s body. Although attending to one’s body need not serve as an obstacle to one’s intellectual or other projects 55 and may indeed be central to these projects, inhabiting a body that is made to misfit through white male able-bodied normativity can put one at risk and seriously detract from the “freedom to think of other things.” 56 Norms related to gender and race impact how one’s body is perceived, how one is expected to comport oneself, and one’s own body. Material anonymity and misfitting are inherently contextual and social phenomena; thus, to accurately describe bodily experiences it is necessary to go beyond the individual and to consider how social norms and spaces privilege and marginalize bodies. CONCLUSION When philosophers develop accounts of embodied experience that purport to be universal or normal, they fail to consider ways that norms related to ability, gender, and race enable the smooth functioning of certain types of bodies while marginalizing and obstructing others. The assumption that being healthy and nondisabled entails being able to ignore one’s body fails to include many people’s lived experiences. I have drawn on Garland-Thomson’s notion of material anonymity in order to make explicit the ways that

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the assumptions of Merleau-Ponty and some of his successors limit the applicability of their approaches. Even theorists of the body who are concerned with disability, gender, or race tend to imply that material anonymity is typical or “normal.” It is imperative for future work on embodied subjectivity to center ways that the intersection of these identity categories shapes lived experiences rather than continuing the trends of considering social identity to be irrelevant or theorizing each axis individually. In particular, I am concerned that many phenomenologists of illness and impairment have not incorporated the insights of feminist philosophers and philosophers of race on embodied experiences. Discussion of one’s own body assumes multiple axes of identity, whether tacitly or explicitly. For instance, discussions of disability that do not talk about race tend to assume whiteness while discussions focused on race tend to assume able-bodiedness. It is time to work toward developing phenomenological approaches that are explicitly intersectional, meaning that they consider the ways that multiple categories impact one’s own body, and the effects often cannot be neatly delineated into these categories. Phenomenologists need to account not only for the impact of bodily conditions and particularities but also for the ways one’s being in the world is structured by norms related to disability, race, and gender. NOTES 1. See Clare, Brilliant Imperfection; Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip; Wendell, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability.” 2. Wieseler, “Missing Phenomenological Accounts,” 85. 3. Reynolds, “Three Things Clinicians Should Know,” 1183. 4. Elsewhere I have argued that the fact that Merleau-Ponty considers how bodily changes resulting from injury or illness impact being in the world makes his approach useful for disability theory. See Wieseler, “Missing Phenomenological Accounts.” 5. Here I am bracketing the question of what we should do with the term “normal” in favor of examining how Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenologists characterize it. 6. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 81. 7. See Heidegger, Being and Time and Zollikon Seminars. 8. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 84, 146. 9. Ibid., 84, 146. 10. Ibid., 430–31. 11. Merleau-Ponty uses a number of different terms in referring to the body. For clarity’s sake, I will use objective body and one’s own body, except in cases in which Merleau-Ponty and other philosophers use different terms. 12. Wieseler, “Feminist Contestation of Ableist Norms” and “Missing Phenomenological Accounts.” In particular, Merleau-Ponty repeatedly draws on the case of Johann Schneider, a patient of psychologist Adhemar Gelb and neurologist Kurt Goldstein. Schneider sustained brain damage as a result of being injury in World War I. See Marotta and Behrmann, “Patient Schn,” 634. 13. See Aho and Aho, Body Matters; Carel, Phenomenology of Illness; Fernandez, “Merleau-Ponty and the Foundations of Psychopathology”; Toombs, Meaning of Illness. 14. Garland-Thomson, “Misfits,” 594. 15. Ibid., 596. 16. Ibid., 592–93.

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17. Ibid., 593. 18. Ibid., 598. 19. Ibid., 600. 20. Ibid., 597; emphasis added. 21. For example, as philosopher Linda Alcoff states, “on their [Young, Butler, and Grosz’s] view Merleau-Ponty’s shortcomings result mainly from the fact that his analysis of embodiment did not specify sexual difference, and thus male embodiment was allowed to stand in for the whole” (Alcoff, “Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Theory on Experience,” 265). 22. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 109. 23. Ortega, “‘New Mestizas,’ ‘“World”-Travelers,’ and ‘Dasein,’” 9–10. 24. See Bell, “Introducing White Disability Studies.” The work of Eli Clare and Josh Lukin are important exceptions. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 2017; Lukin, “Disability and Blackness”; Erevelles, Anne Kanga, and Renee Middleton, “How Does it Feel to Be a Problem?,” 78–79. 25. The risk that ableism, racism, and sexism pose begins at conception. Narratives about certain types of bodies posing a risk themselves increase the risk and limitations people inhabiting those bodies face. Whether we are talking about fetuses with the potential to develop into children of any race with Down syndrome or nondisabled black children, some presume to know a priori how their lives will be lived. According to philosopher Melinda Hall, considering Down syndrome to be a risk requires the belief that it is possible to predict quality of life on the basis of genotype and the assumption that it will inevitably be low (Hall, Bioethics of Enhancement, 87). Similarly, Yancy notes that the former secretary of education under Reagan, Bill Bennett, asserted in 2005 that aborting “every black baby in the country” would lead to a reduction in crime (Yancy, “White Gazes,” 52). 26. See Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness”; Alcoff, “Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Theory on Experience”; Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”; Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description”; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Grosz, Volitile Bodies; Lee, “Introduction”; Weiss, “Normal”; Yancy, “White Gazes”; Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes; and Young, “Lived Body vs. Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity” and “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” in “Throwing Like a Girl,” 12–26 and 46–61, respectively. 27. Scully, Disability Bioethics, 94. 28. Ibid., 89. 29. Ibid., 94–95. 30. Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 7. 31. Toombs, “Illness and the Paradigm of the Lived Body,” 208. 32. Ibid., 214. 33. She states, “While the sense of ‘otherness’ of body is by no means peculiar to illness, it is particularly felt in this experience” (ibid., 217). 34. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 55; emphasis added. 35. Ibid., 141 n. 6. 36. Ibid., 141. 37. Ibid., 55. 38. Carel, “Phenomenology and Its Application in Medicine,” 39. 39. See also Leder, Absent Body. 40. Young asserts, “The notion of the body as a pure medium of my projects is the illusion of a philosophy that has not quite shed the Western philosophical legacy of humanity as spirit” (“Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” in “Throwing Like a Girl,” 52). Even philosophy that is explicitly focused on embodiment struggles to remain focused on the variety of embodied experiences, i.e., the ways bodies are not simply mediums for projects. In addition, when bodies are theorized without consideration of context, theorists miss how they are enabled or disabled. 41. Lee, “Meaning of the Visible Differences of the Body,” 35. 42. Ibid. 43. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 33.

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44. Cahill addresses some of the differences between the experiences of nondisabled and disabled women related to objectification in Overcoming Objectification. 45. Toombs, “Illness and the Paradigm of the Lived Body,” 214. 46. Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 27. 47. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 55. 48. Yancy, “White Gazes,” 56. 49. Curry, “This Nigger’s Broken,” 321. 50. Ibid. 51. See Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” 52. Ritchie, Invisible No More, 91. 53. Iezzoni and O’Day, More Than Ramps, 103. 54. Ibid. 55. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 46. 56. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 55.

WORKS CITED Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68. Aho, James, and Kevin Aho. Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Disease, and Illness. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Alcoff, Linda Martín. “Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Theory on Experience.” In Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of the Flesh, edited by Fred Evans and Leonard Lawler, 251–72. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. ———. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Bartky, Sandra. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990. Bell, Christopher. “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal.” In The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Lennard Davis, 275–82. New York: Routledge, 2006. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–31. ———. “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception.” In The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, edited by Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young, 85–100. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Cahill, Ann. Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics. New York: Routledge, 2011. Carel, Havi. “Phenomenology and Its Application in Medicine.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 32 (2011): 33–46. ———. Phenomenology of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Practice.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–67. Curry, Tommy. “This Nigger’s Broken: Hyper-masculinity, the Buck, and the Role of Physical Disability in White Anxiety toward the Black Male Body.” Journal of Social Philosophy 48, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 321–43. Erevelles, Nirmala, Anne Kanga, and Renee Middleton. “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Race, Disability, and Exclusion in Educational Policy.” In Who Benefits from Special Education? Remediating (Fixing) Other People’s Children, edited by Ellen Brantlinger, 77–99. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Fernandez, Anthony. “Merleau-Ponty and the Foundations of Psychopathology.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Psychiatry, edited by Serife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm, 133–54. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.

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Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Concept.” Hypatia 26, no. 3 (2011): 591–609. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hall, Melinda. The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. ———. Zollikon Seminars: Protocols–Conversations–Letters. Translated by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay. Edited by Medard Boss. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic, 1989. Iezzoni, Lisa, and Bonnie O’Day. More Than Ramps: A Guide to Improving Health Care Quality and Access for People with Disabilities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lee, Emily. “Body Movement and Responsibility for a Situation.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily Lee, 233–54. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. ———. “Introduction.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily Lee, 1–18. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. ———. “The Meaning of the Visible Differences of the Body.” APA Newsletter Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies 2, no. 2 (2003): 34–37. Lukin, Josh. “Disability and Blackness.” In The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed., edited by Lennard Davis, 308–15. New York: Routledge, 2013. Marotta, Jonathan J., and Marlene Behrmann. “Patient Schn: Has Goldstein and Gelb’s Case Withstood the Test of Time?” Neuropsychologia 42, no. 5 (2004): 633–38. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes. New York: Routledge, 2012. Ortega, Mariana. “‘New Mestizas,’ ‘“World”-Travelers,’ and ‘Dasein’: Phenomenology and the Multi-voiced, Multi-cultural Self.” Hypatia 16, no. 3 (2001): 1–29. Reynolds, Joel Michael. “Three Things Clinicians Should Know about Disability.” AMA Journal of Ethics 20, no. 12 (2018): 1181–87. Ritchie, Andrea. Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. Scully, Jackie Leach. Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Difference. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Toombs, S. Kay. “Illness and the Paradigm of Lived Body.” Theoretical Medicine 9 (1988): 201–26. ———. The Meaning of Illness: A Phenomenological Account of the Different Perspectives of Physician and Patient. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1992. Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. ———. “White Gazes: What It Feels Like to Be an Essence.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily Lee, 43–64. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Weiss, Gail. “The Normal, the Natural, and the Normative: A Merleau-Pontian Legacy to Feminist Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Disability Studies.” Continental Philosophy Review 48 (2015): 77–93. Wendell, Susan. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability.” In The Feminist Philosophy Reader, edited by Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo, 826–40. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.

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Wieseler, Christine. “A Feminist Contestation of Ableist Norms: Implications for Biomedical Ethics, Disability Theory, and Phenomenology.” Ph.D. diss., University of South Florida, 2016. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6433. ———. “Missing Phenomenological Accounts: Disability Theory, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, and Being an Amputee.” IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 11, no. 2 (2018): 83–111.

Chapter Six

Social Psychology, Phenomenology, and the Indeterminate Content of Unreflective Racial Bias Alex Madva

This chapter is about implicit bias. I began writing this, however, in the United States of 2017, during a period of burgeoning explicit bigotry and intergroup hostility. The dominant narrative surrounding implicit bias has been aversive racism, 1 according to which most Americans are sincerely opposed to racial discrimination at the explicit level but biased at the implicit level. What, then, to make of the resurgence of full-throated self-ascriptions of white supremacy? Should we say, with apologies to Virginia Woolf, that on or about November 2016, human nature changed? Or that so many of us just got human nature completely wrong? This chapter argues that implicit bias actually helps to explain this resurgence of bigotry. But properly appreciating implicit bias’s explanatory power requires rewriting the dominant narratives about its content, conscious accessibility, and context sensitivity. One source of confusion is that “implicit” racial bias—the construct measured with tools like the Implicit Association Test (IAT) 2—is often described as entirely unconscious. Perhaps describing implicit bias as completely unconscious helps people to acknowledge that they are “part of the problem” without becoming defensive. Yet the evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, albeit in partial, inarticulate, or even distorted ways. These biases form part of the “background” of social experience, exerting a pervasive influence on attention, judgment, and action, even though they are often felt without being noticed, or noticed without being understood. 3 To help make sense of these findings, this chapter develops a thought suggested by Linda Martín Alcoff and Gail Weiss, that implicit bias paradigmatically operates at the intermedi87

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ate level of awareness, between total nonconsciousness and articulated selfknowledge, that has long been a central concern of the phenomenological tradition. Implicit bias dwells in the “unthematized, taken-for-granted . . . pre-reflective habits” 4 that “structure affect, perception, and interpretation.” 5 Another source of confusion is that implicit biases are often glossed as mere associations between groups and traits, which lack intentional content. Take the race–weapon implicit bias. Most Americans (including many African Americans) more easily and quickly identify images of dangerous weapons when they are paired (e.g., share the same button on the keyboard) with black faces than with white faces. This tendency to “associate” blacks and weapons correlates with a bias toward “shooting” unarmed black men in a video game 6 and with regional U.S. trends involving disproportionate police shootings of blacks. 7 That is, in regions where participants (most of whom are neither police officers nor victims of brutality) display stronger black–weapon associations, unarmed black people are also more likely to be shot by the police. 8 Regional IAT data predicted these shooting disparities more than any other tested variable, including self-reported racial attitudes and regional levels of residential segregation, violent crime, and unemployment. Now what does it mean to interpret this race–weapon implicit bias as a mere contentless association? It is, for one thing, to deny that individuals who demonstrate this bias tend to believe, either consciously or unconsciously, that blacks are more likely to carry weapons. The idea instead is that these individuals simply associate “black” and “weapon” in much the same way that they associate “salt” and “pepper” or “doctor” and “nurse”: thoughts of one activate thoughts of the other. This chapter argues that implicit biases are neither mere associations nor fully articulated, propositionally structured beliefs or emotions. 9 Implicit biases are contentful—they take the world to be a certain way—but, in paradigmatic cases, their content is indeterminate. I defend content indeterminism about implicit bias in the metaphysical (rather than epistemic; see below) sense. For example, when a white person experiences a “gut feeling” of discomfort during an interaction with a black person, there is a question about the meaning or nature of that discomfort. Is it a fear of black people? Is it mere anxiety about appearing racist? There is, I’ll argue, no general, determinate answer. The contents of our unreflective racial attitudes are fundamentally vague and open-ended, although they take on particular shapes and implications—that is, they become determinate—depending on contextual features including character traits, background assumptions, and structural power relations. In other words, they are indeterminate when interpreted individualistically, in isolation from context, but determinate (or at least less indeterminate) when understood holistically and relationally, as part of broader cognitive-bodily-social-environmental systems. 10

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In addition to the specific theses defended, I hope to offer a case study in bridging diverse approaches to race and racism. First, we must merge individualistic and structural perspectives. 11 Understanding individuals’ racial attitudes requires situating those individuals in broader social contexts; conversely, understanding racially oppressive structures—and envisioning emancipatory alternatives—requires populating those structures with embodied, biased minds. Second, following the twentieth-century phenomenologists who integrated ongoing social-scientific developments with the philosophy of lived experience, I hope to spur greater cross talk between psychologists and phenomenologists studying race. My sense is that some phenomenologists have been unduly dismissive of implicit bias research, raising criticisms more aptly directed at popularized depictions of the research than at inthe-weeds empirical developments. 12 Conversely, many psychologists (and the philosophers under their influence) are too quick to infer, from various specific findings that upend specific “commonsense” assumptions about experience, that phenomenological investigation is altogether wrongheaded. To the contrary, phenomenologists of race may have much to offer social psychologists, both in assisting theoretical interpretations and identifying underexplored directions for research. The roadmap is as follows. In the first section, I say a bit about the phenomenology of indeterminacy. In section two, I make the case that implicit bias has indeterminate content. In section three, I draw out further implications of my argument, rejecting more radically constructionist and existentialist approaches and defending an enriched understanding of person–situation relations. In the final section, I consider two alternative views. PRIMER ON PHENOMENOLOGICAL INDETERMINACY Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that all experience is shot through with indeterminacy. Indeterminacy is, for him, not an epistemic flaw or practical limitation in our relation to the world, but a fundamental condition underlying our basic abilities to know and navigate physical and social environments. “We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon,” he writes; we must identify and understand “the presence in the perceived of a positive indeterminacy.” 13 What kind of indeterminacy is Merleau-Ponty interested in? What makes it positive? He is focused on a range of fleeting experiences that we encounter in everyday contexts, such as difficult-to-make-out street signs or scribblings on a blackboard. When a sighted person, in her ordinary comings and goings, comes across such indeterminate-looking percepts, her experience often has an affective and action-oriented character: their blurriness presents itself as a problem for her to solve. These “vague something-or-others . . .

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invite further exploration,” 14 perhaps compelling her to lean forward or approach the something-or-others to see them more clearly, or at least to squint or tilt her head to ease the felt sense of tension induced by the indeterminacy. Some of the most easily replicable and shareable experiences of indeterminacy may be auditory, such as the shared difficulty we have in hearing song lyrics. There is, for example, an infamous line in Aretha Franklin’s rendering of “Respect” that is persistently difficult to make out. What makes this indeterminacy “positive”? First, these experiences of indeterminacy are functional and norm sensitive: they induce a sense of unease that motivates certain behavioral responses, as when we tilt our ears to the speaker, reach to turn up the volume, or briefly stop singing along to listen more attentively. It is because the lyric is perceived indeterminately that we feel compelled to discover its determinate properties. In short, the experience of indeterminacy motivates us to make matters more determinate, to get a better epistemic and practical grasp on our environment. MerleauPonty thus writes that “a sensible that is about to be sensed poses to my body a sort of confused problem. I must find the attitude that will provide it with the means to become determinate. . . . I must find the response to a properly formulated question.” 15 Moreover, in paradigm cases, we must bring to bear a range of perceptual, bodily, and cognitive skills in order to resolve the indeterminacy. The transition from vague something-or-other to determinate perception is not a passive process that just happens to us but a cognitive-affective-behavioral accomplishment. It is also typically a social accomplishment. Many indeterminacy-resolving skills are learned via interaction with others, and many indeterminacies are resolved collaboratively, as when we pause the conversation during a song’s chorus in order to collectively discern the garbled lyrics. Consider also how drivers are more likely to get in accidents when they talk on the phone (even if they are using hands-free devices to communicate) than when they talk to a passenger, because passengers and drivers jointly attend to the road. 16 Situational awareness and indeterminacy resolution are often socially shared. We collaborate to disambiguate. According to Merleau-Ponty, the structures of perceptual indeterminacy, and indeterminacy resolution, resemble the figure–ground structure of pictures. As countless perceptual illusions demonstrate, our perception of the figure (the foregrounded point of focus) is shaped by the background against which it is situated. Taken in isolation, the figure may be ambiguous, but the cues surrounding it, together with our skills for understanding those cues, guide us to perceive the figure in determinate ways. Two papers on the interlinked perception of race and emotion exemplify this figure–ground structure nicely. 17 In the first, participants were more likely to identify ambiguous emotional expressions as angry if they belonged to a black face, but happy if they belonged to a white face. Here the figure (the foregrounded

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problem to solve) was the emotion being expressed, while the ground (the context covertly guiding judgments about the figure) was constituted, in part, by perceptions of race. In the second paper, figure and ground were reversed: participants were now more likely to identify racially ambiguous faces as black when the faces looked angry, but white when they looked happy. In both cases, racial biases in perceptual judgment were predicted by participants’ performance on the IAT (but not by their self-reported racial attitudes). Implicit bias, in other words, was also part of the background, shading interpretations about otherwise indeterminate objects of attention. Nor is the indeterminacy-resolving power of implicit bias restricted to split-second judgments. Implicit bias also affects reflective deliberation, leading, for example, mock jurors to judge that ambiguous evidence is more incriminating when defendants are dark skinned. 18 Implicit biases thus figure among the set of “skills” we develop for drawing on contextual cues to resolve indeterminacies. I put “skills” in scare quotes because, although these dispositions are socially learned, they are obviously (and sometimes tragically) biased and misleading. Phenomenologists use the notion of horizon to characterize these features of experience. There are distinct (but related) uses of this idea, two of which are relevant here. Loosely following Husserl, 19 we can call the first the internal horizon, to refer to the range of possible interpretations of a particular percept, with some more central and intuitive, others somewhat strained but still in the ballpark, and still others decisively out of bounds. (Consider trying to identify a blurry letter on an optometrist’s chart; perhaps it looks most like a P, but it might be an F, and it’s definitely not an E or a Z.) Call the second the external horizon, referring to the broader context or field within which each particular percept is experienced, including other percepts as well as background expectations, bodily postures, moods, and so on. Internal horizons refer to particular entities, that is, the range of possible interpretive options of a given percept, while external horizons refer to the context making particular interpretive options more or less salient and determinate. Heidegger and Gadamer invoke interpretive horizons to understand not just perception but also our relationships to texts and art, and Alcoff appeals to interpretive horizons to understand visible social identities like race. She writes, “The concept of horizon helps to capture the background, framing assumptions we bring with us to perception and understanding, the congealed experiences that become premises by which we strive to make sense of the world, the range of concepts and categories of description that we have at our disposal.” 20 Alcoff’s view accounts for the open-endedness and freedom involved in self-interpretations of identity, while at the same time explaining how this range of plausible self-interpretations is constrained by experience, embodiment, and social relations. For example, I (a white American) can understand my social identity as a symbol of supremacy and power, as a

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source of guilt or privilege, as a descendant of immigrants from diverse national origins, and in numerous other ways. But I cannot, at least in current sociopolitical circumstances, understand myself as black; that option is out of bounds. Racially mixed individuals may understand themselves, and be perceived by others, as nonwhite in some contexts and white in others. There is, according to Alcoff, an “indeterminacy of racial categories,” 21 comparable in broad but important strokes to the indeterminacies of perceptual experience and textual interpretation. I claim the same applies to the experiential contents of our implicit biases: they have an indeterminate character. As Lee, Lindquist, and Payne put it, “implicit affect toward outgroups serves as an ambiguous signal that is available to be conceptualized as different discrete emotions based on the context.” 22 Implicit bias exists in a holistic relationship with a range of other factors, any of which may, when taken in isolation, be indeterminate—neither white nor black, neither angry nor happy, and neither biased nor unbiased—but each of which can become determinate in context, via relations to the others. IMPLICIT BIAS FROM BACKGROUND TO FOREGROUND One of the most prominent debates about implicit bias in social psychology and philosophy has been about cognitive structure. On the received view, implicit biases are stored in long-term memory in a network of semantic associations. Part of what inspired and sustains this view is that leading measures of implicit bias are associative in nature. They assess, in various ways, how quickly or likely participants are to pair stimuli, such as images of racially typical faces with images of weapons. In recent years, however, an alternative interpretation has gained ground, that implicit biases are language-like, propositional structures, which can update swiftly in light of the evidence. This propositional interpretation has been buoyed by a raft of studies demonstrating, for example, that an isolated piece of relevant information is sometimes sufficient to shift individuals’ performance on implicit measures, in patterns consistent with the rational revision of belief but harder to square with the intensive reconditioning presumably required for rewiring ingrained associations. 23 Phenomenologists may recognize in this debate the echoes of traditional disputes between empiricism or behaviorism on the one hand and rationalism, intellectualism, or cognitivism on the other. Thinkers such as MerleauPonty sought to transcend these disputes, emphasizing each approach’s insights and oversights. We find ourselves similarly poised with respect to implicit bias. Propositionalists are right that there must be more to implicit biases than mere associations between concepts. Something more substantive

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must be said about the intentional relations in which the concepts stand. For example, a black–weapons association on the IAT might reflect the belief, perhaps unconscious, that blacks are violent, but couldn’t it equally well reflect the (justified and true) belief that blacks are more likely to be stereotyped as violent, or indeed that blacks are more likely to be victims of weapon-related violence? The sheer fact of the association doesn’t distinguish between these interpretations. So if the association were the only evidence we had, we could not say that it amounted to bias against blacks rather than, say, an acute acquaintance with the realities of black oppression. As it happens, of course, the association is not the only evidence we have. Myriad studies correlate performance on these associative measures with discriminatory behavior. Even the most clamorous critics of the race IAT grant that it predicts behavior and is at worst comparable in average predictive power to more traditional self-report measures. 24 But once we have evidence tying implicit measures to behavior, we also have evidence that the intentional contents of implicit biases are more than mere associations. The evidence that a black–weapon association predicts a bias toward shooting unarmed black people is also evidence that this association is more closely tied to a racial attitude along the lines of black people are threatening than black people are threatened. Yet propositionalists take this insight too far and overestimate implicit bias’s determinacy. The full range of behavior predicted by implicit bias is surprisingly broad and mercurial, much more so than in the case of propositional attitudes like belief and desire (at least as they are traditionally understood). In some conditions, an ostensibly “biased” IAT score correlates with prosocial and arguably ethical, rather than discriminatory, behavior. The associative approach is therefore right to suggest that the relations between concepts are open-ended but wrong to leave them too open-ended, as if implicit biases were altogether devoid of intentional content. By contrast, the propositional approach is right that implicit biases are contentful but wrong to portray their contents as more precise than they actually are. The most tried-and-true method for knowing the contents of people’s minds (what they want, believe, etc.) is to ask them. Individuals who sincerely believe that P will be disposed to assert that P when asked (other things equal and in appropriate conditions, e.g., when they want to tell the truth). This strategy might seem unavailable for implicit biases because they are often glossed as opaque to introspection. Yet it has been relatively clear for some time that implicit biases are conscious—or at least no less conscious than so-called explicit attitudes. Leading theorists in both the associative and propositional camps argue that conscious awareness has numerous roles to play in a full accounting of the causes, effects, and nature of implicit bias. How, then, to distinguish explicit from implicit? One influential theory distinguishes between propositional and associative processes, rather than con-

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scious and unconscious representations. 25 This theory describes the outputs of associative processes as spontaneous “affective reactions” to stimuli or, more colloquially, as “gut feelings,” which are qualitatively felt, as in the immediate sense of discomfort a white person might feel during an interracial encounter. The tendency for race-related gut feelings to go unreported does not reflect their being unconscious, unintentional, or automatic. Rather, whether they are reported depends on how they are interpreted in a given context, which in turn depends on a host of further facts about the interpreter. Here propositional (i.e., reflective, inferential) processes enter the scene. On this view, when people with negatively valenced spontaneous reactions toward blacks are asked about their attitudes, they will, holding all else equal, say something along the lines of, “I dislike black people” or “Blacks are unpleasant.” Most six-year-old children, for example, readily report racial preferences, while ten-year-olds are less likely to do so, and adults are much less likely still. 26 Why do people become less likely to report racial biases as they age? Research suggests that adults’ willingness to report their spontaneous reactions depends in part on their other beliefs and values—that is, their interpretive horizons. People who recognize that “Black people represent a disadvantaged minority group” and that “negative evaluations of disadvantaged minority groups are wrong” will infer upon reflection that negative evaluations of black people are wrong—unjustified, inaccurate, or immoral. 27 This means that their own spontaneous negative reactions are wrong, and many individuals resolve the perceived inconsistency (cognitive dissonance) between their biased feelings and egalitarian commitments by reporting that they like blacks and nonblacks equally. Note that this “failure” to self-report racial preferences need not involve intentional misreporting or self-deception. They may be pristinely aware of the prima facie problematic implications of their gut feelings, yet sincerely reject those feelings on the grounds that they do not represent their considered opinion, much as someone can be aware of their phobic or superstitious impulses but recognize that they are not all-things-considered justified. Thus, when given the opportunity to separately report both their “gut feelings” and their “actual feelings,” participants’ self-reported gut feelings correlate more strongly with implicit than explicit measures. 28 By contrast, “old-fashioned” supremacists, who believe that negative evaluations of low-status racial minorities are entirely appropriate (e.g., because they believe racial minorities are actually inferior or are otherwise threats to their way of life), generally do not hesitate to say so. Such individuals have, in effect, a direct line of communication between their immediate affective dispositions and their explicit reports. Similarly, more “modern” racists—who nominally accept that negativity toward the disadvantaged is wrong but who deny, as a factual matter, that blacks continue to be disadvantaged—are also more open about their negative feelings. These individuals

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might attribute the low social status of many African Americans to problematic aspects of their “culture” or “values” or to faulty “personal choices” rather than to oppression. Perceiving blacks as responsible for their own hardships is then taken to license explicit negative evaluations, such as blame or condescension. In sum, individuals who don’t believe, or simply don’t care, that blacks continue to be oppressed will be more likely to report than disavow their gut feelings. Only those who both endorse antiracist values and believe in the persistence of racial oppression will refrain from reporting negative racial sentiments. Now is as good a time as any to note that such findings have straightforward implications for meta-analyses on the correlations between implicit and explicit measures of bias, and between either measure and “real world” behavior. 29 Whether people report their biases, or act on them, depends fundamentally on how those biases interact with other psychological and contextual factors. Ignoring such factors would be analogous to running a metaanalysis of studies examining whether striking a match leads it to catch fire without keeping track of whether, in the preponderance of experiments, there was any oxygen in the room or the matches were soaking wet. There is no “pure” correlation to expect between match striking and match lighting without accounting for such unassailably essential background conditions. Metaanalyses of implicit bias that ignore psychological and social context are, therefore, largely uninformative. Nevertheless, there is nothing inherent to meta-analytic research that precludes coding for context, and meta-analyses that do so find that correlations between implicit measures, explicit measures, and real-world behavior vary to a significant extent in keeping with theory-based predictions. 30 I have yet, however, to discuss the best evidence for indeterminism. The thrust of the aforementioned studies might even seem to run in the other direction. Psychologists claim that participants’ social-affective reactions “imply” concrete evaluative judgments, most naturally expressed with statements of (dis)liking. Of course, a mere association of “black” with “bad” cannot, on its own, imply anything, because it lacks intentional content. So it might seem that, to make sense of these claims, we have to grant that implicit biases characteristically do have determinate content, with a canonical or default articulation along the lines of, “I dislike members of group G.” 31 Now, on my view, this sort of self-ascription of disliking may frequently be among the more central, intuitive options for interpreting implicit bias, but there are grounds for questioning whether it or anything else constitutes the precise, canonical articulation. Why, in particular, should the dispositions at issue be exclusively associated with (dis)liking rather than other forms of affect or motivation? Consider, for example, the finding that antiblack implicit bias did not correlate with any particular self-reported emotion toward black people (whether fear, anger, guilt, etc.), but that it did correlate with the

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average of all these negative emotions taken together. 32 When implicitly biased people report their racial attitudes, they are more likely to say something negative than something positive, but little beyond that is settled. Implicit bias lacks a unique emotional signature and instead reflects a generic, vague negativity. Evidence associating implicit bias with this sort of vague negativity may be why open-ended dislike often seems a natural interpretation, but under certain conditions, this vague negativity can be channeled into distinctive emotional reactions not best interpreted that way. This brings us to the studies most suggestive of indeterminism. First, participants completed an implicit measure of their spontaneous affective reactions to images of white versus black faces. One group of participants was then told that the gut feelings they may have had during the measure reflected fear of blacks; another group was told that these feelings reflected sympathy toward blacks. Participants were then asked to generate two or three reasons why they might have felt fear or sympathy, respectively. Subsequently, those who both tested high in implicit bias and who were instructed to interpret their feelings as fear now tended to agree with statements like “Blacks are scary” and “Blacks are threatening.” However, implicitly biased participants in the sympathy condition tended not to report explicit fear of blacks. (Another study found the same pattern simply by measuring, rather than manipulating, participants’ antecedent beliefs about whether their gut feelings reflected fear versus sympathy.) Negative affect per se did not, just as such, correlate with self-reported fear of African Americans, unless participants noticed and interpreted their negative affect as fear and felt permitted to say so. As a phenomenologist, I interpret these studies as illustrating the openendedness, and pervasive potential for distortion, when we step back and reflect on experience, switching gears from our habitual, “ready-to-hand” mode of being-in-the-world to a more theoretical posture. These studies exemplify the extent to which our unthematized social experience is up for interpretive grabs. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s account of the transition from indeterminacy to determinacy that results when reflective attention is directed upon prereflective experience: Attention, then, is neither an association of ideas nor the return to itself of a thought that is already the master of its objects; rather, attention is the active constitution of a new object that develops and thematizes what was until then only offered as an indeterminate horizon. . . . The object only gives rise to the “knowing event” that will transform it through the still ambiguous sense that it offers to attention as needing-something-to-be-determined, such that the object is the “motive” of and not the cause of this event. . . . This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in the unity of a new sense, is thought itself. 33

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Specifically, these studies highlight the meaningful but indeterminate relations between our immediate affective dispositions and our concrete, articulated emotions, and walk in lockstep with accounts of prereflective affectivity offered by phenomenologists. For example, citing Husserl and MerleauPonty, Alia Al-Saji writes that “the realm of affectivity is wider than what can be called emotion, since emotion is an intentional, sense-giving relation (to an object) that is built on affect, whereas affect is the preintentional tendency or force (attraction, repulsion, pain, pleasure, etc.) that can motivate and support this intentional turning toward an object.” 34 It is hard to imagine a more apt description of how social psychologists are coming to understand the relations between implicit affect, explicit prejudice, and discriminatory behavior. Moreover, the power of attention to make concrete meaning out of vague feelings (or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, to actively constitute new objects out of indeterminate horizons) was not limited to swaying participants’ verbal reports. Participants who interpreted their gut feelings as fear were, on a subsequent task, more likely to perceive emotionally ambiguous black faces as angry. This result recalls, but also contextualizes, the findings mentioned above on implicit bias and the perception of emotion and race. Those results suggested, at first glance, that implicit bias just as such influenced judgments about ambiguous percepts, but the horizon of holistic interconnections is evidently more complex: the effects of gut feelings on perceptual judgment are (always already) mediated by self-interpretations of what those gut feelings mean. Self-interpretation forms part of the background shaping the meaning of implicit bias, which in turn forms part of the background shaping the interpretation of perception. FURTHER TAKEAWAYS Constructionism, Existentialism, and the Bounded Horizons of Interpretation There are further notable findings and takeaways. First, although these studies indicate the wide horizon of possible implicit bias interpretations, they simultaneously reveal that this horizon is bounded. Participants who were instructed to interpret their gut feelings as sympathy were less likely to report fear of blacks, but they were not, it turns out, more likely to report sympathy. The experiment reduced self-reports of fear but did not increase self-reports of sympathy. In this context, then, implicit biases were sufficiently flexible as to be interpreted as either fear or not-fear, but not so completely up for grabs as to be interpreted as any emotion whatsoever. This evidence of nontrivial constraints on the range of feasible interpretations speaks against radically constructionist or existentialist approaches that would attribute unlimit-

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ed freedom to the mind’s self-interpreting and self-constituting powers. This evidence, for example, qualifies the apparently radical constructionist implications of Schachter and Singer’s (1962) notorious (and notoriously difficult to replicate) studies, which found that participants injected with adrenaline reported profoundly different emotional experiences depending on available contextual cues. We must disagree with the Hamlet- or Sartre-inspired interlocutor who would assert that “nothing’s [fear or sympathy] but thinking makes it so.” These findings resonate instead with a model of implicit (and explicit) bias as indeterminate, interpretive horizon. As Alcoff claims about racial identity and history, so it is with the content of implicit bias: “dynamic and unstable, but its meanings are not completely indeterminate or infinitely flexible, and they are not forged by any individual alone.” 35 For a particular individual experiencing a particular gut feeling, certain interpretations and actions are more straightforwardly afforded by the context, while others are off limits, with a gray border area in between. Power, Situation, and Individual Bias Social psychology also makes vivid how the passage of bias from indeterminate to determinate is shaped by the broader situation, outside the individual. In several studies, participants are (overtly or covertly) encouraged by authority figures into conceiving of their gut feelings in particular ways, thereby illustrating the intimate, self-interpretive depths to which power relations can reach. (Interpretations of racial gut feelings are not forged by any individual alone.) These studies thus recall the classic situationist experiments by the likes of Milgram, Zimbardo, and Sherif, as further lessons in the power of authority, norms, and the like. 36 Typically, the authority figure in these experiments is a scientist (and participants themselves tend to be psychology majors, who are especially likely to value psychological research and defer to psychologists’ summaries of what that research means). But there is no reason to assume that scientists are alone in occupying positions of influence over others’ interpretive horizons; parents, professors, politicians, and religious leaders presumably also share the power to shape how we interpret our own minds. Authoritative others have the power to activate, legitimize, and even mold our inchoate gut feelings, transforming vague feelings of social discomfort into concrete emotional experiences of fear or indignation, and indeterminate implicit biases into explicitly endorsed discrimination. It is not just that authority figures “take advantage of” or “exploit” preexisting biases, but that they play a significant role in making those biases what they are. Yet even as these studies demonstrate the profound power of the situation, they simultaneously undermine the conventional situationist narrative, according to which factors “external” to the individual are somehow more

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powerful drivers of behavior than factors “internal” (personality traits, moral commitments, etc.). This approach to situational influence is foundationally flawed, and these studies help explain why. For example, only those participants who tested high in implicit bias were influenced by the manipulations telling them how to interpret their gut feelings. Participants who demonstrated little or no implicit bias were immune to demagogic testaments to the validity of their negative feelings, for the obvious reason that they didn’t have negative feelings to validate. Implicit biases thus constitute an important individual-difference variable, determining whether and how situational factors shape thought and action. Numerous other personal beliefs and traits also have decisive roles to play. For example, telling (implicitly biased) participants that their gut feelings represent their “real” attitudes and “genuine” selves can also lead them to report explicit prejudice and support for discriminatory policies; 37 however, this manipulation primarily affects only those (implicitly biased) participants who are also high in self-esteem, that is, those antecedently disposed to have positive views of their “selves.” Thus, although studies like this are clearly reminiscent of classic situationist findings, they also represent a decisive departure from the narratives passed down about those findings. The core contrast between person and situation, or in sociological contexts between agency and structure, is confused. Situations do not operate by themselves to shape self-interpretation and action, but only in conjunction with individuals’ other (potentially idiosyncratic) attitudes, habits, traits, experiences—and implicit biases. The power of situations depends, fundamentally, on the minds of those in them. In a final exemplification of indeterminacy, some studies even find that, in the right metacognitive context, implicit biases become cues to act virtuously. 38 Specifically, individuals who feel acutely aware and even guilty about their biased feelings, but who are earnestly committed to being unprejudiced, can effectively learn to reinterpret those feelings, not as invitations to be biased, but as palpable, internal signals to be just. Such findings speak to strategies for ameliorating injustice, which I explore more fully elsewhere. 39 Notably, for example, when diversity trainers stress that the “vast majority of people” harbor implicit biases, trainees become more biased, but when trainers stress that the “vast majority of people try to overcome” their implicit biases, trainees became less biased. 40 Collectively telling ourselves that our biases are inaccurate, unintentional, unrepresentative of our underlying commitments, and ultimately to be overcome, may be key to discouraging the implicit from bubbling up into the explicit and motivating us to unlearn our biases altogether.

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OBJECTIONS AND ALTERNATIVE VIEWS Epistemicism I take such findings to reveal the profound indeterminacy inherent in our implicit biases. An alternative interpretation is that individuals simply don’t know what the contents of their attitudes are. 41 This alternative locates the problem in epistemology rather than metaphysics, concluding that introspective access to implicit bias is limited, and corresponds to Williamson’s “epistemicist” take on vagueness, which argues that apparent borderline cases (e.g., between being bald and having hair) are actually determinate; we just don’t, perhaps can’t, know whether they are one way or the other. 42 There is, on this line of thinking, a fact of the matter about whether implicitly biased individuals do or don’t fear black people, but they (and we) may not know either way. Let me first note my agreement that these studies highlight various obstacles to self-knowledge. A central theme of the phenomenological tradition, after all, is that mental life is not transparent to introspection. “Nothing is more difficult,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “than knowing precisely what we see.” 43 My view is that many of us fail to know that the contents of our racial attitudes are indeterminate and context sensitive. This is not because our attitudes are unconscious, only difficult to interpret. It is, however, unclear what empirical evidence or metaphysical ur-facts could settle that our biases have one precise content rather than another. If we take a broadly functionalist approach to individuating mental content (and what other approach is there?), then their content is manifestly underspecified. Can we appeal to self-report, and attribute beliefs based on people’s sincere assertions? Not when the relations between implicit bias and sincere assertion are, to put it mildly, a big mess. The same is true if we look beyond self-report, for example to prereflective nonverbal behavior or perceptual judgment. White people with antiblack implicit biases are not, simply thereby, more likely to see black faces as angry; they must also interpret their bias as fear. So I am skeptical that there are pure, determinate facts about the content of implicit bias, which we then fail to know. What we can know is that this bias in this mind in this body in this environment is, say, fear of African Americans. But once we appreciate that each potential context plays a key role in shaping the meaning of our racial attitudes, then we should acknowledge that there is no neutral context that could, even in principle, reveal those attitudes in some unalloyed form.

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Disjunctivism Emphasizing the context-specificity of implicit bias, however, suggests another interpretation: disjunctivism. On this line (which is compatible with epistemicism), giving a full accounting of a given individual’s attitudes toward blacks might require us to say that they feel fear-in-context-C but sympathy-in-context-D, and so on. This individual might not generally fear black people—suppose, for example, he reliably marches and votes against policies that criminalize denizens of the black ghetto—but he does (determinately) fear tall dark-skinned men wearing hoodies when walking alone at night. Disjunctivism rests satisfied with a mere listing of all these contextindexed dispositions and denies that there is anything substantive to say about his racial attitudes that remains true across contexts. As with epistemicism, I have some sympathies with disjunctivism. I believe our racial attitudes (often) become determinate once embedded in context, so a sufficiently long and complex disjunction could perhaps describe an individual’s overall dispositional profile. But would this disjunction constitute the most accurate and perspicuous way to represent the contents of his racial attitudes? I doubt it. First, since disjunctivism refuses to say anything about what underlies or unifies the individual’s diverse race-related dispositions, it seems tantamount to abandoning an explanatory or illuminating account of racial bias altogether. Second, since the full disjunction may well be infinitely long, the disjunctivist tack makes even the descriptive project of capturing the phenomenology and psychology of racial bias come to seem hopeless. Disjunctivism is, then, not just compatible with, but may in fact entail, epistemicism. There are indefinitely many unknown and perhaps even unknowable contexts that could shape and be shaped by our implicit biases, making the true contents of those biases in principle unknowable as well. So it seems preferable to sum up individuals’ racial attitudes with an admirably short and sweet, but regrettably vague and open-ended content (namely, that they are implicitly biased!), with the understanding that this vagueness will often be determinately resolved in specific cases. That disjunctivism devolves into quietism and ignorance about both self and other may seem either a virtue or a vice, depending on one’s other philosophical leanings. My grounds for preferring indeterminism are also practical and similar in spirit to Haslanger’s critical-theoretical approach to race and gender, which asks which metaphysical views of these categories best serve our political aims. 44 Similarly, we might ask how best to conceptualize implicit bias for the purpose of resisting injustice. Which view is most useful, whether for generating new empirical research, or for motivating social change? Both epistemicism and disjunctivism seem to me to make the role for individual and collective responsibility obscure. How can we take

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responsibility for our biases if we can’t know what they are, or if what we do in one context is wholly irrelevant to what we do in another? My hunch is that with great indeterminacy comes great responsibility. Indeterminism makes salient that the biases we harbor hold the potential to guide us toward both just and unjust action—depending on our other habits, beliefs, and values, and the contexts in which we find ourselves. As Emily Lee writes, “why value openness and ambiguity? Open and ambiguous knowledge permits the possibility of becoming and change.” 45 So it is with indeterminism about implicit bias, which brings into sharpest relief the potential for change, both for better and for worse. Each of us is individually responsible for interpreting, reining in, and ultimately eradicating our implicit biases, as well as for holding others accountable for doing the same. We are, moreover, collectively responsible for structuring social environments that, among other things, encourage more accurate and virtuous self-interpretations and discourage vicious ones. But if I have convinced you of nothing else, I hope it is at least clear that the received aversive racism narrative, which portrays most Americans as unambiguously antiracist on the explicit level and irredeemably biased on the implicit level, is due for a rewrite. Our conscious egalitarianism is far more fragile and subject to contextual variation than commonly appreciated (or at least than was appreciated until about June 2015), and our implicit biases are also up for contextual grabs. Are these social gut feelings conscious or unconscious, reflectively endorsed or disavowed, representative of our real selves or alien implantations by external cultural forces? Are we afraid of the racial other or just afraid of appearing racist? Depending on context, the answer can be any or none of the above. We must own up to as much, and in particular own up to disowning our biases. 46 NOTES 1. See Pearson, Dovidio, and Gaertner, “Nature of Contemporary Prejudice.” 2. This chapter focuses on the spontaneous reactions driving performance on measures like the IAT. Yet our minds are populated with an array of arguably “implicit” cognitive structures that contribute to discrimination but may evade detection on IATs. See Del Pinal, Madva, and Reuter, “Stereotypes, Conceptual Centrality and Gender Bias.” 3. Madva, “Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility.” 4. Weiss, “Sedimented Attitudes and Existential Responsibilities,” 97 n. 14; see also 93, 99–100 n. 43. 5. Alcoff, “Sotomayor’s Reasoning,” 130 n. 17. 6. Glaser and Knowles, “Implicit Motivation to Control Prejudice.” 7. Hehman, Flake, and Calanchini, “Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing.” 8. On implicit bias and criminal justice, see Cholbi and Madva, “Black Lives Matter and the Call for Death Penalty Abolition,” sec. II. 9. See also Brownstein and Madva, “Normativity of Automaticity.” 10. Eric Schwitzgebel defends another kind of indeterminacy in Americans’ racial attitudes, such that aversive racists neither believe nor fail to believe that all races should be treated

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equally, in “Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs.” I argue that the very contents of our racial attitudes are indeterminate, although much of the evidence to follow may be amenable to Schwitzgebel’s analysis also. 11. Alcoff, Future of Whiteness, 74–90; Madva, “Plea for Anti-anti-individualism.” 12. E.g., Ngo, “Racist Habits,” 854. 13. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 7, 12. 14. Romdenh-Romluc, Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Merleau-Ponty, 18. 15. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 222. 16. Drews, Pasupathi, and Strayer, “Passenger and Cell Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving.” 17. Hugenberg and Bodenhausen, “Facing Prejudice” and “Ambiguity in Social Categorization.” In future work, I plan to discuss numerous subsequent studies finding similar patterns. 18. Levinson and Young, “Different Shades of Bias.” 19. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, sec. 8. 20. Alcoff, Visible Identities, 95. 21. Ibid., 179. 22. Lee, Lindquist, and Payne, “Constructing Bias,” 4; emphasis added. 23. Cone, Mann, and Ferguson, “Changing Our Implicit Minds.” 24. Oswald et al., “Predicting Ethnic and Racial Discrimination.” 25. Gawronski and Bodenhausen, “Associative and Propositional Processes in Evaluation.” 26. Dunham, Baron, and Banaji, “Development of Implicit Intergroup Cognition.” 27. Gawronski et al., “Understanding the Relations between Different Forms of Racial Prejudice,” 650. 28. Ranganath, Smith, and Nosek, “Distinguishing Automatic and Controlled Components of Attitudes.” 29. Brownstein, Madva, and Gawronski, “Understanding Implicit Bias.” 30. Cameron, Brown-Iannuzzi, and Payne, “Sequential Priming Measures of Implicit Social Cognition.” 31. This account of the inferential relations between spontaneous affective reactions and propositional judgments is puzzling, given that these theorists also argue that implicit biases are stored as mere contentless associations (e.g., Gawronski et al., “Understanding the Relations between Different Forms of Racial Prejudice,” 650, 660). How can a mere association “lead to” a gut feeling that in turn “implies” anything unless the original association also has intentional content? Are social psychologists running afoul of the “Myth of the Given”? Thanks to Gabby Johnson for discussion here, which I hope to address in future research. 32. Lee, Lindquist, and Payne, “Constructing Bias.” 33. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 55. 34. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 162 n. 2. 35. Alcoff, Visible Identities, 115. 36. I had hoped to say more here about implicit bias, norms, and hermeneutical injustice, but space limitations require deferring that discussion to future work. 37. Cooley et al., “Who Owns Implicit Attitudes?” 38. Burns, Monteith, and Parker, “Training Away Bias.” 39. Madva, “Virtue, Social Knowledge, and Implicit Bias”; Madva, “Biased against Debiasing”; Madva, “Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue.” 40. Duguid and Thomas-Hunt, “Condoning Stereotyping?” 41. Thanks to Andreja Novakovic for discussion. 42. Williamson, Vagueness. 43. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 59. 44. Haslanger, Resisting Reality. 45. Lee, “Towards a Lived Understanding of Race and Sex,” 85. 46. For insightful feedback, I am grateful to Michael Cholbi, Peter Ross, and especially Emily Lee, as well as to audiences at Washington University’s “Psychology of Prejudice” workshop (November 2017), Wake Forest University (April 2018), and Cal Poly Pomona’s “brown bag” workshop (April 2018).

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WORKS CITED Alcoff, Linda Martín. The Future of Whiteness. Malden, MA: Polity, 2015. ———. “Sotomayor’s Reasoning.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (2010): 122–38. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-6962.2010.01005.x. ———. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Al-Saji, Alia. “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily S. Lee, 133–72. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Brownstein, Michael, and Alex Madva. “The Normativity of Automaticity.” Mind & Language 27 (2012): 410–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2012.01450.x. Brownstein, Michael, Alex Madva, and Bertram Gawronski. “Understanding Implicit Bias: Putting the Criticism into Perspective.” Unpublished paper. Burns, Mason D., Margo J. Monteith, and Laura R. Parker. “Training Away Bias: The Differential Effects of Counterstereotype Training and Self-Regulation on Stereotype Activation and Application.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 73 (2017): 97–110. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.06.003. Cameron, C. Daryl, Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi, and B. Keith Payne. “Sequential Priming Measures of Implicit Social Cognition: A Meta-analysis of Associations with Behavior and Explicit Attitudes.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 16 (2012): 330–50. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1088868312440047. Cholbi, Michael, and Alex Madva. “Black Lives Matter and the Call for Death Penalty Abolition.” Ethics 128 (2018): 517–44. https://doi.org/10.1086/695988. Cone, Jeremy, Thomas C. Mann, and Melissa J. Ferguson. “Changing Our Implicit Minds: How, When, and Why Implicit Evaluations Can Be Rapidly Revised.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 56 (2017): 131–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2017.03.001. Cooley, Erin, B. Keith Payne, Chris Loersch, and Ryan Lei. “Who Owns Implicit Attitudes? Testing a Metacognitive Perspective.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 41 (2015): 103–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214559712. Del Pinal, Guillermo, Alex Madva, and Kevin Reuter. “Stereotypes, Conceptual Centrality and Gender Bias: An Empirical Investigation.” Ratio 30 (2017): 384–410. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/rati.12170. Drews, Frank A., Monisha Pasupathi, and David L. Strayer. “Passenger and Cell Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 14 (2008): 392–400. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013119. Duguid, Michelle M., and Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt. “Condoning Stereotyping? How Awareness of Stereotyping Prevalence Impacts Expression of Stereotypes.” Journal of Applied Psychology 100 (2015): 343–59. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037908. Dunham, Yarrow, Andrew S. Baron, and Mahzarin R. Banaji. “The Development of Implicit Intergroup Cognition.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (2008): 248–53. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.tics.2008.04.006. Gawronski, Bertram, and Galen V. Bodenhausen. “Associative and Propositional Processes in Evaluation: An Integrative Review of Implicit and Explicit Attitude Change.” Psychological Bulletin 132 (2006): 692–731. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.5.692. Gawronski, Bertram, Kurt R. Peters, Paula M. Brochu, and Fritz Strack. “Understanding the Relations between Different Forms of Racial Prejudice: A Cognitive Consistency Perspective.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 648–65. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0146167207313729. Glaser, Jack, and Eric D. Knowles. “Implicit Motivation to Control Prejudice.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2008): 164–72. Haslanger, Sally, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hehman, Eric, Jessica K. Flake, and Jimmy Calanchini. “Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing Is Associated with Regional Racial Biases of Residents.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 9, no. 4 (2017): 393–401. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1948550617711229.

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Hugenberg, Kurt, and Galen V. Bodenhausen. “Ambiguity in Social Categorization: The Role of Prejudice and Facial Affect in Race Categorization.” Psychological Science 15 (2004): 342–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00680.x. ———. “Facing Prejudice: Implicit Prejudice and the Perception of Facial Threat.” Psychological Science 14 (2003): 640–43. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.0956-7976.2003.psci_1478.x. Husserl, Edmund. Experience and Judgment. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Lee, Emily S. “Towards a Lived Understanding of Race and Sex.” Philosophy Today 49 (2005): 82–88. Lee, Kent M., Kristen A. Lindquist, and B. Keith Payne. “Constructing Bias: Conceptualization Breaks the Link between Implicit Bias and Fear of Black Americans.” Emotion 18, no. 6 (2018): 855–71. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000347. Levinson, Justin D., and Danielle Young. “Different Shades of Bias: Skin Tone, Implicit Racial Bias, and Judgments of Ambiguous Evidence.” West Virginia Law Review 112 (2010): 307–50. Madva, Alex. “Biased against Debiasing: On the Role of (Institutionally Sponsored) SelfTransformation in the Struggle against Prejudice.” Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4, no. 6 (2017): 145–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0004.006. ———. “Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99, no. S1 (2017): 53–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12212. ———. “The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue.” In Overcoming Epistemic Injustice, edited by by Benjamin R. Sherman and Stacey Goguen. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming. ———. “A Plea for Anti-anti-individualism: How Oversimple Psychology Misleads Social Policy.” Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 27 (2016): 701–28. https:// doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0003.027. ———. “Virtue, Social Knowledge, and Implicit Bias.” In Implicit Bias and Philosophy: Metaphysics and Epistemology, vol. 1, edited by Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul, 191–215. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/ 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198713241.001.0001/acprof-9780198713241-chapter-8. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013. Ngo, Helen. “Racist Habits: A Phenomenological Analysis of Racism and the Habitual Body.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 42, no. 9 (2016): 847–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0191453715623320. Oswald, Frederick L., Gregory Mitchell, Hart Blanton, James Jaccard, and Philip E. Tetlock. “Predicting Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: A Meta-analysis of IAT Criterion Studies.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 105, no. 2 (2013): 171–92. https://doi.org/ 10.1037/a0032734. Pearson, Adam R., John F. Dovidio, and Samuel L. Gaertner. “The Nature of Contemporary Prejudice: Insights from Aversive Racism.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3, no. 3 (2009): 314–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2009.00183.x. Ranganath, Kate A., Colin Tucker Smith, and Brian A. Nosek. “Distinguishing Automatic and Controlled Components of Attitudes from Direct and Indirect Measurement Methods.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2008): 386–96. Romdenh-Romluc, Komarine. Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010. Schwitzgebel, Eric. “Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs or the Gulf between Occurrent Judgment and Dispositional Belief.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91, no. 4 (2010): 531–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0114.2010.01381.x. Weiss, Gail. “Sedimented Attitudes and Existential Responsibilities.” In Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters, edited by Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge, 75–102. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. Williamson, Timothy. Vagueness. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Chapter Seven

A Phenomenology of Seeing and Affect in a Polarized Climate Emily S. Lee

Since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016, it has been very difficult for me not to be afraid of him and his supporters. It has been very difficult not to demonize him and his supporters. I have begun simply to dismiss his supporters out of hand. But this is contrary to my usual belief system. I was reminded of my belief system while reading Krista Tippett’s book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. Tippett quotes Frances Kissling, the longtime head of Catholics for Choice. Kissling states, “The polarization that exists on the abortion issue, in which people have called each other names and demonized each other for decades, definitely speaks against any level of truth that enables people to come to some commonality.” 1 Kissling continues to cite Sidney Callahan, a longtime prolife advocate, who states that “the hallmark of a civil debate is when you can acknowledge that which is good in the position of the person you disagree with.” 2 As much as I agree with these ideas theoretically, I find it incredibly difficult to practice in regard to Trump supporters, who include members of my family. I am not referring to the outright white supremacist, alt-right group members who support Trump. I refer to all those who voted Trump into office and do not consider themselves white supremacists, such as the Asian American members of my family who are also members of Californians for Trump. So I find myself not living up to my ideals; I find myself thinking about such Trump supporters in dismissive if not demonizing terms. I realize that many of the Trump supporters only see the poor and immigrants in thoroughly negative terms: as criminals, as opportunists, perhaps even as simply lazy people seeking state handouts. The question of race functions 107

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here because as Trump himself stated, he welcomes immigrants from Norway and those areas of the world. I aim to encourage Trump supporters to see otherwise about visibly specific immigrant populations, especially asylum seekers and refugees, because such Trump supporters are members of my family with whom I share holidays, because such Trump supporters make up part of the community who informs my child’s development. The political is personal. I aim to facilitate my ability not to see Trump supporters in dismissive, demonizing ways, in order to live up to my ideals so gracefully recalled by Tippett’s work. I trace the parameters to this possibility of perceiving otherwise within Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, especially his last work, The Visible and the Invisible. Merleau-Ponty locates the possibility of seeing differently within the chiasmatic relation between the visible and the invisible. Although he emphasizes the role of the world and the situations one finds oneself in, he also implicates the subject in this moment. In this interstice, I focus on the function of affect, mood, or emotion because so much of the reaction surrounding the Trump presidency is emotionally laden. Kym Maclaren’s, David Kim’s, and Alia Al-Saji’s work repositions emotion in the interstice between the subject and the world—this interstice, I argue, is between the visible and the invisible. I explore this interstice in order to explore the possibility of perceiving otherwise about others, especially others with whom I disagree. THE FUNCTION OF VISIBILITY IN CONCERNS OF RACE Racism hinges on the visible features of the body. 3 Through the visible differences of the body, one conjectures about the invisible differences of the person. Yet human bodies have visibly similar features as well as visibly different features. Racism and sexism highlight certain features. Certain body features are made visibly prominent; they are made to appear natural. But Merleau-Ponty writes, every individual is responsible for every instantiation of the accepted belief. Every interaction and experience is an opportunity to affirm or to deny a shared belief. As Merleau-Ponty writes, a naturalized knowledge “is not an inert mass in the depths of our consciousness . . . what is acquired is truly acquired only if it is taken up again in a fresh momentum of thought.” 4 One engages in recalling, beckoning, and focusing on such body features. Pointing to the naturalized status of the visibly different body features does not suffice; individual acceptance, individual involvement, matters. Race functions in the visible. As such, I focus on perceiving, not thinking, differently. As a phenomenologist, I have long accepted that changes in perception do not begin in thought but originate somewhere in my engage-

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ment with the world. It is not because I think that therefore I see. The relation between perception and thought is more complex, and the world plays a role. In regard to the divide that the United States is experiencing currently between Trump supporters and his opponents, logic and argument do not play a prominent role in persuading the opposing side. The two camps appear to work within two very different frameworks, with each framework following its own logic. The situation reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche and his position that affective states—emotion, desire, and mood—influence thought. In a rather binary structure, Nietzsche (more or less) prioritizes affect’s influence on thought. I am not sure I follow him. As a phenomenologist, I adhere to a more relational and contextual understanding of forces or motivations, particularly for perception. Hence, without reneging all the influence of thought and ideas, but considering the present circumstances around the Trump presidency where the role of arguments clearly falters, I explore the relation between affect and perception. To see otherwise about visibly different body features requires attentiveness to affective states. Alia Al-Saji’s work following Frantz Fanon has already definitively established and explored this relation between affect and perception in the context of race. Al-Saji writes, Though affect is pre-intentional, on the phenomenological account, it can provide the motivating and material support for the projective intentionality of racializing perception, and is hence implicated in naturalizing its reactive directionality. Affect and perception form two sides of the same phenomenon, linking that which is seen as racialized to its immediately felt effects on the racializing body. 5

Acknowledging her important work, and in the spirit of building from her work, in this chapter I focus on a specific structure of emotion: it’s relation to the world. I focus less on individualized affect and perception, but on the structure of affect as situated in the flesh of the world. MERLEAU-PONTY’S PARAMETERS Let us turn to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception first, before turning to emotion’s relational structure with the world. Merleau-Ponty’s work makes several controversial maneuvers. First, he conceptualizes the ontological as embodied. Such an ontological conceptualization requires that he relinquish the idea of universal knowledge. Merleau-Ponty argues that all knowledge is situated knowledge. As Richard Wolin writes, Merleau-Ponty shows a “willingness to surrender wholesale the idea of epistemological transparency: that is, the idea that somehow our knowledge of things could ever be exhaustive, consummate, and pure. For it is the perennially situated nature of

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the knowing subject that mocks omniscience and suggests finitude as the true transcendental ground of cognition.” 6 Second, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the importance of the experiences that embodied subjects undergo. He writes, “it is to experience therefore that the ultimate ontological power belongs.” 7 Merleau-Ponty takes experience seriously. Experience, which is usually abandoned for its inability to be absorbed into a universal analysis, serves as the site for meaning. 8 Third, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological framework is a philosophy of becoming. Merleau-Ponty’s system separates away from a philosophy of being, toward a philosophy of becoming. 9 Merleau-Ponty’s search for creativity is a search for the possibility of movement, of change, and of development—particularly human development. Fourth and finally, Merleau-Ponty locates the moment of creation within the moment of perception. He argues against the traditional understanding of consciousness as a completely constituting, pure power of signification and representation. It is not through reason alone that man discovers meaning. For Merleau-Ponty, creation occurs in the moment of the awakening of attention. 10 THE FLESH . . . VISIBILITY To understand how these four positions lead to the possibility of human beings perceiving otherwise, let us more closely examine the process of perception, particularly the perception of something new. In his last unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty offers an analysis of perception radically different from the traditional understanding of perception. 11 In the divide between the visible and the invisible, the invisible plays a pivotal role in the presentation of the visible. The most commonly understood and perhaps the simplest way of understanding the structure of the visible and the invisible is as the body and the mind, the object and the subject. As the subject, the invisible is oneself, the self who cannot be seen in the act of looking upon the object. As the subject, the invisible is “that which we forget because we are part of the ground.” 12 As the subject, James Phillips associates the invisible with the unconscious. 13 But the invisible is much more than simply mind or subject; such a conception aligns much more with Merleau-Ponty’s earlier endeavors. The invisible is, as Phillips indicates, the “nucleus of meaning-structures,” the “nuclei of signification.” 14 Or the invisible is, as Henri Maldiney writes, “the depth of the world . . . the unexpected of the world.” 15 The medium of the relation between the visible and the invisible MerleauPonty names as the flesh. “The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance, to designate it, we should need the old term ‘element,’ . . . in the sense of a general thing, a midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea.” 16 Visibility is the incredible moment when body and mind, subject and

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object, internal and external, signification and signified, coincide. The flesh accomplishes this feat, Merleau-Ponty writes, by folding back on itself. As Shannon Sullivan elaborates, “the ‘folding’ . . . gives birth to both subject and object and their interpenetration. Thus the notion of flesh speaks to us of the intertwining of an exchange (‘chiasm’) between the subject and the object which results in a fundamental ambiguity and possible reciprocity between them.” 17 With the notion of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty collapses traditional, sacred dualities. Alphonso Lingis beautifully states, “this intertwining, this chiasm effected across the substance of the flesh is the inaugural event of visibility.” 18 Within the shimmering between the visible and the invisible, through the medium of the flesh, perception occurs. 19 The shimmering occurs between the intentionality of the subject and the transcendence of the object. The intentionality of the subject is reflected in the subject’s prereflective direction toward and within the givenness of the world. 20 The transcendence of the perceived thing, as Renaud Barbarus eloquently elaborates, “does not qualify a relation to the subject but, indeed, the way of being of the perceived thing. Consequently, we should say that it is because the perceived thing is intrinsically distant—that is, exists as transcendence—that it makes possible a relation with a perceiving subject.” 21 The shimmering occurs also within the function of time. Hence, Gaile Weiss depicts the dialogue as “transcendence as a sense of openness to future projects as an existence-for-itself and immanence as a sense of rootedness to the past stemming from one’s objectification as a being-for-others.” 22 The shimmering occurs not only within the vacillation of movement between the subject and the object, but within a vacillation inherent in the subject herself living in the present within the immanence of one’s past and facing one’s transcendental future self. Perception occurs, amazingly enough, through this heavy thickness of time and space. Perception occurs through a haze of ambiguity. The structure of the visible and the invisible clarifies the intimacy of the relation between the visible features of the body and the invisible meanings that appear natural. The two are so entangled that one cannot see without the intertwining of the two. In this sense, it must be that when Trump supporters see refugees and immigrants (especially the refugees and immigrants with visibly racialized body features), they cannot see but with the immediacy of invisible meaning—a host of negative meanings from terrorism to violence and criminality. I recognize that I may be following the same perceptual structure, for I see white people as supporters of Trump. In the day after the election of Trump, I saw the domineering presence of whites at the supermarket and at the aquarium. I viscerally felt disgust and fear. I also felt the absence of Latin American bodies in these public spaces. Living in Southern California, Latin American people are usually a dominant presence. The only

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white people I do not fear are the white people I personally knew were as upset as me over Trump’s election. My Asian American family members trouble this relationship, for I do not immediately associate Asian American embodiment with such conservativism and racism and hence as supporters of Trump. I consider them misguided; I expect them to know better, and because they should know better, I am even more repulsed by their support of Trump. They remain an enigma, clearly, for although Asian Americans have lived in the United States for over a hundred years, immigrant communities occupy a part of our history and remain a part of the makeup of our current community. TOWARD PERCEIVING OTHERWISE For Trump supporters to see refugees and immigrants with different meaning, and for me to stop dismissing and demonizing Trump supporters, both groups need to see differently. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor point to the possibility of creativity within the shimmering vacillation of perception. They write that the dialogue “provides a direction for the becoming of both subjects and objects and yet retains the degree of indeterminacy or ambiguity required for the creative contributions of subjects and for the surprises that the world harbors.” 23 It is because flesh is so dense, so rich, so indeterminate that Merleau-Ponty ultimately locates creation and newness here. MerleauPonty does not simply address the creation of a few anomalies; he addresses the birth of the norms of society and the significations for understanding. Recall the following oft-quoted line from him: “Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it.” 24 Merleau-Ponty proposes that for human beings to truly experience the defining quality of humanity, we must participate in the activity of creation in whatever form. He does not isolate the act of creating to a specific form of expression, or to a specific type of life. I suggest that creating is a part of even the banal practices of life, especially in the act of perceiving. The process of creating is integral to living. So let us consider what entails creation and perceiving differently. Because Merleau-Ponty offers flesh and chiasmic reversibility as the site of meaning, let me turn to Véronique Foti’s article, because she aims to locate exactly what is creative within flesh. Foti locates the moment of creativity in the act of dislodging the too readily formed identity between matter and form/eidos. 25 She describes normal perception as the ready-made association of matter with its form. Creative perception and expression separate these ready-made formulas and reveal the possible wide dearth of meaning between matter and its eidos. She explains, “Visible Being, because of its very ‘doublure’ of the invisible, calls forth the effort at expression; it requires us

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to create it.” 26 Because the visible always embodies an invisible, expression provides human beings the possibility of disentangling the visible from its usual relationship with the invisible and perceiving another association with the invisible. Foti provides a springboard to think about creative perception, but let me point out that the visible cannot exist without an invisible, and the invisible cannot exist without a visible. I agree with Foti that creative perception requires hesitating from the ready-made associations of the two, but the two cannot exist in isolation. In other words, in order for the ready-made associations to separate, both features need another relation. I argue that the disruptions in ready-made associations will not occur without an invitation, a motivation for an alternative association. The usual suspects for explorations of creativity are imagination, attention, expression, and style. Merleau-Ponty and Merleau-Ponty scholars explore these four areas, though perhaps a little less on imagination. 27 But I believe that Merleau-Ponty ultimately does not rely on these usual suspects because something in the structure of these features emphasizes too much the internal within the subject projecting outwardly to the world. Such a relation evokes too much the rationalists/intellectualists and the prioritization of subjects acting upon the world. The materiality, the visible of the world, serves an integral role, indeed provides the inspiration for wonder and for creativity. But of course, the subject plays an active role in this productive, expressive relationship. I turn to emotions because on a phenomenological reading, emotion is not solely internal to the subject. Emotion is situated intertwined between the subject and the world; emotion demonstrates the subject’s intertwined state with the world. Emotion is in the flesh of the world. EMOTION’S CHIASMATIC POSITION BETWEEN THE SUBJECT AND THE WORLD Because this focus on seeing otherwise already admits that the change does not begin in thought but rather requires a different relation between the invisible and the visible, I turn to emotion and mood. The affective appears underdeveloped. Kym Maclaren’s work highlights an understanding of emotion as not simply internal to the subject but as chiasmatically intertwined with the world. Maclaren explains how phenomenology understands emotion differently from prevailing traditional understandings of emotion. Specifically, Maclaren makes three corrections: (1) emotions are not isolatable (or atomistic) and labelable; 28 (2) emotions are not irrational and do not prevent agency and freedom; 29 and (3) emotions are not projections of something internal to the subject onto the external world. 30 Maclaren writes,

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Maclaren concludes, “the world, as it gives itself to us in perception, prior to any thought or reflection about the world, is emotionally meaningful.” 32 She explains that the world is laden with emotion; as such, subjects do not experience emotion without a context, without a world. In other words, I read Maclaren as arguing that emotion demonstrates the subject and the world as chiasmatically intertwined. Although Maclaren clarifies the difference between the traditional understanding of emotion and the phenomenological understanding of emotion, let me point out that the more current philosophical treatment of emotion aligns with the phenomenological understanding of emotion. I point this out not to suggest in any way that Maclaren misrepresents the traditional understanding of emotion—because I believe that her portrayal of the traditional understanding of emotion is widely held. But philosophers other than phenomenologists share this position that emotion is not simply felt internally within the subject but in the world. So what exactly is emotion, and what is the force of emotion? David Kim distinguishes emotion from thought, but he also distinguishes emotion from desire or conatus: “Such cognitivist or conative accounts divest emotion of affect or feeling, which is the heart of emotion.” 33 Evoking the phenomenological sense of intentionality, Kim continues to include “[Peter] Stocker and [Michael] Goldie as well, [who] contend that whatever else emotion may be, our lived-experience shows that it is fundamentally a feelingful form of intentionality or an affective mode of awareness.” 34 Avoiding the sense of intentionality as a projection from the internal subject to the external world, Kim ultimately agrees with Maclaren. He writes, “Goldie contends that one of the features of emotion’s intentionality is that it is a feeling toward some relevant feature of the world. In the end, I do not think that this phrase, which suggests outward projection, describes our phenomenology adequately. Our experience [of emotion] is better described in terms of disclosures or presentings.” 35 Kim writes that because of emotion, “Something matters or has import in a dangerous way, offensive way, or an intriguing way precisely because of the types of feeling found in fear, resentment, or curiosity. If there was no feeling, nothing would matter to us.” 36 Kim highlights the interstitial, entangled state of emotion, for events in the world are already emotion laden. Emotion lies in the chiasmatic interstices between the subject and the world.

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I have noticed for a while now how I see differently depending on my mood. The world appears differently based on my mood. I have especially noticed that when I am tired and grumpy, I am inevitably prone to impatience. At such times, I encounter people who are inconsiderate, rude, and ultimately irrational. But when I am calm, relaxed, without any deadlines to meet or a to-do list so long that it appears overwhelming, I encounter the nicest people, people who are considerate and go out of their way to assist me. A significant number of these interactions has helped me to understand that the world and my moods chiasmatically intertwine. This does not demonstrate that the world simply reflects my internal projections. Rather, the mood depicts the intertwining of my subjectivity and the world, in the phenomenological understanding of the intertwining of the materiality of my embodiment and the significations in the world, the visible and the invisible. As such, Maclaren describes emotional tension “as a struggle not with some inner aspect of ourselves at odds with our grasp on reality, but with that very grasp on reality.” 37 As Kim concludes, “Feeling and worldly imports are facets of the same structure.” 38 What does it mean that emotion and the world share the same structure? How should we understand emotion as phenomena in the interstices between the world and the subject? To the extent that there is an appropriate emotion for an event in the world, the emotion serves both to interpret the happenings in the world and to affirm the events. In this sense, Kim describes the relation between emotion and the world as “world-constituting in addition to being world-disclosing.” 39 With this recognition of the structure of emotions and the intertwined state of the subject and the world, I want to think about the antagonistic and polarizing political and social climate since the election of Trump. Perhaps such antagonism was already brewing during the Obama presidency; he experienced very serious opposition from the legislative branch of our government since his inauguration. But in the recent, frequent descriptions of the state of our Congress as so entrenched in its divisiveness that they cannot pass any significant legislation, clearly the state of the present political climate is polarized and antagonistic. The mood of our country is antagonistic. This mood of antagonism contributes to the difficulty of seeing otherwise, of associating a different invisibility, a different meaning, onto certain visibly embodied people. Perhaps why Trump supporters see immigrants as opportunists instead of someone to help, why Trump supporters see poor people as burdens on society instead of people experiencing difficulty that any one of us might experience, is because of the polarized climate, the strong emotions flowing throughout the country. In this current antagonistic mood, I must admit that the two moods that dominate me are the moods of anger and guilt. I feel anger at the Trump supporters and all the members of Congress who do not resist him and his coterie enough. I feel anger at all the people who voted him into office. I feel

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anger at the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in the United States. As someone who works on the philosophy of race, I am at home with the feeling of anger. And I am very aware that anger has the propensity to proliferate, to grow, to spread. Anger self-perpetuates. Second, I feel guilt for not doing enough personally to resist Trump’s cabinet and his agenda. I feel guilt for not doing enough to help all those impacted by his policies, especially the immigrants. Trump supporters clearly feel anger too—witness the rallies in support of Trump, opposing the demonstrations against Trump. Although I am not sure if guilt is felt by Trump supporters, anger is clearly shared. Is the antagonistic mood of our country a chiasmatic reflection of the anger people feel in the current times? And reciprocally, is the anger people viscerally feel chiasmatically reflecting the antagonistic mood of the country? In recognizing the affective deadlock of the country, I realize I need to dig deeper. I am left contemplating Tippett’s words and the need to think more holistically, to think more richly, in order to break out of the oppositional stance against Trump supporters and to think about my commonality with them. I am trying to take a deep breath, to abate my anger and guilt. In taking this deep breath, I am trying to see Trump supporters not simply as deep seated bourgeois racists. I am trying to see Trump supporters as people, and paraphrasing Kissling in the interview with Tippett, see that which is good in the position of the person I disagree with. I am trying to understand them not as simply selfish, and greedy, if not evil. 40 I am attempting to work on my emotions. This is not to justify, empathize, or in any way to humanize some of the policies of the Trump administration—especially separating the children from their parents among immigrants and asylum seekers. But I recognize that my emotional temperament in this circumstance is not helping. I agree with Elizabeth Spelman and her forwarding (consistent with Aristotle) of the importance of the emotion of anger especially for political awareness. 41 I think that the emotion of anger is necessary in the awakening of political consciousness, but I am not certain that staying in anger is productive for bringing political disagreements to a conclusion. Recall Maclaren’s second position in regard to emotion: emotions are not irrational and do not prevent or foreclose agency and freedom. In other words, in recognizing our society and its people as mired in emotion, I do not posit that the emotions of anger and guilt solely negatively impact the people or the country. As Al-Saji writes, “Though it may be tempting to align racializing and responsive affects with so-called positive and negative emotions, such a categorization not only overlooks the way in which emotions can serve different functions (e.g., anger can be blind hostility or the beginning of critique), it also mistakes the nature of the difference between the affects in question.” 42 Anger and guilt can enable as well as disable the self and one’s world. More importantly, my emotion of anger and guilt is appropriate because my emo-

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tions not only disclose the world but constitute the world. In other words, my emotions do not simply reveal the world as something is going wrong, but my emotions construct the world as something is wrong. In stark contrast with the history of philosophical debate about the possibility of thought controlling emotions or emotions controlling thought, recognizing emotions are chiasmatically situated between the subject and the world as to be world disclosing and world constituting, let me turn to a question about emotional intelligence. In his book Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, John Gottman emphasizes that parents respect all the emotions from their children. Gottman explains that only on the grounds of such respect of their emotions will children be open to direction for how to express their emotions. Gottman paraphrases the work of Haim Ginott: Parents must show genuine respect for their children’s feelings. . . . Communication between parent and child must always preserve both parties’ self-respect. Statements of understanding should precede statements of advice. Ginott discouraged parents from telling children what they ought to feel, because that simply makes children distrust their feelings . . . Ginott believed that while not all behavior is acceptable, all feelings and wishes are acceptable. 43

This is a wildly popular parenting resource. I mention this book because it is consistent with Maclaren’s analysis of emotion within the context of Merleau-Ponty’s work in child psychology, specifically regarding a little boy of about two years of age named Gricha. But more directly for this present paper, Gottman’s call to respect all emotions helps me to understand that as much as we want to let children develop trust in their own emotions, my emotions are important for me. Respect for my emotions validates me. Emotions form an integral part of my subjectivity. Hence, I am not arguing that my feelings of anger and guilt are inappropriate or unproductive. For to ask me or the Trump supporters to feel otherwise is to invalidate us. Emotions are not irrational or prohibitive of agency and freedom; emotions, including the so-called negative emotions, not only reveal a subject’s character but constitute a subject. THE FLOW OF EMOTIONS My endeavors at abating my emotions of anger and guilt during this polarized time is not a call to control my emotions. Again, this falls into the traditional philosophical framework that prioritizes reason and its ability to control emotions. So what to do with the current scenario? I have several additional questions:

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• How should one perceive and feel about those who disagree with one? Clearly, I should not dismiss or demonize someone because I disagree with her. • Is there a separate category between Asian Americans who support Trump and people one must oppose, if not demonize, such as white supremacists? • Is understanding and communication in search of common ground really the solution for all disagreements, especially in regard to race? Most of my research focuses on the daily interactions, the minute, banal interactions, assuming that white supremacists are a different category. I focus on the banal interactions to highlight how these seemingly little interactions are significant. I treat white supremacists as a separate category. I do not know if this is a luxury today. Jose Medina writes that “just as gender violence and domestic abuse are typically preceded by verbal violence and stigmatizing expressive treatments that weaken subjects and make them vulnerable to harm, collective harms and atrocities . . . are typically preceded by symbolic stigmatizations of the targeted population and by particular expressive harms that become socially accepted and even habitual.” 44 In trying to see Trump supporters as somehow struggling with a need to protect their own, I hope not to trivialize the very serious dangers they are causing. I do not aim to normalize their inhumane policies and positions, paving the way for accepting them. I believe some positions must be absolutely opposed. Chantal Mouffe persuasively writes that “too much emphasis on consensus together with an aversion toward confrontation leads to apathy and disaffection with political participation. . . . While consensus is necessary, it must be accompanied by dissent.” 45 I agree with Mouffe in that certain policies must be opposed; consider slavery, Jim Crow laws, difference in pay based on gender. The problem lies in determining when to oppose and when to work toward consensus building, especially considering Merleau-Ponty’s position that we are all situated beings. In trying to abate my anger, I am trying to remember Merleau-Ponty’s words in “The Yogi and the Proletariat”: “what if, in the social order, no one were innocent and no one absolutely guilty? What if it were the very essence of history to impute to us responsibilities which are never entirely ours? . . . We would then be in the difficult situation of never being able to condemn with a good conscience, though it is inevitable that we do condemn.” 46 In my situatedness, I do not have access to some infinite all-knowing truth. I believe in this epistemic position. Under such circumstances, I am aware that I need to address my affect, my emotions, if I am to see otherwise about Trump supporters. Recall Fanon’s analysis that racializing affect is rigid, racializing affect is stuck. Al-Saji writes, “‘Affective ankylosis’ conveys, at once, the rigidity,

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immobility, and numbing that characterize racializing affects; it explains the recalcitrance of these affects. The rigidity of racializing affect can be witnessed in its temporality, for this affect is not only frozen in its response but repetitive in its form.” 47 As my emotions constitute the world and me, I understand that rigidly holding onto these emotions is not good for me. The emotions must flow. Maclaren posits the role of others to promote emotional metamorphoses. As much as others cause emotional tension, others also model means for emotional metamorphoses. She writes, “Emotion is not an internal conscious event, but rather the experience of a tension within our reality that puts into question our place in reality. . . . Other people play an essential role in producing such a constrained situation . . . others can lend us new existential resources for making sense of our situation.” 48 Our immediate community matters, but with the opportunity to choose, we tend to surround ourselves with like-minded folks. Of course, we do not completely choose our family members. In the current situation, it is difficult to determine who to model or if there is anyone to model to develop out of this situation. Al-Saji recommends hesitation in these moments to staid emotions. AlSaji details five ways hesitation reconfigures affect, but I cite only the last. To hesitate is to delay and to make affect wait. The incompleteness, both of affect and of that to which affect responds, is here felt. To wait is to testify that time makes a difference for experience, that all is not given in the present. To wait . . . is not only to be open to a futurity that escapes prediction, but also to a past that can be dynamically transformed through the passage of events, and that grounds the creative potential of events. This breaks with the closure of the past and the predetermination of the future found in racialization. 49

Perhaps this paper is a call for hesitation. I understand that I am not alone in experiencing discomfort with members of my family making political and moral decisions with which I disagree. In the wake of the Trump election, the amount of time families spend together during holidays has significantly diminished, with some families not meeting at all. 50 Clearly these are polarized times. In knowing that others play an important role in promoting emotional tension and emotional metamorphoses, such disagreements within the family make a deeper affective impact. Al-Saji forwards the importance of the influence of living with others impacting our affective attachments to them and influencing how we see with these people. 51 So I am not sure that the familial strife during this polarized time challenges Al-Saji’s analysis, or perhaps such divides within families illustrate the lack of attachments among the members of families. I was advised not to engage in political conversations with my family members to keep the peace. Now I wonder if such silence actually does not contribute to nurturing relationships. Or perhaps such political conversations

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draw too much on arguments and logic, which do not help our affective conditions. I do not know. I do know such affective discord cannot remain stagnant. CONCLUSION Merleau-Ponty’s work implies that every racist perception is a result of a specific signification of the visible features of the body; to break out of the framework of racism requires perceiving a new meaning about body features. Because racism hinges on the visible features of the body, which have acquired invisible meaning, it is necessary to disrupt the ready-made associations of the visible and the invisible and to create new relations between the two. This paper explores the function of emotion in the ready associations we draw from the visible features of the body, specifically the association Trump supporters make about immigrants as dangerous and criminals and the association I make about whiteness with Trump supporters that the Asian American members of my family trouble. Within a phenomenological understanding of emotion, emotion both discloses and constitutes the world and the subject. Without immediate or ready-made solutions and recognizing that others serve as models for emotional metamorphoses, as Maclaren writes, let me end with one last image from Tippett’s book: In 2015, the Confederate flag was finally lowered and transferred from state houses to museums in several southern states, but not before a horrific shooting of nine African Americans inside their church in the center of Charleston, South Carolina, by a young white Supremacist. . . . In the ensuing weeks, an image went viral of a black South Carolina state trooper, Leroy Smith, gently guiding a white supremacist to a seat after he was overcome by heat at a rally protesting the move of the Confederate flag. What he saw, he told a New York Times reporter, was a fellow human being, an older man, in trouble. 52

I am left with the tried and tested words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” 53 Emotion may entrench us in our current divide, but the solution is not in ignoring the emotion, or controlling the emotion. The solution will lie in emotion as well. NOTES 1. Tippett, Becoming Wise, 32. 2. Ibid., 33. 3. I can cite extensively in this regard. Consider Patricia Williams, who recounts her experiences publishing an article explicating the now quite famous case of her denied entrance

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to a Benetton store. Williams writes that the editors erased all references to the fact that she is a black woman, effectively erasing all means for understanding that she was denied entrance because of racism. Williams writes that “what was most interesting to me in this experience was how the blind application of principles of neutrality, through the device of omission, acted either to make me look crazy or to make the reader participate in old habits of cultural bias” (Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 48). See my analysis of this scenario in Lee, “Madness and Judiciousness.” 4. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 130. 5. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 140. 6. Wolin, “Merleau-Ponty and the Birth of Weberian Marxism,” 117. 7. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 110. 8. See Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 94–95. 9. Barbarus, “Perception and Movement,” 80. 10. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 28–29. 11. Note that a vertical structure of the invisible and the visible replaces the horizontal structure of the gestalt, organized as the figure and the ground. Merleau-Ponty moves away from the notion of the gestalt upon which he had so strongly relied in his earlier works. See Phillips, “From the Unseen to the Invisible,” 83. 12. Olkowski, “Continuum of Interiority and Exteriority,” 11. The mind and all that is ineffable and ethereal are usually associated with the invisible, whereas the body and all that are sensuous and concrete are traditionally relegated to the world of matter, the visible. 13. Phillips, “From the Unseen to the Invisible,” 80. 14. Ibid. 15. Maldiney, “Flesh and Verb in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty,” 56. 16. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 144. 17. Sullivan, “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” 9. 18. Lingis, Translator’s preface, lvi. 19. Evans and Lawlor, “Introduction,” 3–4. 20. Reuter, “Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Pre-reflective Intentionality,” 77. 21. Barbarus, “Perception and Movement,” 82. 22. Weiss, Body Images, 10. 23. Evans and Lawlor, “Introduction,” 4. 24. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 197. 25. Foti, “Painting and the Re-orientation of Philosophical Thought,” 116. 26. Ibid., 119. She cites Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 170. 27. There is a plethora of work exploring imagination for its political influences, but I do not follow this road here, because again this prioritizes a projection of the internal onto the external. See Medina, Epistemology of Resistance. 28. Maclaren, “Emotional Metamorphoses,” 29. 29. Ibid., 26. 30. Ibid., 28. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 28–29. 33. Kim, “Shame and Self-Revision,” 112–13. 34. Ibid., 113. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Maclaren, “Emotional Metamorphoses,” 33. 38. Kim, “Shame and Self-Revision,” 114. Al-Saji agrees with this understanding of affect. She writes, “The structure of affect undermines several dichotomous schemas: it lies at the hinge of passivity-activity, but also inside-outside, or more accurately, self-affection and hetero-affection” (“Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 146). 39. Kim, “Shame and Self-Revision,” 115. 40. I am thinking of this in the spirit of the work of Arlie Russel Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land.

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41. Elizabeth Spelman writes that anger works “to take yourself seriously—seriously enough, anyway, to trust and perhaps express your own strong sense that something really crummy is going on . . . have the right or the ability to pass the kind of judgment on a person or on a state of affairs that being angry assumes” (“Anger,” 44). 42. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 144. 43. Gottman, Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, 34–35. 44. Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 250. 45. Ibid., 275. Medina cites Chantal Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Public Sphere,” in The Pragmatist Imagination, ed. J. Ockman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 72. 46. Merleau-Ponty, “Yogi and the Proletarian,” 222. 47. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 141. 48. Maclaren, “Emotional Metamorphoses,” 42. 49. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 148. 50. Fox, “Did Trump Ruin Thanksgiving?” 51. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 160–61. 52. Tippett, Becoming Wise, 114. 53. King, A Testament of Hope, 594.

WORKS CITED Al-Saji, Alia. “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment and Race, edited by Emily S. Lee, 133–72. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Barbarus, Renaud. “Perception and Movement: The End of the Metaphysical Approach.” In Chiasm: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, edited by Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, 77–88. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Evans, Fred, and Leonard Lawlor. “Introduction: The Value of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the Modernism/Postmodernism Debate.” In Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, edited by Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, 1–21. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Foti, Véronique M. “Painting and the Re-orientation of Philosophical Thought in MerleauPonty.” Philosophy Today 24, nos. 2/4 (Summer 1980): 114–20. Fox, Maggie. “Did Trump Ruin Thanksgiving? Study Shows 2016 Election Split Families.” NBC News, May 31, 2018. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/did-trump-ruin-thanksgiving-study-shows-2016-election-split-families-n879001. Gottman, John. Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1997. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hochschild, Arlie Russel. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning in the American Right. New York: New Press, 2016. Kim, David. “Shame and Self-Revision in Asian American Assimilation.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily S. Lee, 103–32. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. King, Martin Luther, Jr. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches. New York: HarperCollins, 1986. Lee, Emily S. “Madness and Judiciousness: A Phenomenological Reading of a Black Woman’s Encounter with a Saleschild.” In Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, edited by Maria Lupe Davidson, Kathryn Gines, and Donna-Dale Marcano, 237–48. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Lingis, Alphonso. Translator’s preface to The Visible and the Invisible by Maurice MerleauPonty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

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Maclaren, Kym. “Emotional Metamorphoses: The Role of Others in Becoming a Subject.” In Embodiment and Agency, edited by Sue Campbell, Letitia Meynell, and Susan Sherwin, 25–45. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Maldiney, Henri. “Flesh and Verb in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty.” In Chiasms: MerleauPonty’s Notion of Flesh, edited by Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, 51–76. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Medina, Jose. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. ———. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. ———. “The Yogi and the Proletarian.” In The Primacy of Perception, edited by James M. Edie, translated by Nancy Metzel and John Flodstrom, 211–28. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Olkowski, Dorothea. “The Continuum of Interiority and Exteriority in the Thought of MerleauPonty.” In Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, edited by Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley, 1–21. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Phillips, James. “From the Unseen to the Invisible: M-P’s Sorbonne Lectures as Preparation for His Later Thought.” In Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, edited by Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley, 69–89. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Reuter, Martina. “Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Pre-reflective Intentionality,” Synthese 118 (1999): 69–88. Spelman, Elizabeth. “Anger: The Diary (Excerpts).” American Philosophical Association Newsletter 98, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 43–46. Sullivan, Shannon. “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.” Hypatia 12, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 1–19. Tippett, Krista. Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. New York: Penguin, 2016. Weiss, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York: Routledge, 1990. Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Wolin, Richard. “Merleau-Ponty and the Birth of Weberian Marxism.” Praxis International 5, no. 2 (July 1985): 115–30.

Chapter Eight

Race Consciousness Phenomenologically Understood Lewis R. Gordon

Phenomenology explores the complexity of meaning constituted by a conception of consciousness that is intentional, directed, active, and attuned to the evidential elements of appearance. Phenomenology is also critical of ontological presuppositions that may interfere with meaningful dimensions of lived experience and by extension lived reality. Race, considered through such an approach, should be explored as a meaningful relationship in which appeals to “ontology” may be irrelevant except insofar as a critique of appealing to it is the immediate object of inquiry. I offer here, first, a discussion of phenomenology; second, a discussion of race in historical terms; third, another in phenomenological terms; and, fourth, an exploration of some implications that may follow for the study of race as a human science in phenomenological terms. PHENOMENOLOGY There are many lines of phenomenology ranging from those formulated in German idealism in Europe and pragmatist inquiries in North America to African and Asian interrogations into consciousness and the human relationship to the world across a variety of approaches from the existential to the transcendental and combinations thereof. Despite the rich variety, it is the Husserlian approach that looms large to the point of its almost being a synecdoche of phenomenology. Drawn from an insight from Edmund Husserl’s teacher Franz Brentano, the basic premise on which this form of phenomenology is based is the intentional theory of consciousness. 1 Consciousness, from this perspective, is 125

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always of something. Eliminate all objects of consciousness, including the experience of thinking about anything through the absence of everything, and the point becomes apparent. No objects, no consciousness. “Objects,” however, are ambiguous. They could mean what is objectified on one hand or what is simply encountered as “there” on the other. The former requires investing in what are called “phenomena” in the everyday realm of what phenomenologists call the “natural attitude.” This involves taking things and our way of engaging them as what they are. The condescending term “naïve” is often used to refer to this way of being, although it’s not meant to be pejorative. It simply means our unreflective relationship with the world we live in or reality. 2 Phenomenology begins when we put to the side our naïve or unreflective attitudes and begin a process of attentiveness or focus on how things appear. In this movement we pay attention to things as phenomena. The mythic origins of the word “phenomena” bring this insight to the fore. From the Persian god Phanes (manifestation), who was in turn an offspring of the god Chronos (time), phenomena already establish a relationship with reality that all conscious subjects share, which is that reality in the least should appear or be made manifest. 3 The preposition “of” establishes the relational element here. Consciousness never stands alone. The relational aspect of consciousness pertains to a variety of other phenomena made manifest through consciousness. Experience, after all, is always experience of something. So are feelings and other affective phenomena. An arrow pointing to a variable could easily designate this relational element: —► x The arrow here is not meant to be a thing but instead a signification of the relationship. Thus, in everyday terms, there is simply: x That the reader is looking at that x constitutes a consciousness of it, which is what was signified in the initial formulation. Now, if we bracket or parenthesize the x, we have the properly phenomenological formulation: —► (x) This formulation can itself be reformulated from bracketing or parenthesizing as an act of ontological suspension. What this means is that we are

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putting to the side the ontological status of x in this moment of focusing on it. At this point, we have initiated a phenomenological inquiry. Now, already crucial in these movements, which in specialized terms are called movements of phenomenological reduction, we have already offered several philosophically rich considerations. First, in the second instance, when I switched to the reader observing the x, there is already admission of an intersubjective, communicable relationship. Although I may engage in phenomenological inquiry by myself, it is never in fact as myself since each stage is subject to evidential possibilities beyond myself. This is what it means for intentionality to be properly relational. Second, if I decide to question this process, in which there is always an implicit “we,” I must do so critically through parenthesizing or ontological suspension of each stage. I must not, in other words, take any stage for granted, which means I cannot also presume the rigor of phenomenology. I must attempt to go about questioning critically each stage instead of presuming its legitimacy. Husserl called this philosophical endeavor transcendental phenomenology or philosophical phenomenology. The main thing is that its critical self-evaluation is akin to a procedure in logic and mathematics, which involves evaluating the rules of the system to see if they are consistent. Unlike logic and mathematics, however—where the question is posed in advance whether each procedure is logical or mathematical—this phenomenological inquiry should not ask itself if its movements would be phenomenological. It must be radical in the sense of bringing all theoretical resources, including itself, into question, which means exploring how critical we can be about any thought whatsoever and maintain the coherence of thought or thinking as an enterprise. 4 If we eliminate thinking and thought, we should be left, pretty much, consciousness without an object of intention. This, however, would collapse into a nothingness of which there couldn’t be consciousness since that would make that an object of consciousness. There must, then, be something of which we think when we think about thought. Arriving at thinking whatsoever as an intention of thought has a form. It is this: —► (x) That form, then, is arrived at as the grounding of any intellectual effort. That relationship Husserl not only considered to be the grounding of phenomenology philosophically but also formulated as the transcendental ego. That ego is not a thing but a relationship. The transcendental ego as a relationship means there is no ego behind consciousness. Instead, there is an ego constituted in the relationship of consciousness to that of which it is conscious. This is the theory of constitutionality in phenomenology. It is a core concept that informs many areas of

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phenomenological thought, especially phenomenological sociology, where the social construction of reality also means the realization of social reality as constituted by intersubjectivity and communication. 5 That there is no ego behind consciousness but instead one constituted in conscious acts suggests that the age-old divide between existentialism and transcendental phenomenology may be a false dilemma. Existential thought begins with the insight that to appear is to stand out. To experience one’s own appearance involves the same. The word “existence” is derived from the Latin expression ex sistere, which means to stand out. Thus to stand in an existential relationship with oneself is to stand out from oneself. Jean-Paul Sartre famously criticized Husserl on these grounds. 6 There is neither an ego behind the ego nor one behind consciousness. What Sartre failed to see is that Husserl asserted no such thing. A crucial element in each moment of phenomenological reduction to consider is that as a moment of theoretical reflection it is also one of decision. This element, which is at the heart of all theory, involves the responsibility of seeing what one sees, hears, smells, feels, thinks, or experiences. In each theoretical movement, then, is an effervescence of freedom. Freedom, however, is not necessarily easy to bear. Responsibility is a weight that some of us prefer to avoid, and in so doing, we attempt to evade freedom. Here there is the paradox of freedom. To have it is to have the ability to attempt its evasion. We could make the attempt through resources of lying, which include self-lying and its concomitant forms of denial. In existential phenomenology, this phenomenon is called bad faith. The famous early analysis of this phenomenon, in French mauvaise foi, is Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’être et le néant (1943). 7 It is the primary text in response to which, among Sartre’s novels up to that point, Gabriel Marcel offered his famous critique through which he also coined the term “existentialism.” 8 Now, an important thing to remember is that, although the expression “bad faith” has the word “bad” in it, it is not always the case that retreating to bad faith is a bad thing. It simply means placing one’s faith in that which is not true, or put differently, it is investment in a pleasing falsehood. There are varieties of manifestations of such falsehoods, but at times, especially during moments of great suffering, denying the truth is excusable. Think of trauma. Or think of torture. A form of bad faith is the denial of one’s embodiment. It’s not a good idea to be fully embodied, however, during experiences of torture. So the point here is that although appealing to a falsehood could at times be immoral or unethical, it is not always so. It can, in the words of the speech-acts theorist J. L. Austin, at times be excusable. 9 The question of embodiment brings us full circle with our initial phenomenological reflections. Remember that an intended object is a there. For a there to exist there must be a here. These are relational terms. The here,

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however, is simply a point from which there can be constituted. Among phenomenological philosophers, this is called the Body. 10 Imagine a dot. If that point were a perspective or point of view, it would experience itself as wholly embodied, though from another perspective it may be a mere point on a flat plane. The idea here is that in order for consciousness to have a there by which it is constituted it must be somewhere. That somewhere is the body. Thus, for there to be a conscious denial of one’s embodiment would be a performative contradiction. It would be a form of bad faith. Embodiment sets the basis for a variety of philosophical and social relationships. Among them is the world of selves and others, and the accountability in that world involves evidentiality and communication. Although one could reason with oneself, so to speak, there is a difference between treating the self analogically—where there is simply a projected doubling of the self—versus the self as an Other, which places that self among others in a stream of what is, in a word, public. The publicity of selves and others demand communicating what stands before all that, at least in principle, is communicable or learnable. That bad faith could intervene means, then, that each phenomenological act must subject itself to a critical relationship to evidence. This criterion raises questions of whether what is being examined has subjugated evidence or is subject to it. If it is the former, then it is a form of epistemic colonization of the process. This is why phenomenology cannot presume logic or phenomenology as intrinsically legitimate when it interrogates itself. I have argued elsewhere that this is the postcolonial affinity of phenomenology. 11 Nelson Maldonado-Torres argues that this aspect is its own kind of reduction, which he calls a “decolonial reduction.” 12 I see this as more a matter of emphasis than distinction. After all, phenomenology concedes the possibility of prejudice among phenomenologists. Husserl, for instance, infamously attempted to demonstrate the intrinsic reasonability of Europe. 13 Frantz Fanon, among others, showed that this was no less than a form of unreasonable reason. 14 Indeed, the Euromodern investment in making reason European was no less than an effort to yoke reason to its ethno-racial dictates. And if that were consistently applied, then a form of instrumental rationality of consistency, which entails maximum consistency in order to be complete, would lead to a model of rationality that was hyper-rational. Made plain, hyper-rational rationality is unreasonable. 15 So, in effect, the decolonizing of knowledge, logic, and also phenomenology requires ontological suspensions or parenthesizing of normative epistemic idols. What is this, however, but an instantiation of the practical demonstration of an unimpeded arrival at the nakedness of our relation to thought once epistemic colonizing elements have been cast aside?

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In phenomenological and metaphilosophical terms, then, phenomenology already raises an important question for the study of race, if we concede that race and racism are generated from colonizing practices. Two additional considerations. The use of the word “consciousness” is not without criticism in an age marked by antiessentialism and postmodern rejections of subjects. The appeal to such a term, such critics would avow, is a sign of the continued ghost of “the” subject. Eradicate such remnants, as critics such as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas have argued, and one could focus on practices by which they are produced. 16 A similar set of criticisms emerges in the debate between hermeneutical phenomenology and phenomenological hermeneutics. Is consciousness an interpreted phenomenon or is interpretation a phenomenon of which there is consciousness? What is consciousness without meaning and what is meaning without consciousness of what is meant? 17 Phenomenologists ranging from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to the later JeanPaul Sartre and those influenced by them such as Peter Caws, along with many other philosophers of culture such as Ernst Cassirer, Drucilla Cornell, and Kenneth Panfilio, and this author, argue a false dilemma is afoot. 18 After all, once consciousness is rejected as a thing but instead understood as a relationship without completeness, then the capacity for the production of meanings could be endless. Outside of the Husserlian tradition, this is certainly the case not only with functionalist models among a neo-Kantian such as Ernst Cassirer but also an African pragmatist philosopher such as Kwasi Wiredu and an East Indian transcendentalist such as Sri Aurobindo. 19 In stream with Aurobindo, I would like to add that a rejection of a single, thing-like attribute to consciousness entails the manifestation of more than one function. This means that consciousness could be constituted in an act that constitutes other openings from consciousness such as arts, communication, culture, language, mind, sciences, and more. It is in this framework that phenomenology offers much for the study of race, for it goes beyond asking what race “is” to instead explore what it means and how it is lived. RACE IN HISTORICAL TERMS That race is historical is evident in there having been times without race. The term itself goes back at least to the tenth century in Andalusian Spain, where Afro-Muslims ruled for nearly a millennium. Reaching the southern regions of France and dominating the Mediterranean, this group affected the world of Christendom, which had conceived of itself eschatologically as the end of history. Having to deal with the presence of Jews despite their condemnation in the Holy Roman Empire, Christendom faced a ruling force that also stood

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outside of St. Augustine’s proverbial relished city. The generic word for these two groups, which was also linked to breeds of dogs and horses, was raza. It was the prototype for race. 20 This is not to say that people did not make distinctions, prejudicial and otherwise, among themselves and toward other groups before the emergence of race. The people of which I speak are, of course, members of our species Homo sapiens, which has been around for roughly 220,000 years, with most of those years taking place on the African continent, the place of its birth. Up to nearly 200,000 of those years were spent with other species of hominids, some of whom were absorbed through interbreeding into the Homo sapiens population. 21 Species difference clearly did not overcome affinities for the purposes of sexual reproduction. A basic epistemological point should be borne in mind here. A species incapable of making distinctions not only between itself and other species and genera but also among members of its own species would jeopardize its survival. Add to this the necessities a knowledge-based species faces. Knowledge cannot emerge without the ability to make distinctions, which means, then, a knowledge-based species would live by a proliferation of such. 22 Think of what a zeal or dazzle of zebras looks like to human beings. Each zebra sees, however, a broad range of differences between itself and the others. Think, in turn, of what zebras and other animals “see” when they look at a group of human beings. We might as well be our perception of the same for zebras. A similar phenomenon occurs among members of families. Outsiders see them as looking alike, while each family member sees all the difference in the world. Our ability to make such distinctions among each other is epistemic evidence of our belonging to the same species. Although this is an experiential and epistemological point—one that is, of course, not foolproof because of the complexities of what lies beneath such perception— it is important for the understanding of distinctions and meanings in human communities, which is where the action of race and racism takes place. There is no shortage of historical iconographies of human morphological difference. What those differences meant to those who produced them is what is at stake, and the fallacy of placing present-day categories onto the past is not short of suitors. Indeed, the effort to rewrite the past on the basis of the present leads to historical erasure of so many kinds that the ridiculous takes on the veneer of legitimacy because of a resulting failure to think otherwise. Notions of a segregated past lead to misconceptions of an adulterated moment of first contact. Thus, despite evidence of human groups always finding other communities of human beings throughout the history of our species, investments remain in polygenic origins. Despite Africa’s and Europe’s clear close proximity and evidence of trade over several millennia, notions of an exclusively white Europe persists. I don’t add the symmetry of an exclusively black Africa because of the historic fact that light-skin

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morphology succeeded dark skin over the course of our species. Like it or not, human origins point to our embodied consciousness’s having first been in a dark hue. Things changed, however, since the end of the fifteenth century, when the Afro-Muslims were defeated in Grenada and Columbus took to the seas and landed in the Bahamas. Those events transformed a theonaturalism of difference, as too many who stood outside of the grace of Christendom were neither Jew nor Moor. Accounting for such people required a philosophical anthropology that appealed to more than what the Bible offered, and along its path raza began to receive its transformation. Alongside the transformation from theonaturalism to secular naturalism was the shift from trade across the Mediterranean, which was dominated by the Islamic world, to the Atlantic and a burgeoning world of “conquest” and profit. I place “conquest” in quotation marks because that is the term to which those from what is today Europe designated themselves. For the Indigenous peoples who have inherited this imposition on their history, “invasion” is the appropriate term. 23 These combined forces of avowed conquest and profit affected the perception of those who conducted such practices, and although the initial population of predominantly Christian invaders was multiracial—a typical painting from sixteenth-century Iberian cities, such as Portrait of Duke Alessandro de’Medici by Bronzino, would reveal such—the course of profit soon turned profiteers onto each other. 24 This history took a moral, political, and economic course from outraged Spanish priests protesting the facing genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the “Americas” to rationalizations, as a once economic-depleted Christendom, marked by an obsessive ascetic search for purity, grew fat on global spoils, of the transformation of people into property with Africa as the focus of primitive accumulation. The quotation marks around “America” should alert the reader to an important consideration. That name is, after all, an eponym of one of the avowed “conquerors,” the late fifteenth- through early sixteenth-century cartographer, explorer, navigator, and fancier Amerigo Vespucci. The Indigenous peoples had their own names for the countries and regions of their birth, and in the twentieth century confederations of those in the Southern hemisphere gathered to do something about it. As Catherine Walsh recounts: Abya Yala is the name that the Kuna-Tule people (of the lands now known as Panama and Colombia) gave to the “Americas” before the colonial invasion. It signifies “land in full maturity” or “land of vital blood.” Its present day use began to take form in 1992 when Indigenous peoples from throughout the continent came together to counter the “Discovery” celebrations, “to reflect upon 500 years of the European invasion and to formulate alternatives for a better life, in harmony with Nature and Human Dignity.” 25

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The term refers to what is for the most part today called “the Americas.” Chattel slavery in the colonizers’ America needed its rationalization, and as the goals of conquest and profit became the final arbiters, accompanying philosophical anthropologies followed. 26 A system that rationalized a group of people with the right to possess everything necessitated outrage against others acquiring anything. In that process, it was not only race but also specialized embodiments of it that were born each with their logic of haves versus should-not-haves. Euromodern societies, presumed white and deserving of wealth, were born. RACE IN PHENOMENOLOGICAL TERMS This brief historical overview already hints at some basic insights into the lived realities of race. For one thing, race never emerged by itself. It was part of a process through which other elements were coextensive and coexisting. No people lived as racial alone, for instance, but they were so through engendered and economically located manifestations. Race, in other words, can never appear by itself. What complicates the matter is that none of the other ways human beings appear are possible in and of themselves as well. Understanding human beings relationally, we see that each changed relationship produces different kinds of relationships. Thus, whatever relations offered meanings for what many people were, their changes affected what people became. Women, for instance, were not constants across human worlds. The Christendom that took to the Atlantic was heavily informed by Aristotelian conceptions of human beings drawn from literature retrieved from the Crusades against the Muslim civilizations that translated, interpreted, and to some extend preserved those ancient texts. The Aristotelian model was misogynist, with a conception of women in Περὶ ζῴων γενέσεως (On the Generation of Animals) as underdeveloped men. This notion of fully formed men received its challenge in the notion of underdeveloped peoples across the globe. Realigning its logic led to the notion of fully developed people in Europe, which meant white men and white women. “White women,” it turns out, are creatures of the Euromodern world, alongside Indigenous peoples, Amerindians, blacks, and so forth. Yet such beings carried along the sexual baggage of their historically material exclusion. Thus, in addition to “women” read as “white,” there were also sex and sexualities bursting from the seams. 27 What becomes clear is that as these new kinds of beings emerged, so, too, did new kinds of consciousnesses, since they related to worlds of different kinds of phenomena. Race consciousness, among these consciousnesses, faced then a multitude of possibilities as historical events unfolded.

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The lived reality of race, as relational, is always saturated with many challenges. A common feature under a history of colonization and enslavement is that its semiological features are not symmetrical. “White,” for instance, is not simply the opposite side of “black” and vice versa. On one hand there could be the attempt to make them two contraries, which would be two equally opposed universals. This would mean “all” versus “none,” in which neither meets. Yet a glance at the logic of each would reveal what Frantz Fanon would call the sociogenic telos of each. 28 White, after all, regards itself as an aspiration in this system in which it regards blacks as a zone from which to create a great distance. This leads to the logic of a white governed system to be straightforward: (1) “Be white!” and (2) “Avoid being black.” 29 It is, of course, a binary, which should alert us to its fundamental flaw of Manichaeism. To maintain itself it must elide a basic fact of human life: communication. The interaction of people in communicative practices collapses the logic of contraries with the threat of a dialectical lived reality. Contraries aren’t properly human since they are universals onto themselves; the human being crosses universal categories through simultaneously being instances of some and negations of others. A lot, in other words, happens between avoiding being black and becoming white. Much of it is the lived reality of never being enough of an instance of any one of these without the presence of the other. In effect, this white governed system is premised on problematic blackness. The mere presence of blackness poses a problem, and thus to sanitize itself, this system demands a theodicy. Where a god is omnipotent, omniscient, and good, there is difficulty accounting for the presence of evil and injustice. The classical response is to argue there is either only an appearance of infelicity or that the source of such is a negative consequence of human free will instead of the god’s intentions. It in effect renders its legitimacy on the exclusion of dark forces. 30 This leads to a singular axiom, since where achieving whiteness may be an impossible ideal of pure purity, avoiding blackness is a readily achievable goal. Thus, antiblackness could be maintained even where white supremacy fails. So the system could be summarized by its second axiom: “Don’t be black.” This antiblack position is, however, based on granting no legitimacy to a black point of view. If the black point of view were the mere acceptance of its negation, then it would regard itself as a problem, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed more than a century ago. 31 Fanon, however, reminded us later on that such a position distorts history. 32 While the white may want to believe blacks have no ontological resistance to what whites have imposed on them, the reality of the matter is that blacks must live every day simultaneously with the imposition of whiteness and its transcendence. Put differently, the double consciousness of seeing a white perspective on reality and a black one is transcended into a potentiated second sight, as Paget Henry argues, and

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potentiated double consciousness, as Jane Anna Gordon expanded it, when blacks realize the contradictions of a society that makes blacks into problems. Such realization transforms blacks into Blacks—namely, agents of history exemplifying a potentiated double consciousness. 33 We come here to forms of melancholia. Of particular relevance is the kind premised on bereavement from separation and loss. 34 The Euromodern world produces kinds of people who are temporally indigenous to it. Concluding the future is European or white renders a form of nonbelonging to such peoples. In effect not belonging to the future, their present becomes illegitimate. They “belong,” so to speak, in the past. Thus they suffer a form of loss, a form of melancholia endemic to the age in which they attempt to live. If, however, they take hold of possibility and begin building a future that cannot exist without them as conditions of its possibility, their present is transformed into a different modernity than Euromodernity. For racially designated black peoples, this becomes a form of modernity beyond Euromodernity. Some call it Afro-modernity. As the Indigenous peoples of Australasian countries are also called “black,” a more apt term may be needed. What is significant is that such action would constitute a different present and, in so doing, new kinds of beings. Racial logics, then, need not be closed. This is not to say they are progressive, good, bad, or regressive. It simply means, as human productions, they are open, despite their producers’ efforts to ontologize them, instead of closed phenomena. As open phenomena, they also offer their contradictions. For instance, East Asian peoples make no sense in a white-supremacist teleology. They are not black or white. Some have tried—perhaps thinking through the four elements—yellow and, as has been the designation for Amerindians, red. But these classifications collapse when the teleology is brought to its conclusion. Is Asian a step on the way to whiteness? If so, wouldn’t that mean that whites went through an “Asian” phase as G. W. F. Hegel argued was the path of Geist or Spirit in his philosophy of history? If not, then couldn’t there be a polygenic notion of different simultaneous teloi? Or perhaps there is a pseudo-Aristotelian logic of a mean between extremes, where East Asian and black represent those in the middle of which stands perfectly balanced whiteness? In addition to the clear absence of red, problems return, however, with the various paleolithic histories in which Asiatic peoples are reputed to have come to North America as ancestors of the peoples who are now known under the color designation red, as is commonly used to refer to the Indigenous peoples there. How did yellow become red? And what about South America, where black, brown, red, and yellow abound? 35 These questions are, of course, varieties of absurdities, but what phenomenology would remind us is that they are lived absurdities. They have meaning. Take, for instance, the earlier reference to Jews and raza. Though today

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the language of anti-Semitism dominates discussions of anti-Jewishness, the reality is that most people who hate Jews have no idea of what Jewishness or Judaism is. They hate an imagined type, and that being, in their imagination, has material features of wretched Jewishness. In existentialist terms, antiJewishness is a form of seriousness of values ascribed onto a presumed Jewish being. This being, then, is raced, as in the history of Jews from raza, in a racist logic. 36 There isn’t space here for details on the complexity of why many European Jews have proffered anti-Semitism as an ascription over racism, but what is clear is that the phenomenological question of racist intentionality or racist consciousness raises questions as well of what is involved in living a race consciousness in a continuum with a variety of other consciousnesses constituted by a world sustained by such investments. The historical survey raises, however, a consideration about time. Race and racism have not only been around a short time but also been undergoing varieties of transformations and shifts throughout their foray. These twists and turns are functions of their being part of the human world, which means their ebb and flow depend on human action, and history, through varieties of political conflicts across time, leads to much beyond expectations of fixed expectations. SOME IMPLICATIONS Phenomenologies of race bring to the fore the importance of locating race as a human science, or at least human category of study. Whether or not race exists, it is a story and set of practices about human beings, even where and when their humanity is being denied. As a human practice, it raises, as the Haitian anthropologist and philosopher Anténor Firmin argued in 1885, normative challenges not foreclosed by any one science. 37 The human being exceeds the sciences by virtue of having to articulate them self-referentially. This insight preceded Husserlian phenomenology of human science, which brings to the fore an important insight to consider. The Husserlian phenomenological point is not about a fixed theory to apply. It is also not about influence. It raises the important question of convergence. As with the relation constituted as and by the transcendental ego, a disciplinary subject is constituted through its practice and ongoing relevance to the phenomena it was developed to study. Where the theorist fails to see this, the discipline is ossified; methodological efforts collapse as the theorist attempts to squeeze the human world into the discipline. Race, understood in these terms, as a human science, is such a challenge. That phenomenological approaches depart from ontological presuppositions means certain types of race debates lose their weight. Take, for instance, the question of whether there “are” races. Racial eliminativists often

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argue against race because of (1) its falseness (read as fiction) and (2) its serving as a condition for racism. First, if racism is a problem, we should address that issue, whether or not it has a “real” designator. What if races do exist? Isn’t the real question the normative one of how people of such designations should be treated? If it would be illegitimate to disrespect people of different races if such races were real, then wouldn’t that already hold even if people were disrespected for what others mistakenly took them to be? I recall being attacked as a Puerto Rican by a group of black and white boys in my youth. I didn’t bother to explain I was not Puerto Rican since it seemed more important to fight against those who hated Puerto Ricans. Would not the same hold for many other misapplied identities? In short, the factual matter of what one “is” is beside the point. It is about how one should be treated. Moreover, with regard to the first, the notion of fictive being is often ambiguous. Physicalism may account for what physicists and chemists study, but the human world is rich with meaning beyond those categories. Whether we think through symbolic forms as Ernst Cassirer argued, fallacies of naturalism and historicism as Husserl did, the metaphysical in us all as Maurice Merleau-Ponty did, or mind beyond minds as Sri Aurobindo did, the fact remains that human reality reveals that what we call “reality” is always a small part of a larger story. Thus, while some may long for the elimination of race, it is quite possible that we are actually living through its proliferation, which means, then, that kinds beyond but also including other kinds of race are yet to come. We come then to two concluding, though neither final nor exhaustive, considerations. They both emerge from questioning the supremacy of being, purity, and straightness. The lived reality of race and racism involves a constant encounter with suppression in the face of divergence, as intentionality emerges from a divergence from being through which phenomena and relationships to them are constituted. As we have seen, this points to an incompleteness at the heart of human relationships with reality and, as well, to ourselves. As we also saw with our discussion of contraries, efforts at noninteraction belie reality. In effect, reality is a constant interaction of transcendence despite efforts at closed being. Letting go of closed being opens the door to living mixtures. In their writings, Jane Anna Gordon and Michael Monahan refer to this as creolizing phenomena. 38 They hearken, in this analysis, to the convergence of dialectical and phenomenological challenges to notions of pure or unadulterated method in the study of human reality. A method is an epistemic instrument whose application determines certain epistemic results such as data, understanding, or a form of practice. A pure method imposes on instead of articulates what is already a mixed and relational world. This insight about divergence is also taken up by queer theory in the study of race and other human phenomena. If being submerged in being is treated

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as the normal condition of all things, then to emerge would also mean to diverge from the consistency of that norm. This would be a formalism in which each movement is a reinstantiation of the initial moment. In logic terms, it would be an endless affirmation of noncontradiction or, in geometrical language, a straight line. To diverge is to be out of line and, in effect, in the prevailing metaphor of queer theory, not be straight. The writings of Sara Ahmed and David Ross Fryer bring this insight to the study of race, in addition to gender and sexual orientation. 39 Their work brings to the fore a basic insight already underlying questions not only of race consciousness and other kinds but also the notion of consciousness as divergence through emergence. To be conscious of something is also to be distinguished from that of which one is conscious. Recall our reflection on existential versus transcendental phenomenology, where I argued that it’s a false dilemma because both existential and transcendental phenomenological arguments are premised on emergence or standing out. At the heart of existence is the peculiar responsibility for emergence. To be on the straight and narrow is to be at one with being, which is, in effect, to not exist at all. The distinction through which intentionality is constituted exemplifies a divergence that queer theorists readily recognize as getting out of line. This is also peculiarly so in epistemological terms, since no knowledge could emerge without distinction in which there is also difference. It is no accident that our earlier discussion required reflection on bad faith. If the human being makes no sense without emergence, distinction, and divergence, these elements of queerness would also be at work. The suppression of the queerness of human existence requires identifying it in order to deny it. As with racism, where a human group has to be identified in order to deny their humanity, the performative contradictions of human stasis and disambiguation offer their seductive fare. At the heart of race consciousness phenomenologically understood, then, is a story about the human condition as one among many useless passions, among which is to be the architects of the prisons through which we deny queer dimensions of freedom. Attempting to erase those elements, however, requires a flight whose contradictions and folly offer a promise beneath which are perverse desire and faith in that which is futile. NOTES 1. See Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. 2. Much of what I summarize about Husserl’s approach is available in Husserliana. His Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge summarizes these themes, as also does his Formale and transzendentale Logik. A wonderful summary is also available in Natanson, Edmund Husserl. 3. For discussion of Chronos and Phanes, see Nettesheim, Tyson, and Freak, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 428.

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4. I elaborate this requirement of radicality in Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, and more recently in Gordon, “Disciplining as a Human Science.” 5. For the best exemplars of this aspect, see Schutz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, and Berger and Luckman, Social Construction of Reality. 6. See Sartre, La Transcendance de l’Ego. 7. The famous early analyses are Sartre’s L’être et le néant and Beauvoir’s Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté. I elaborate this concept, particularly with regard to its relevance for the study of race and racism, in Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, Existentia Africana, and more recently, “Bad Faith.” 8. Most commentators offer 1943 as the date of this review, which Gabriel Marcel entitled “Existence and Human Freedom.” Marcel dates it as January 1946, when he reprinted it in his short collection The Philosophy of Existentialism, 5. The term is introduced on page 84. 9. I am speaking, of course, of Austin’s “A Plea for Excuses,” in his Philosophical Papers, 175–204. 10. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception and Le Visible et l’invisible, and in addition Manganyi, Alienation and the Body in Racist Society, and Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, especially the chapter “The Body in Bad Faith.” 11. See Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. For discussion of evidentiality, Husserl offers a classic summary in his Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. See also Gordon, “Short Reflection on the Evidentiality of #Evidence.” 12. See Maldonado-Torres, Against War. 13. See Edmund Husserl’s May 10, 1935, Vienna lecture, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man.” 14. See Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, and for elaboration, Gordon, What Fanon Said, chap. 2. 15. For elaboration, see Gordon, “Essentialist Anti-essentialism.” 16. See Butler, Gender Trouble; Foucault, Les mots et les choses; and Habermas, Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften. 17. Paul Ricoeur offers succinct discussions of this debate in Du texte à l’action: Essais d’herméneutique, tome 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986). For discussion sympathetic to this view from the perspective of a philosopher from the Global South, see Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), though Alcoff is critical of radical interpellation or linguistic idealism. 18. See Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens; Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique and Critique de la Raison dialectique; Caws, Structuralism; Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff and Philosophie der symbolischen Formen; Cornell and Panfilio, Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity; and Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence and Fear of Black Consciousness. 19. See, e.g., Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars; and Aurobindo, Future Evolution of Man. 20. For an excellent short history, see Nirenberg, “Race and the Middle Ages.” 21. This is now well known among paleo-anthropologists. For a short discussion, see Wayman, “Modern Humans Once Mated with Other Species.” 22. This point about the importance of distinction for the emergence of knowledge is old stuff in philosophy. It’s a crucial part of Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, and the concept receives an elegant formulation in Sartre’s “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité,” in Situations I. 23. See Walsh, “Decolonial For,” 18. 24. O’Toole, “You’ll Never Think of the Renaissance in Quite the Same Way,” is a wonderful reflection on the racial significance of this sixteenth-century painting of Lisbon. 25. Walsh, “Decolonial For,” 21. 26. See, e.g., Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; James, Black Jacobins; and Goldberg, Racist Culture. For the preceding centuries of Christian asceticism, see Nixey, Darkening Age. 27. I elaborate on this observation in my chapter “Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire” in Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children. See also Gordon, Fear of Black Consciousness. 28. See Fanon, Peau noir, masques blancs, introduction. 29. See Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children and Fear of Black Consciousness.

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30. For elaboration of theodicy and race, see Gordon, “Race, Theodicy, and the Normative Emancipatory Challenges of Blackness.” 31. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk. 32. Fanon, Peau noir, masques blancs, as well as Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre. 33. Henry, “Africana Phenomenology”; Jane Anna Gordon, “General Will as Political Legitimacy”; Jane Anna Gordon, “The Gift of Double Consciousness”; and Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory. I offer discussion of varieties of double consciousness in many of my writings, but see Gordon, Introduction to Africana Philosophy, for summaries, esp. 77–79 and 117. There is also the concept of doubled double consciousness; see Chandler, X. 34. For what I have in mind, see Natanson, “From Apprehension to Decay”; Butler, “Thresholds of Melancholy”; Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia; and Etoke, Melancholia Africana. 35. See Gordon, “Thinking through Some Themes of Race and More,” and Gordon, Fear of Black Consciousness, for a critical elaboration of this logic. 36. For elaboration, see Gordon, “Juifs contre la Libération.” 37. Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines. 38. See Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory; and Monahan, Creolizing Subject. 39. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; and Fryer, Thinking Queerly.

WORKS CITED Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Aurobindo, Sri. The Future Evolution of Man: The Divine Life upon Earth. Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press, 2003. Austin, J. L. Philosophical Papers. Edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Beauvoir, Simone de. Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckman. The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Random House, 1966. Brentano, Franz. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (1874). Available in English as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, translated by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. MacaLister. London: Routledge, 1995. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. “Thresholds of Melancholy.” In Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson, edited by Steven Galt Crowell, 3–12. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995. Cassirer, Ernst. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923–1929. ———. Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1910. Caws, Peter Caws. Structuralism: A Philosophy for the Human Sciences. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1997. Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. X—the Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Cornell, Drucilla, and Kenneth Panfilio. Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity: Cultural and Racial Reconfigurations of Critical Theory. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches Chicago. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1903. Etoke, Nathalie. Melancholia Africana. Paris: Editions du Cygne, 2010. Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: François Maspero, 1961. ———. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952.

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Firmin, Anténor. De l’égalité des races humaines: anthropologie positive. Paris: Librairie Cotillon, 1885. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Fryer, David Ross. Thinking Queerly: Race, Gender, and the Ethics of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2008. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Goldberg, David Theo. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1993. Gordon, Jane Anna. Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. ———. “The General Will as Political Legitimacy: Disenchantment and Double Consciousness in Modern Democratic Life.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2005. ———. “The Gift of Double Consciousness: Some Obstacles to Grasping the Contributions of the Colonized.” In Postcolonialism and Political Theory, edited by Nalini Persram, 143–61. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Gordon, Lewis R. “Bad Faith.” In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann Murphy, and Gayle Salamon. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming. ———. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities International Press, 1995. ———. Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. New York: Routledge, 2006. ———. “Disciplining as a Human Science.” Quaderna: A Multilingual and Transdisciplinary Journal 3 (2016). http://quaderna.org/disciplining-as-a-human-science/. ———. “Essentialist Anti-essentialism, with Considerations from Other Sides of Modernity.” Quaderna: A Multilingual and Transdisciplinary Journal 1 (2012). https://quaderna.org/ essentialist-anti-essentialism-with-considerations-from-other-sides-of-modernity/. ———. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 1995. ———. Fear of Black Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, forthcoming. ———. Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. ———. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. “Juifs contre la Libération: Une critique afro-juive.” Tumultes 50 (2018): 97–108. ———. “Race, Theodicy, and the Normative Emancipatory Challenges of Blackness.” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 725–36. ———. “A Short Reflection on the Evidentiality of #Evidence.” Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art & World, November 11, 2016. http://allegralaboratory.net/a-short-reflection-onthe-evidentiality-of-evidence/. ———. “Thinking through Some Themes of Race and More.” Res Philosophica 95, no. 2 (2018): 331–45. ———. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Habermas, Jürgen. Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970. Henry, Paget. “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications.” In Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader, edited by Paget Henry, Jane Anna Gordon, Lewis R. Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts, 27–58. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. Husserl, Edmund. Husserliana. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973–2012. Vol. 1, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge; and vol. 17, Formale and transzendentale Logik. ———. “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man.” In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, translated by Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965.

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James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Manganyi, N. Chabani, Alienation and the Body in Racist Society: A Study of the Society That Invented Soweto. New York: NOK, 1977. Marcel, Gabriel. The Philosophy of Existentialism. Translated by Manya Harari. New York: Citadel, 1968. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le Visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail. Edited by Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. ———. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. ———. Sens et non-sens. Paris: Nagel, 1948. Monahan, Michael. The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. ———. La Transcendance de l’Ego: Esquisse D'une Description Phenomenologique. Paris: J. Vrin, 1936. ———. L’être et le néant: essai d’ontologie phénomologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. ———. “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité.” In Situations I. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Natanson, Maurice. Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. “From Apprehension to Decay: Robert Burton’s ‘Equivocations of Melancholy.’” Gettysburg Review 2 (1989): 130–38. Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von, Donald Tyson, and James Freak. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 1992. Nirenberg, David. “Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and Its Jews.” In Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, edited by Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quiligan, 71–87. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Nixey, Catherine. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. London: Pan Books, 2017. O’Toole, Fintan. “You’ll Never Think of the Renaissance in Quite the Same Way.” Irish Times, March 23, 2013. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/you-ll-never-think-of-the-renaissancein-quite-the-same-way-1.1335635. Ricoeur, Paul. Du texte à l’action: Essais d’herméneutique. Book 2. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique de la raison dialectique: Precede des Question de method, tome I. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. ———. Critique de la Raison dialectique, tome II: L’Intelligibilité de l’Histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. ———. Situations I. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1818–1859. Schütz, Alfred. Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Vienna: Springer, 1932. Walsh, Catherine. “The Decolonial For: Resurgences, Shifts, and Movements.” In On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, edited by Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, 15–32. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Wayman, Erin. “Modern Humans Once Mated with Other Species.” Smithsonian.com, November 2, 2011. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/modern-humans-once-matedwith-other-species-125536319/. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Wiredu, Kwasi. Cultural Universals and Particulars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Chapter Nine

The Black Body A Phenomenology of Being Stopped George Yancy

A phenomenology of “being stopped” might take us in a different direction than one that begins with motility, with a body that “can do” by flowing into space.—Sara Ahmed

I write within a philosophical context where embodiment painfully matters, where, more specifically, my racialized embodiment as Black constitutes the foreground of my social occupation of space. Indeed, within the context of a white anti-Black world, my body functions as a surface upon which white people script their distorted assumptions. This racist scripting of Black bodies is a process that is systemically embedded within the history of white domination. Within a white anti-Black world, I am instantly “seen” as a problem. As such, my being “seen” triggers white racist affective responses from fear and anxiety to bodily gestures of self-protection—staying clear from me as I walk down the street, pulling on purses, locking car doors, and refusing to get on elevators with me. This white anti-Black space has shaped my metaphilosophical assumptions about how philosophy is always already an embodied process, how doing philosophy begins from a phenomenologically pregnant here, which is a personal and collective confluent space of lived history. To reiterate, this social context that constitutes an importantly concrete locus philosophicus speaks to what it means to be raced as Black within an anti-Black world, a social world where my Black body is constituted as a target, as that which is denigrated, criminalized, stereotyped, and profiled through processes of white racist interpellation or hailing. Within this anti-Black social and historical space, it is not unusual for me to ask the question, “Where is my body?” The question makes sense as the epistemic 143

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perspective regarding the meaning of my body is often challenged by heteronomous racialized and racist white gazes and discourses that attempt to ontologically truncate the meaning of my body, make me into something that I am not, where my first-person understanding of the meaning of my body is belied by a (white) third-person account that violates the semiotic and narrative integrity and meaning of my Black body. The resulting impact is by no means symbolic, but traumatically corporeal, a violent blow to the flesh. Hence, for me, the raced embodied self that I am must not be bracketed and deemed irrelevant to philosophy and theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one’s search for personal meaning and value. My racialized experience mocks any pretension to do philosophy from nowhere. In fact, I can’t afford to do philosophy from “nowhere.” The social facticity and social ontology of race and the process of racialization are just too great, too overwhelming. The white racist world confronts me precisely from a somewhere, from a there, which presupposes a here. So to deny my Black embodied here, as one might do in a state of bad faith, is to deny the reality of a relentless and violent white there, a there that has the power not only to ontologically truncate my embodied here, but has the power to dispose of that here through a simple act of stopping me dead. After all, my body is exposed. And within an anti-Black social world, that exposure cannot be concealed. The Black body is always already a foregrounded object vis-à-vis the normative background of whiteness as unmarked, unnamed, unraced. Hence, to theorize the Black body one must “turn to the [Black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experience.” 1 This particular strategy also functions as a lens through which to theorize and critique whiteness, for the Black body’s racialized experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the raced white body. While I will not argue this point here, when it comes to whiteness vis-à-vis the Black body, there are no ontological edges, which raises the issue of an ethics of no edges. In other words, whiteness constitutes an oppressive social institutional and quotidian vector, an expansive social integument, that touches Black bodies and bodies of color. To be white within a white racist culture that is always already entangled with anti-Blackness means that to be white is to occupy a position as oppressor and thereby is oppressively haptic vis-à-vis Black bodies and bodies of color. An ontology without edges belies any fictive notion of an isolated neoliberal white subject, as one’s whiteness has relational implications for what it means to be raced as the denigrated other. One’s whiteness is complicit and thereby not innocent. In this chapter, I describe and theorize a variety of instances in which the Black body is reduced to racially manufactured instantiations of the white imaginary, the power of the white gaze, and white discursive constructions resulting in both what Sara Ahmed refers to as “a phenomenology of being stopped” 2 and what I call the phenomenological return of the Black body.

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These two violent processes result from whites’ efforts (even if unconscious) at self-construction through complex acts of erasure and denigration of Black people. On this score, white identity is parasitic upon the Black body; it is through processes of repetitive negation of the Black body, and repetitive discursive and nondiscursive acts of violence toward the Black body, that white identity is constituted. These acts of white self-construction through negation and violence maintain white power, white privilege, white hegemony, and white normalcy. As James Snead explains, “Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black] demotion along a scale of human value.” 3 To use a more visceral metaphor, one that helps to explain the grotesque nature of whiteness, white people spew their vomit onto Black bodies from an internalized place of their own myth-making, only to deny that they did so. And yet they need that vomit, but in the form of a denied externalized reality. In this way, the Black body is deemed “naturally” an object according to which they, white people, must recoil. Yet the process of externalization is one that involves a process of reinternalization. In short, white people come to reinternalize the lies superimposed upon the Black body; they then “see” the Black body from that internalized set of lies, eliding the fact that they were externalized by them ab initio. So, through the process of internalizing the lies, they are, in essence, eating their own vomit, their own externalized vicious white racist myths. The phenomenologically rich vignettes that follow provide a critical, interpretive framework for exposing the impact of whiteness vis-à-vis the Black body and how the latter is negatively impacted in terms of its aspirational ideals and embodied movement through social space. As Sara Ahmed writes, “To be black in the ‘white world’ is to turn back towards itself, to become an object, which means not only not being extended by the contours of the world, but being diminished as an effect of the bodily extensions of others.” 4 Hence, these vignettes provide critical phenomenological accounts of how the Black body is traumatically impacted by heteronomous forces and trapped in an anti-Black history that cuts at the very corporeal integrity of the Black body. FRANTZ FANON “The Black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.” 5 Frantz Fanon is exposing the asymmetry of representational power. From the perspective of the somatic regulatory epistemic regime of whiteness, the Black body appears to have no resistance. The Black body becomes ontologically pliable, just a thing to be scripted in the inverse image of whiteness. Cutting away at the Black body, the Black person becomes resigned no longer to aspire to his or her own emergence or upheaval. 6 Black bodies

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undergo processes of ontological stagnation and epistemological violence while standing before the one “true” gaze. In very powerful discourse describing how he was “unmercifully imprisoned,” how the white gaze forced upon him an unfamiliar weight, Fanon asked, “What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?” 7 The violence of the white gaze and the insidious reality of anti-Black racism were responsible for Fanon’s “difficulties in the development of my bodily schema,” where his embodiment was no longer “a definitive structuring of the self and the world.” 8 Rather, his body was thrown back, returned, as an object occupying space. “Below the corporeal schema,” Fanon wrote, “I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by ‘residual sensations and perceptions of a primarily tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,’ but by the other, the white man [or woman].” 9 In other words, Fanon saw himself through the lens, as it were, of a historico-racial schema. Fanon had become the threatening “him” of the Negro kind/type. Under pressure from and assailed by antiBlack racism, his corporeal schema was collapsing. It was giving way to a racial epidermal schema. The white gaze constructed the Black body into “an object in the midst of other objects.” 10 Furthermore, Fanon noted, “I took myself far off from my presence, far indeed, and made myself an object.” 11 Note that there was nothing intrinsic to his physiology that forced his corporeal schema to collapse; it was the “Black body” as always already interpellated and “made sense of” within the context of a larger semiotics of white bodies that provided him with the tools for self-hatred and embodied disorientation. His “darkness,” a naturally occurring phenomenon, became racially historicized, residing within the purview of the white gaze, a lived space created and sustained by white socio-epistemic and semiotic communal constitutionality. The Black body evolves from within a space of constitutionality, that is, the space of the racist white same, the one. Against the backdrop of the sketched historico-racial (racist) scheme, Fanon’s “darkness” returned to him, signifying a new genus, a new category of man: A Negro! 12 He inhabited a space of anonymity (he is every Negro/nigger/Black), and yet he felt a strange personal responsibility for his body. “I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors,” Fanon explained. “I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘sho’ good eaten’.’” 13 Think here of the traumatic weight of these myths and how they constitute the Black body, Fanon’s body, as an object. Fanon wrote about the Black body and how it can be changed, deformed, and made into an ontological problem in relation to the white gaze. Describ-

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ing an encounter with a white woman and her white son, Fanon narrates the young boy’s petrified utterance, “Look at the nigger! . . . Mama, a Negro!” 14 Fanon: My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a Negro, it’s cold, the Negro is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up. 15

The white imagery of the Black as a beast, a primitive and uncivilized animal or subperson, was clearly expressed in the boy’s fear that the “cannibalistic” Negro would eat him. “The more that Europeans dominated Africans, the more ‘sav-age’ Africans came to seem; cannibalism represented the nadir of savagery.” 16 Of course, the boy may someday come to “confirm” his fears through reading an “authoritative” voice such as Hegel’s, who linked the supposed contempt Africans/Negroes held for man to their failure to make historical progress. “To the sensuous Negro,” Hegel argued, “human flesh is purely an object of the senses, like all other flesh.” 17 For Hegel, Africans/ Negroes apparently lacked the capacity of representation that tells them that human flesh, though identical with animal nature, is distinctive and identical with our own bodies, which are bodies of beings capable of representation and self-consciousness. African/Negro bodies are tethered to the immediate, the arbitrary, and the sensuous and have not “reached the stage of knowing anything universal.” 18 Presumably, the young boy did not know his words would (or how they would) negatively impact Fanon. However, for Fanon, the young white boy re-presented white society’s larger perception of Blacks. The boy turned to his white mother for protection from impending Black doom. The young white boy, however, was not simply operating at the affective level; he was not simply haunted, semiconsciously, by a vague feeling of anxiety. Rather, he was operating at both the affective and the discursive level. He said, “Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up.” This locutionary act carries a perlocutionary force of effecting the phenomenological return of Fanon to himself as a cannibalistic threat, as an object to be feared. Fanon, of course, did not “want this revision, this thematization.” 19 One is tempted to say that the young white boy saw Fanon’s Black body “as if” it were cannibal-like. The “seeing as if,” however, was collapsed into a “seeing as is.” In Fanon’s example, within the lived phenomenological transversal context of white racist behavior, the “as if” reads too much like a process of “conscious effort.” On my reading, what appears in the uninter-

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rupted lived or phenomenological flow of the young white boy’s racist experience is “youngwhiteboyexperiencesniggerdarkbodycannibalevokestrepidation.” There is no experience of the “as if.” Indeed, the young white boy’s linguistic and nonlinguistic performance indicates a definitive structuring of his own self-invisibility as “whiteinnocentselfinrelationshiptothedarkniggerself.” This definitive structuring is not so much remembered or recollected, as it is always present as the constitutive imaginary background within which the white boy is both the effect and the vehicle of white racism; indeed, he is the orientation of white epistemic practices, ways of “knowing” about one’s (white) identity vis-à-vis the Black other. The “cultural white orientation” is not an “entity” whose origin the white boy needs to grasp or recollect before he performs whiteness. He is not a tabula rasa, one who sees the Black body for the first time and instinctively says, “Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up.” The boy did indeed undergo an experience of the dark body as frightening, but the fright that he experienced regarding Fanon’s dark body was always already “constructed out of . . . social narratives and ideologies.” 20 The boy was already discursively and affectively acculturated through microprocesses of “racialized” learning (short stories, lullabies, children’s games, 21 prelinguistic experiences, and so forth) to respond “appropriately” in the presence of a Black body. His racist actions were not simply dictated by what was going on in his head, as it were. His racism, though he is young, was “‘in’ the nose that smells, the back, neck, and other muscles that imperceptibly tighten with anxiety, and eyes that see some but not all physical differences as significant.” 22 The gap that opened up within the young white boy’s perceptual field as he “saw” Fanon’s Black body had already been created while innocently sitting on his mother’s lap. 23 His habituated perceptions were “so attenuated as to skip the stage of conscious interpretation and intent.” 24 His mother’s lap constituted a raced zone of white security, a maternal site of white racist pedagogy. Learning about taboos against masturbation and associating with Negroes, and how both of these taboos were associated with sin, guilt, and a sense of deserved punishment, Lillian Smith has described these forbidden acts as the first lessons she learned as a young white girl raised in Southern society. Such taboos were “ideological pabulum,” as it were, fed to Smith as a young child. She notes that such lessons “were taught us by our mother’s voice, memorized with her love, patted into our lives as she rocked us to sleep or fed us.” 25 Smith’s father also played a formative role in this process of racist tutelage. Her father scolded her for her sense “of superiority toward schoolmates from the mill and rounded out his rebuke by gravely reminding me that ‘all men are brothers,’ [but] trained me in the steel-rigid decorums I must demand of every colored male.” 26 This point acknowledges the fundamental “ways the transactions between a raced world and those who live in it

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racially constitute the very being of those beings.” 27 In the case of the young white boy in Fanon’s situation, the association of Blackness with “nigger” and cannibalism is no mean feat. Hence, the young white boy is already attending to the world in a particular fashion; his affective and discursive performances bespeak the (ready-to-hand) inherited white racist background according to which he is able to make “sense” of the world. Smith knows that how she came to see the world, to make sense of her place within it, was based upon lies about skin color and lies about white adults’ “own fantasies, of their secret deviations—forcing decayed pieces of their and the region’s obscenities into the minds of the young and leaving them there to fester.” 28 Like moving my body in the direction of home, or only slightly looking as I reach my hand to retrieve my cup of hot tea that is to the left of my computer screen, the young white boy dwells within/experiences/engages the world of white racist practices in such a way that the practices qua racist practices have become invisible. The young boy’s response is part and parcel of an implicit knowledge of how he gets around in a racial and racist Manichean world. Being-in a racist world, a lived context of historicity, the young boy does not “see” the dark body as “dark” and then thematically proceed to apply negative value predicates to it, where conceivably the young boy would say, “Yes, I ‘see’ the dark body as existing in space, and I recognize the fact that it is through my own actions and intentions that I predicate evil of it.” “In order even to act deliberately,” as Hubert L. Dreyfus maintains, “we must orient ourselves in a familiar world.” 29 My point here is that the young white boy is situated within a familiar white racist world of intelligibility, one that has already “accepted” whiteness as “superior” and Blackness as “inferior” and “savage.” Involved within the white racist Manichean world, the young boy has found his orientation, he has already become part and parcel of a constituted and constituting force within a constellation of modes of being that are deemed natural. However, he is oblivious to the historicity and cultural conditionedness of these modes of being. Despite the fact that “race” doesn’t exist as a naturally occurring kind within the world or cut at the joints of reality, notice the evocative power of “being Black,” which actually points to the evocative power of being white. The dark body, after all, would not have evoked the response it did from the young white boy were it not for the historical mythos of the white body and the power of white normativity through which the white body has been prereflectively structured, resulting in forms of embodied comportment that are as familiar and as quotidian as my reaching for my cup of tea. His white racist performance is a form of everyday coping within the larger unthematized world of white social coping. The socio-ontological structure that gives intelligibility to the young white boy’s racist performance is prior to a set of beliefs of which he is reflectively aware.

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Fanon underwent the experience of having his body “given back to him.” Thus, he experienced a profound phenomenological experience of being disconnected from his body schema. Fanon felt his body as flattened out or sprawled out before him. And yet his “body,” its corporeality, was forever with him. It never left. So how can it be “given back”? The physical body that Fanon had/was remained in space and time. It did not somehow disappear and make a return. But there is a profound sense in which his “corporeality” was interwoven with particular discursive practices. Under the white gaze, Fanon’s body was not simply the res extensa of Cartesian dualism. Within the context of white racist practices toward the Black body, there is a blurring of boundaries between what was “there” as opposed to what had been “placed there.” Hence, the body’s corporeality, within the context of lived history, is shaped through powerful cultural schemata. The above line of reasoning does not mean that somehow the body does not exist. After all, my body forms the site of white oppression. To jettison all discourse regarding the body as “real,” being subject to material forces, and such, in the name of the “postmodern body,” is an idealism that would belie my own philosophical move to theorize from the position of my real lived embodiment. The point here is that the body is never given as such, but always “appears there” within the context of some set of conditions of emergence. 30 The conditions of emergence for the phenomenological return of Fanon’s body qua “inferior” or “bestial” were grounded in the white social imaginary, its discursive and nondiscursive manifestations. Having undergone a gestaltswitch in his body image, his knowledge/consciousness of his body had become “solely a negating activity . . . a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.” 31 “Look, a Negro” is a form of interpellation that stops one’s mobility through space; the expression marks the Black body as a problem, something that is out of place and thereby suspicious and in need of being stopped. Ahmed writes, “Being stopped is not just stressful: it makes the ‘body’ itself the ‘site’ of social stress.” 32 Helen Ngo describes this process of being stopped vis-à-vis her identity as Asian and notes the specific phenomenological burden involved. She writes about “the quiet hegemony of whiteness, the tension in experiencing oneself from the ‘inside’ as invisible but from the ‘outside’ as visibly ‘raced’ and the sense of ‘burden’ that this duality brought with it.” 33 Linda Alcoff discusses the phenomenological sense of being disjointed as a form of “near-incommensurability between first-person experience and historico-racial schema that disenables equilibrium.” 34 Alcoff emphasizes Fanon’s notion of the “sociogenic” basis of the “corporeal malediction” Blacks experience. 35 On this score, “the black man’s [and woman’s] alienation is not an individual question.” 36 In other words, the distorted historico-racial schema that occludes equilibrium takes place within the realm of sociality, a larger complex space of white social intersubjective constitutionality “of

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phenomena that human beings have come to regard as ‘natural’ in the physicalist sense of depending on physical nature.” 37 Of course, within the context of colonial or neocolonial white power, the objective is to pass off what is historically contingent as that which is ahistorically given. W. E. B. DU BOIS In his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois, on my reading, also located the problem of white racism within the realm of the sociogenic, a space where his Black body is returned and stopped through an act of white violence. Du Bois provides a profound example of how “Blackness” gets negatively configured within a (white) gestural, semiotic space, where there is a phenomenological moment of slippage resulting from the white gaze/glance, between how he may have understood himself and how he suddenly experienced himself as different from the other (white) children. “In a wee wooden schoolhouse,” Du Bois writes, “something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards—ten cents a package— and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.” 38 Du Bois’s example suggests that he was in some sense similar to the other (white) children. In “heart,” “life,” and “longing” he appears to have felt a kindred relationship. But something went awry. There was a sudden annoying feeling of difference, which presumably did not exist prior to this encounter. Hence, Du Bois underwent a distinctive phenomenological process of coming to appear to himself differently as one who is expelled/stopped. He moved from a sense of the familiar to the unfamiliar. He is forced to deal with the meaning of a racial epidermal schema as a result of (or introduced by) the meaning-constituting activities of the young girl’s racialized consciousness. As with Fanon, Lorde, Ellison, myself, and Woodson, Du Bois was “taken outside” of himself and returned. As the tall white girl refused him, she sent a semiotic message, a message whose destructive meaning was immediately registered in the consciousness of the young Du Bois. Her body language, her refusal, involved a ritual that had tremendous power. The ritual glance/refusal took place within a pre-interpreted space of racial meaning. This precondition formed the basis upon which the glance’s meaning registered for Du Bois that something had become problematic at the level of his epidermis. In order for Du Bois to have understood the specific racial meaning of the glance, he had to have a certain level of racial narrative compe-

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tence. In short, part of his horizon involved an awareness of difference, but also an awareness of difference in an exclusionary sense. The ritual glance is both a product of this space and a vehicle through which racial and racist performances are perpetuated. Du Bois wrote that the tall white girl “refused it peremptorily, with a glance.” This refusal involves the arrogance and self-centeredness of whiteness, a form of white narcissism articulated through a look. The performance of whiteness, then, is not restricted to a set of articulated propositional beliefs or in the deployment of various rhetorical strategies. White racism is expressed through the modality of physical comportment, a way of inhabiting physical space, a way of glancing/not glancing. “Seen” through the eyes of the newcomer, Du Bois’s Black body was already coded as different, as a problem, as that which should be avoided. Though young, the tall white newcomer had already learned complex ways of white coping, ways of seeing the Black body as a site of avoidance, ways of not seeing her body as raced, different. Her whiteness as norm is reinforced through this exclusionary act. Her racial status as white remains paradoxically unmarked and yet marked in this communicational space, though she never spoke. The unspoken power of whiteness reflects the effective transmission of racism, not only through words but also through subtle actions. “We learned far more from acts than words, more from a raised eyebrow, a joke, a shocked voice, a withdrawing movement of the body, a long silence, than from long sentences,” Smith notes. 39 Within the context of this highly racial and racist communicational space, Du Bois’s body came to matter. He was the materialization of darkness with all its normative and typological associations, “the colored kid, monkeychild, different.” 40 Indeed, the newcomer’s ritual glance “produced bodily effects through immediate [non]verbal acts that reify racial difference.” 41 Through her refusal to exchange with Du Bois, he returns to himself as excluded. The white girl, however, returns to herself as the center; her glance policed her whiteness as a privileged (unspoken) site. 42 The tall white newcomer has been situated (and situates her own identity) in the role of a member of a “superior” group. Describing the importance placed upon whiteness as a symbol of group purity and superiority, Smith observes, “There, in the land of Epidermis, every one of us was a little king.” 43 Through the performative act of refusal, though words were presumably never spoken, Du Bois became, even if unknowingly, “a damn nigger.” Through her glance and her refusal, she reduced Du Bois to his Blackness, a mere surface, a thing of no particular importance, though important enough to reject and avoid. Du Bois was no longer within the group, but outside it, left looking upon himself through the newcomer’s eyes. Like Fanon, who described the phenomenological dimensions of corporeal malediction, Du Bois underwent a similar process, one that he termed double consciousness:

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It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. 44

Du Bois began to experience a disjointed relationship with his body. In this process of disjointedness, one ceases to experience one’s identity from a locus of self-definition and begins to experience one’s identity from a locus of externally imposed meaning. In short, Du Bois was forced into a state of doubleness, seeing himself as other (the “inferior” Black body) through the gaze of the young girl as the one (the “superior” white). This white scopically imposed meaning of Blackness as dirty, immoral, and inferior interpellates the Black body as a pre-scopic essence. The tall white newcomer’s glance marked Du Bois as absent, as different. Her white glance possessed the power to confiscate the Black body, only to have it returned to Du Bois as a burden and a curse. At the heart of each of the aforementioned vignettes emerges a question. The question is posed from within what Du Bois calls “the veil.” So what is this question? It is not a question born of solitude, but of racist discriminatory practices, oppression, white lies and white myths, embodied struggle and sustained existential and ontological tension, a struggle that emerges within the context of a powerful racializing white regime. It is not born of hyperbolic doubt, a questioning of all things that fail the test of epistemological indubitability, though it may involve, as Du Bois wrote, “incessant selfquestioning and the hesitation that arises from it.” 45 The question is, “What, after all, am I?” 46 Aware of the systematic negation of Black humanity under colonialism, Fanon argued that “colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘In reality, who am I?’” 47 Similarly, theorizing what he refers to as the “Negroe’s greatest dilemma,” which he sees as the ambivalence regarding an identity that is both African and American, Martin Luther King Jr., wrote, “Every man [woman] must ultimately confront the question ‘Who am I?’ and seek to answer it honestly.” 48 Unlike René Descartes, who asked a similar question—“But what then am I?”—after arriving at the indubitable cogito argument and who reached the eventual conclusion that he was a thing that thinks, Du Bois’s question is linked to his having been racially marked and relegated to the domain of the wretched. 49 Far from a disembodied thing that thinks (res cogitans), Du Bois is cursed precisely in terms of his racially epidermalized embodiment. The internalization of this cursed wretchedness helps mystify the various ways white racism systematically encourages this form of pathology. Stuart Hall writes, “It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a

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dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that ‘knowledge,’ not only as a matter of imposed will and domination, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective conformation to the norm.” 50 Hence one plausible answer to the question might be, “I am a problem! Who I am as an embodied Black body is a problem!” This response to the question would indicate Hall’s conceptualization of the “inner compulsion and subjective conformation to the [white] norm.” The connection between Blackness and the concept of “being a problem” is central to Du Bois’s understanding of what it means to be Black in white America. Du Bois revealed how whites engage in a process of duplicity while speaking to Black people. They often approach Black people in a hesitant fashion, saying, “I know an excellent coloured man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?” 51 Du Bois maintained that the real question whites want to ask is, “How does it feel to be a problem?” 52 Du Bois also pointed out that some whites greet Black people with a certain amicable comportment. They talk with you about the weather, while all along performing hidden white racists scripts: “My poor, unwhite thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born—white!” 53 With regard to the notion of being a problem, whites do not ask, “How does it feel to have problems?” The question is raised to the level of the ontological: “How does it feel to be a [Black] problem?” INVISIBLE MAN In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s “thinker-tinker,” his “Jack-the-Bear,” his invisible man, also experiences the phenomenological return of his Black body and stopped in his aspirations as an agential subject. Although he tries to live the life of an individualist, he soon finds that individualism is an illusion, particularly given the fact that at every turn he learns that whites threaten his efforts at agency. After all, he is constantly under erasure, unable to stand out as an individual. In an anti-Black racist context, it is difficult for Black people to be “just me.” His Blackness prevents a mode of living according to liberal and neoliberal ideals. More accurately, whites are able to enact a “just me” status because of their normative status, they move through the world where their whiteness constitutes a powerful affordance where social reality communicates, “Yes, you can.” For Black people, however, society whispers, “Don’t forget. Don’t think that you are one of us. After all, you are Black! As such, you cannot.”

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The invisible man knows himself as embodied flesh and blood, and yet he is invisible. His body is, and yet he is not. The invisible man observes, “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people [in this case white people] refuse to see me.” 54 In Fanon’s example, the Black body is seen as hypervisible; for Ellison, the Black body is seen as invisible. In the case of hypervisibility, the Black body becomes excessive. Within this racially saturated field of hypervisibility, the Black body still functions as the unseen as it does in the case of its invisibility. Perhaps in the case of invisibility, though, one has a greater opportunity of not being seen while taking advantage of this invisibility. Think here of those whites who may have disclosed pertinent information in the company of Blacks who had been rendered invisible, information that may have functioned to empower them in some way. The ocular frame of reference in both cases is central. A fundamental phenomenological slippage occurs between one’s own felt experience of the Black body and how others (whites) understand/construct/experience/see that “same” Black body. Ellison also raised the issue of how the Black other is a reflection of the white same, a concept consistent with my deployment of the term “vomit.” Ellison says in Invisible Man that when whites “see him” they see “themselves, or fragments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” 55 The invisible man’s invisibility is a racialized invisibility. The white one sees everything and anything vis-à-vis the Black other, but not the Black. Fanon asked, “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence.” 56 Felt invisibility is a form of ontological and epistemological violence resulting from “the construction of their inner eyes with which they [whites] look through their physical eyes upon reality.” 57 Ellison’s reference to inner eyes that look through physical eyes suggests that the “inner eyes” are precisely those white racist, epistemic perspectives, interlocked with various social and material forces, from which whites “see” the world and violate Black subjectivity. The “inner eyes” that Ellison refers to as “a matter of construction” raise the issue of the sociogenic. Ellison’s invisible man is “seen” against the unthematized backdrop of everyday forms of white coping. To be “seen” in this way is not to be seen at all. Within this context, Blacks are trapped, always already ontologically closed. In each case, the totalizing power of whiteness holds Blacks captive. When Blacks speak or do not speak, such behavior is codified in the white imaginary. To be silent “confirms” passivity and docility. To speak, to want to be heard, “confirms” brazen contempt and Black rage. The point here is that no matter the response, Black emergence outside of whiteness’s scopic power is foreclosed. Ellison’s invisible man knows the frustration of being “seen” and yet

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“not seen.” There is an upsurge of protestation whereby the Black body begins to make itself felt. “You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.” 58 Again, note that even as the invisible man protests, he is “seldom successful,” which may be partly why he decides to “walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.” 59 Throughout the text, the invisible man finds himself objectified/distorted by the white gaze. Hence, like Fanon, he has difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consider the Black men who are made to participate in the battle royal—a site constructed for white men only, indeed, for white eyes. During the fight, the Blacks are all blindfolded. Symbolically, the blindfolds replicate the larger socioeconomic powerlessness of Blacks in relation to whites. The Black body is looked at. The Black body does not return the gaze. The white body looks at. The battle royal is a spectacle, a visual (or ocular) power zone within which Black male bodies are mere surfaces. Before they are instructed to fight like animals for the pleasure of the lookers, however, a naked blonde white woman with a small American flag tattooed on her abdomen, sensuously dances before them. One might say that she is “dangled” before them like a piece of white flesh they dare not touch or look at. Indeed, “some of the boys stood with lowered heads, trembling.” 60 Some of the white men threatened them if they actually looked, while others were threatened if they did not look. After all, she is a white woman and therefore taboo. She is not to be looked at by Black males, and yet some of the white men forced them to look, creating a psychosexual “complex fusion of desire and aversion.” 61 The battle royal is a site of pain, pleasure, hatred, misogyny, and white myths interwoven into a sadistic and erotic spectacle. It is a site of white male terror, anxiety, and desire. The white men—the “bankers, lawyers, judges, doctors, fire chiefs, teachers, merchants” 62—create a context of sexual intensification through the unthinkable juxtaposition of Black male bodies with white female bodies, creating an erotic space in which the white male imaginary is able to “get off” at the thought of watching a Black male desire a white woman. The erotic ritual is designed to intensify white men’s pleasure as they imagine one of the Black men having sex with the blonde white woman. Black men are also rendered invisible through the eyes (inner eyes) of white women. Ellison explores this theme through the female character Sybil, who never really sees Ellison’s protagonist. All that she sees is her own distorted and sexually perverse projections upon the Black male body. The invisible man describes himself as “Brother Taboo-with-whom-allthings-are-possible.” 63 Sybil is interested in literally playing the role of the

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white innocent victim in relation to the myth of the “Black rapist.” Indeed, the invisible man jokingly references D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, invoking the memory of the filmic narrative construction and semiotics of the Black male as rapist. He asks, “What’s happening here . . . a new birth of a nation?” 64 Sybil wants him to take her against her will, to play at being raped by a Black “buck.” “But I need it,” she says, uncrossing her thighs and sitting up eagerly. “You can do it, it’ll be easy for you, beautiful. Threaten to kill me if I don’t give in. You know, talk rough to me beautiful.” 65 She describes him as “ebony against pure snow.” 66 She describes her husband as “forty minutes of brag and ten of bustle.” 67 She describes the protagonist, however, as having unbelievable sexual endurance, whom she wants “to tear [her] apart.” 68 Playing into her fantasies, and playing within his own invisibility, he says, “I rapes real good when I’m drunk.” She replies, “Ooooh, then pour me another.” 69 In a state of mythopoetic (and masochistic) frenzy she says, “Come on, beat me, daddy—you—you big black bruiser. What’s taking you so long?” she said. “Hurry up, knock me down! Don’t you want me?” Annoyed, he slaps her, but this only leaves her “aggressively receptive.” He never rapes her, but constructs the moment with a different semiotic spin, writing on her belly with lipstick: “SYBIL, YOU WERE RAPED BY SANTA CLAUS, SURPRISE.” 70 The invisible man has unveiled the core of Sybil’s projections—projections that are designed to ontological truncate, to bar the invisible man’s self-narration. What she wants is a fantasy that does not exist. The point here, though, is that Ellison provides a rich narrative portrayal of the psychosexual dynamics involved in the erasure and problematic return of Black male identity in relationship to white female desire for the Black body as phantasmatic object. Throughout the text, Ellison’s protagonist is never really in charge of who he is, which is another manifestation of his invisibility and powerlessness. When he joins the Brotherhood, which is where he thinks he will finally gain recognition, he is still treated as amorphous, invisible. 71 During a moment in the text where he is used to give a speech at a rally, the invisible man notes, “The light was so strong that I could no longer see the audience, the bowl of human faces. It was as though a semi-transparent curtain had dropped between us, but through which they could see me—for they were applauding— without themselves being seen.” 72 The influx of light is significant here. In one way or another throughout the text, the protagonist has had to contend with the blinding light of whiteness, its power to see, to gaze, to control, to return, to stop. Here again, the protagonist cannot return the gaze; he is seen, but cannot see. Indeed, he cannot see that he is being tricked by the Brotherhood. Beneath the façade of an intrinsic interest in the invisible man, the Brotherhood wants him as a political and ideological speaking Black body, a mere verbal Black surface. For example, a character named Emma asks, “But don’t you think he should be a little blacker?” 73 His subjectivity and human-

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ity are not valued. Rather, it is his Blackness that functions as a site of political semiosis; he is a manipulated political tool. The invisible man notes, “Maybe she wants to see me sweat coal tar, ink, shoe polish, graphite. What was I, a man or a natural resource?” 74 Perhaps the history of American slavery offers the answer: he is a means to a larger white purpose, a “natural resource” to be exploited. Ellison explores the dialectics of how whiteness is constructed through the reconstruction/negation of Blackness in a brilliant example where the protagonist gets a job working for a paint plant. As the invisible man arrives at the plant, he sees a large sign that reads: “Keep America Pure with Liberty Paints.” 75 Working under Mr. Kimbro, the invisible man learns how to make the paint. He is instructed to open each bucket of paint and put in ten drops of a liquid that is black. To his surprise, as the black liquid disappears, the pure white paint appears. After the invisible man completes a few buckets, Mr. Kimbro exclaims, “That’s it, as white as George Washington’s Sunday-goto-meetin wig and as sound as the all mighty dollar! That’s paint!” he said proudly. “That’s paint that’ll cover just about anything!” 76 Another white employee, Lucius Brockway, later describes the pure white paint as “Optic White.” Describing how he helped create the slogan for Optic White paint, Brockway says, “If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White.” 77 The symbolism regarding the black liquid raises the dynamics of Black erasure in relation to whiteness. Just as the paint’s quality of pure white needs the black drops, “racialized” whiteness as normative, moral, good, and pure is dependent upon the projection of the Black body as “inferior,” “stained,” and “impure.” Of course, by the time the paint has become pure white, there is no trace of Blackness. This symbolism is characteristic of white America’s denial that its very existence is inextricably linked to the presence of Black people. The large sign rings true, America must be kept pure. The pure whiteness of the paint can “cover just about anything.” Hence whiteness “covers” that which is sullen, dirty, evil. It does away with the unclean. Optic White literally can be translated as “eye white” or “seeing white” or figuratively as “I white,” where the verb is deleted. Of course, the term “optic” raises the issue of the white gaze. Optically, the protagonist is rendered invisible. Optically, whites either refuse to see him or see him as if he were the reflected image given back as a result of being “surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.” 78 As Optic White is “Right White,” the white gaze, as it renders the protagonist invisible/distorted, attempts to elide critique because white is always right. Moreover, since optics is the science that deals with the propagation of light, which Europeans historically brought to so-called backward cultures of “darkness,” Optic White is “Right White.” Consistent with this symbolism, Africa became “dark” (again, a form of phenomenological return) as “explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded

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it with light, because the light was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of ‘savage customs’ in the name of civilization.” 79 AUDRE LORDE Kyeong Hwangbo writes, “Trauma is a liminal experience of radical deracination and calamity that brings about a violent rupture of the order on both the personal and the social level. It annihilates the sense of continuity in our lives and our self-narratives, bringing to the fore the contingency of our lives.” 80 Of course, as Black, the contingency of Fanon’s life is defined through the violence of white normative assumptions that destabilize and traumatize our Black embodiment. Ahmed writes, “For bodies that are not extended by the skin of the social, bodily movement is not so easy. Such bodies are stopped, where the stopping is an action that creates its own impressions. Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? Each question, when asked, is a kind of stopping device: you are stopped by being asked the question, just as asking the question requires that you be stopped. A phenomenology of ‘being stopped’ might take us in a different direction than one that begins with motility, with a body that ‘can do’ by flowing into space.” 81 Racialized interpellation, then, is by no means inconsequential in an anti-Black world. The hail impacts the Black body through the skin of the social. The hail is the site of a social ontological and sonic material vector—a stopping force. This stopping force was made painfully clear to me when Theo Shaw wrote to me. Shaw is one of “The Jena Six,” which consisted of six Black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana, who were convicted in 2006 for the beating of Justin Barker, a white student at the local Jena High School. Many believed, given the complexity of the case, that their convictions were too harsh and racially driven. Shaw wrote to me and asked a very difficult question: “Dr. Yancy, is to be Black and male in America like being on death row?” While it was a painful question to answer, I did so in the affirmative. Shaw is pointing to what it is like to be always already on the precipice of having one’s Black body returned as a problem and then stopped with often deadly force. The NYPD’s racial profiling practice of stop-and-frisk disproportionately targeted both Black and Brown bodies, a racial hailing that stresses and traumatizes hundreds of thousands of innocent Black people, especially as many of those individuals have been stopped at least more than once. Imagine the impact on one’s body integrity to undergo stop-and-frisk based upon “reasonable suspicion” where the “reasonableness” is governed by a racial and racist logic that has already constructed certain bodies as “criminals” and “urban savages.” Imagine the impact of what it means to have one’s own body returned to oneself as a problem on a daily basis.

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Adding to Ahmed’s concept of a phenomenology of being stopped, I emphasize that a phenomenology of traumatization in virtue of being specifically Black in an anti-Black world (which does not exclude other bodies of color) can also take us in a different direction, one that theorizes specific forms of Black trauma that don’t occur for white people. Within the context of a white normatively structured world, there is no racialized radical deracination and calamity for whites. It is this absence, for whites, of a racialized traumatic and dehumanizing deracination that also speaks to the absence of forms of white racialized grieving that helps us to understand the limits of white empathy and the ways these absences are underwritten by an unspoken philosophical anthropological norm that guarantees that white lives really matter. That unspoken white norm frames the experience, for example, that Audre Lorde remembers in terms of the disgust and hatred directed toward her, as a young Black girl, by a white woman seated on the AA subway train to Harlem. “I clutch my mother’s sleeve, her arms full of shopping bags, Christmas-heavy. The wet smell of winter clothes, the train’s lurching. My mother spots an almost seat [next to a white woman], pushes my little snowsuited body down.” As she sat next to the white woman, Lorde remembers this woman pulling her coat away from Lorde’s snowsuit. The white woman is staring at the young Lorde. She writes, “Her mouth twitches as she stares and then her gaze drops down, pulling mine with it.” 82 Lorde talks about how she thought that perhaps there was a disgusting insect that the woman was trying to avoid. This “thing” that has created such a visceral repugnance on the part of the white woman “must be something very bad from the way she’s looking.” 83 It is the white gaze that Lorde recognizes. After all, she knows the white gaze, its penetrating hatred, its impact upon her body. In fact, she says, “I don’t like to talk about hate. I don’t like to remember the cancellation and hatred . . . seen in the eyes of so many white people from the time I could see.” 84 Lorde’s use of the term “cancellation” suggests a sense of existential annulment and personal invalidation. “From the time that I could see” speaks painfully and insightfully to the fact that Lorde has undergone the trauma of the hatred of the white gaze very early on. Lorde makes it clear that she has been confronted by white people in ways that sent a clear and deliberate message: “You are a Nigger!” As Lorde soon discovers, it was her body that the white woman perceived as vermin. She writes, “When I look up the woman is still staring at me, her nose holes and eyes huge. And suddenly I realize there is nothing crawling up the seat between us; it is me she doesn’t want her coat to touch.” 85 This experience leaves Lorde with the impression that she has done something wrong—that she is embodied as wrong. Lorde came too close to the “purity” of white embodiment, to white “scared” occupied space. As a result, her Black body underwent a powerful manifestation of white perceptual violence, a racialized regulatory surveillance. Her body is

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returned as untouchable, stopped in its sense of lived motility and its sense of comfort at having found a place to sit on a crowded train. The white woman’s disgust communicates: as an embodied contaminant, you are too close. 86 Lorde is returned as a problem, and any sense of movement as a site of effortless grace is canceled. PERSONAL EXPERIENCE When I was seventeen or eighteen, my white math teacher’s “advice” to me functioned to stop me in terms of my aspirational ideals and forced a phenomenological return of my Black body upon itself. He was able to accomplish this process with complete calm. Given the historical construction of whiteness as the transcendental norm, his own raced subject position was rendered invisible. After all, he lived in the “real world,” the world of whiteness where white constructed racist values are believed anterior to their existential founding. As I recall, we were discussing my plans for the future. I told him I wanted to be a pilot. I was earnest about this choice and had spent a great deal of time not only reading about aerodynamic lift and drag but also the requirements involved in becoming a pilot, such as accumulating flying hours. After taking note of my firm commitment, he looked at me and implied that I should be realistic (a code word for realize that I am Black) about my goals. He said I should become a carpenter or a bricklayer. There I was being vulnerable, telling a trusted teacher what I wanted to be, what I aspired to be, and he returned me to myself as something I did not recognize. He stopped me in my aspirations. I did not intend to be a carpenter or a bricklayer. I wanted to be a pilot. The situation, though, is more complex. The teacher did not simply return me to myself as a carpenter or a bricklayer when all along I had had this image of myself as a pilot. Rather, he returned me to myself as a fixed entity, returned me to myself in his own image, a Black body whose epidermal logic had already foreclosed the possibility of being anything other than what befitted its “lowly station.” His white voice functioned as a synecdoche of a larger anti-Black racist society that “whispers mixed messages in our ears,” the ears of Black people who struggle to think of themselves as a possibility. 87 He mentioned that there were only a few Black pilots and again implied that I ought to face reality. (One can only imagine what his response would have been had I said that I wanted to be a philosopher, particularly given the whiteness of the field and the presumption that philosophical thought was the domain of white men.) The message was clear: because I am Black, I had to settle for an occupation “suitable” for my Black body, unlike the white body that he would have eagerly encouraged to become a pilot. Having one’s Black body returned as ontologically problematic and ersatz, one begins to

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think, to feel, to emote, even if unconsciously, “Am I incapable?” The internalization of the white gaze creates a doubleness within the Black psyche, leading to a destructive process of superfluous self-surveillance, self-interrogation, and self-doubt. This moment was indeed a time when I felt ontologically locked into my body. My body was indelibly marked with a stain of failure. After all, he was the white mind, the mathematical mind, calculating my future by factoring in my Blackness. He did not “see” me, though. Like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, I occupied that paradoxical status of “visible invisibility.” Within this dyadic space, my Black body phenomenologically returned to me as inferior. I was returned as an appearance to consciousness, my consciousness. The (negatively) raced manner in which my body underwent a phenomenological return, however, presupposes, as argued, a thick social reality that has always already been structured by the ideology and history of whiteness. More specifically, when my body is returned to me, the white body has already been constituted over centuries as the norm, both in European and AngloAmerican culture, and at several discursive levels from science to philosophy to religion. My math teacher’s whiteness was invisible to him, just as my Blackness was hypervisible to us both. White identity, as I’ve argued, is defined around the “gravitational pull,” as it were, of the Black body. 88 The not of white America is the Black of white America. This not is essential, as is the invisibility of the negative relation through which whites are constituted. All embodied beings have their own “here.” My white math teacher’s racist social performances (for example, his “advice” to me), within the context of a white racist historical imaginary and asymmetric power relations, suspends and effectively disqualifies my embodied here. What was the message communicated? Expressing my desire to be, to take advantage of the opportunities for which Black bodies had died in order to secure, my ambition “was flung back in my face like a slap.” 89 Fanon wrote that within the lived context of the white world he “was expected to behave like a black man—or at least like a nigger. I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged.” 90 According to Bettina Bergo, drawing from the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, “Perception and discourse—what we see and the symbols and meanings of our social imaginaries—prove inextricable the one from the other.” 91 Hence the white math teacher’s perception, what he “saw,” was inextricably linked to social meanings and semiotic constructions and constrictions that opened up a “field of appearances” regarding my dark body. There is nothing passive about the white gaze. There are racist sociohistorical and epistemic conditions of emergence that construct not only the Black body but the white body as well. So what is “seen” when the white gaze “sees” “my body” and it becomes something alien to me?

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In stream with phenomenology, consciousness is always “consciousnessof.” What was my white math teacher “conscious-of”? The answer to this question, to which I already alluded, can only be given through the acknowledgment of a culturally and historically sedimented “racialized” consciousness-of structure. Hence, white racist acts of consciousness in regard to the Black body are meaning giving in ways that specifically distort the Black body. After all, they are acts of meaning giving structured through the white imaginary. Indeed, the construction of the “manners-of-givenness” of the Black body as inferior, for example, is contingent upon white racialized consciousness—of a socially ordered and, by phantasmatic extension, “naturally” ordered world. Conversely, the construction of the “manners-of-givenness” of the white body is contingent upon the distortion or negation of the Black through whites’ reactionary value-creating force. Instead of my white teacher self-consciously admitting (to the extent that was possible) the role he played (and continues to play) in the perpetuation of this white social imaginary (and the racist way he was conscious-of my body) in his everyday social performances, ideologically he “apprehended” the Black body, my Black body, as pregiven in its constitution as inferior. Of course, he cannot claim responsibility for the entire stream, as it were, of white racist consciousness given the fact that these constructions are part of a larger historical imaginary, a social universe of white racist discourse that comes replete with long, enduring myths, perversions, distorted profiles, and imaginings of all sorts regarding the nonwhite body. Yet he is complicit and thereby must be held responsible. Charles Johnson has noted that one can become blind to seeing “other ‘meanings’ or profiles presented by the object if the perceiver is locked within the ‘Natural Attitude,’ as [Edmund] Husserl calls it, and has been conditioned culturally or racially to fix himself upon certain ‘meanings.’” 92 On my reading, within the framework of an anti-Black racist world, the meaning of the Black body is a synthesis formed through racist distal narratives that ideologically inform whites of their “natural superiority,” that enable whites to flee their part in constructing a “racial regional ontology” fit for Blacks only. Phenomenologically, I experience myself as “the profile that their frozen intentionality brings forth.” 93 After all, whiteness is deemed the horizon of all horizons, unable to recognize the imaginary “racial” dualism that it has created. The white gaze has constructed the Black body “as the specular negative images of itself and that hence, abstracts the white person into an abstract knower.” 94 The meaning of my lived body is phenomenologically skewed when white consciousness negatively intends me as my Black (read: inferior, evil) body. I become alienated, thrown outward, and assigned a meaning not of my intending. In my everydayness, I live my body from an existential here. Wherever I go, I go embodied. As Lewis Gordon writes, “Here is where I am located. That place, if you will, is an embodied one: it is

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consciousness in the flesh. In the flesh, I am not only a point of view, but I am also a point that is viewed.” 95 In my phenomenological return, however, I am reduced to a point that is viewed. My here is experienced as a there. The experience of being reduced to one’s “Black exteriority,” rendered thing-like, through processes of meaning-intending acts of white racist intentional consciousness, is insightfully described by Charles Johnson: I am walking down Broadway in Manhattan, platform shoes clicking on the hot pavement, thinking as I stroll of, say, Boolean expansions. I turn, thirsty, into a bar. The dimly-lit room, obscured by shadows, is occupied by whites. Goodbye, Boolean expansions. I am seen. But, as black, seen as stained body, as physicality, basically opaque to others. . . . Their look, an intending beam focusing my way, suddenly realizes something larva in me. My world is epidermalized, collapsed like a house of cards into the stained casement of my skin. My subjectivity is turned inside out like a shirtcuff. 96

In the face of my white teacher’s racism, I could have decided to lose myself in laughter, but, like Fanon, I was aware “that there were legends, stories, histories, and above all historicity.” 97 My dark embodied existence, my lived historical being, became a chain of signifiers: inferior, nigger, evil, dirty, sullen, immoral, lascivious. As Fanon wrote, “In the unconscious, black = ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality.” 98 When phenomenologically returned to myself, when stopped in my aspiration, I appeared no longer to possess my body, but a “surrogate” body whose meaning did not exist anterior to the performance of white spectatorship. JACQUELINE WOODSON As she gave her acceptance speech after receiving the prestigious 2014 National Book Award (NBA) in the category of Young People’s Literature on November 19, 2014, one could see on Jacqueline Woodson’s face a sense of gratitude and jubilation. Her body language communicated a sense of being at home within that ceremonial space. With style and humility, she congratulated the other finalists and stressed just how important young adult and children’s literature are to our world. Her embodied presence was marked by a sense of accomplishment, of having revealed to the world, through the literary creation Brown Girl Dreaming, what it is like to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s vis-à-vis the vestiges of Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. Brown Girl Dreaming is her existential odyssey, one explored through verse, a text that signifies to the literary world and beyond that she is part of a formative tradition that feeds the active imaginations of young adults and children regardless of race. Her dreams speak to universal themes that denote fungible relationships among all readers. She could have said with Fanon, “I

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wanted to come lithe and young into a [literary] world that was ours and to help to build it together.” 99 Woodson dreamed through the critical imaginary of a Black/Brown body, tracing her origins and making meaning of life, of joy and pain. Yet, and without a moment’s notice, there was set into motion a series of unfortunate racist events, ones that decentered Woodson’s humanity and installed in its place an event of racist violence, an event of embodied malediction, where her Black body was returned and where she underwent a form of being stopped. Daniel Handler, host of the NBA, reminded Woodson (and all Black bodies by implication) that her most sublime moment of achievement was secondary to the true meaning of her racial epidermal surface, a surface that is woven “out of a thousand [white racist] details, anecdotes, stories,” 100 stereotypes, myths, and lies. She was transmogrified into an oddity, like Sarah Baartman’s “primitive” backside. While there is no attempt to conflate the deep existential tragedy that happened to Baartman with Woodson’s experience at the NBA ceremony, there is that sense in which Woodson became a spectacle, a wonder to behold, a racial and racist essence as Handler revealed that “Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon.” Handler then asked the audience to “Just let that sink in your mind.” By doing so, he drew on the collective white racist meme within the audience and effectively engaged in an act of discursive violence against Woodson’s Black embodied integrity. Woodson was returned as a racial anomaly. “Let that sink in” is an invitation to the audience to join him in a collective act of affirming their racism through acknowledging the racist joke that implicates all Black bodies as bodies that love watermelon. After the audience allows it to sink in, there is laughter from the predominantly monochromatic (white) audience, revealing the active production of a form of racist knowledge that is distortive and dehumanizing. It’s not simply that they understood the joke, but that they affirmed, through laughter (and not outrage) their sense of humor regarding the oxymoronic idea of a Black body allergic to watermelon. They think that they are hip and cool (racially neutral) literati who can laugh without being deeply implicated in the perpetuation of white racist injustice and anti-Black racism. Yet the collective laughter further marked Woodson as an essence, as a Black body, with big eyes and oversized lips, which naturally and sloppily eats watermelon; she is gluttonous and lacks control, a racist trope that has deeper hypersexual implications. 101 The audience, along with Handler, forgot about the flesh-and-blood Black woman standing there before them, her feelings, and her sense of pride. How she saw herself was foreclosed and stopped. They were more concerned about what they took to be humorous than Woodson’s sense of dignity and elation in what was her moment. In other words, Handler, and the other white people who laughed, helped to install a racist value-laden colonial space at the NBA ceremony, creating a racist Manichean divide between “us” (whites) and “them”

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(Woodson and other ontologically “problematic” Black bodies). And as is typical within the colonial order of things, the colonizer assumes a position of definitional power and has the power to constrain and to stop those who are colonized. Handler invited the audience to participate with him in the reinscription of a form of racist essentialism that he endorsed. It is a form of racist essentialism where to be Black and to love watermelon is a tautology. For a Black body to be allergic to watermelon leaves us with just a few options: either Woodson is an oxymoron or Woodson isn’t really Black. In either case, it is an abhorrent racist claim. And notice how this happened within the context of Woodson’s having been recognized for her achievement, an achievement that apparently only white people are supposed to garner. Handler’s recentering the white gaze on something far more palatable (a non-watermeloneating “Nigger”) places under erasure the significance of Woodson’s achievement. The space of that ceremony was flooded with white racist history, calling forth a panoply of racist images/iconography: “Coons,” “Sambos,” “Picaninnies,” “Mammies,” and “Calibans.” More specifically, Handler’s invitation—his call and the response it received—revealed the racist logics always already at play just waiting to be tapped within such predominantly white spaces. The implication here is that white racism is not an anomaly or something extraordinary, but quotidian; white racism is a normal part of white American life. Moreover, “good” white people, progressive and liberal white people, demand that Black people or people of color underwrite both their racism and their “goodness” in one fell swoop. 102 This happens when Handler said to Woodson that he would write a book about a Black girl who is allergic to watermelon only if he received an endorsement from Woodson, Cornel West, Toni Morrison, and then President Barack Obama. As he says, their support would communicate, “This guy’s ok! This guy’s fine!” Yet this is more essentialism. It assumes that “ordinary” Black people don’t really understand the harm that is being done to Woodson, or know a racist when we see one, that we stand in need of being corrected regarding the ethical credentials of “good white” folk, those who mean no real harm. There was so much racist toxicity in Handler’s remarks. It was as poisonous as the racist ideology of the Klan. And yet there is no pretending from the Klan. Hence, it is “good” white folk like Handler that I fear. Woodson no doubt saw Handler as a friend, one of the “good ones.” After all, she had disclosed to him something personal about her medical history regarding a particular fruit. He threw that personal disclosure back at her within a public space. The act of throwing that back at her was a kind of social death blow. While not the kind of death blow experienced by Michael Brown at the hands of white officer Darren Wilson, Woodson may have experienced a form of death—a nonphysical death by microaggression. It is the kind of death that

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Black people and people of color experience on a daily basis. For example, being followed while shopping or being pulled over while driving, Black bodies undergo forms of erasure/death. Handler attempted to subject Woodson’s work to a certain kind of death; her winning the National Book Award was subjected to a certain kind of death, and her literary and imaginative creativity was subjected to a certain kind of death. At the height of validation vis-à-vis the award, Handler attempted to invalidate Woodson’s moment. Handler effectively created a space where Woodson’s “oxymoronic” racialized identity was returned to her as a brown girl dreaming of what it would be like to consume watermelon voraciously without having an allergic reaction. It wasn’t about her dreams, but the dreams of Handler and those whites in the audience who laughed or who refused to call Handler on his racism. Like the “dreams” of my white math teacher, I was invited into a white racist nightmare. It is fascinating that at the end of his racist insult, Handler says to Woodson, “Alright, we’ll talk about it later.” Again, there is laughter from the audience. It is as if Woodson is open to further conversation about the matter. He doesn’t want to let it go; he refuses to let it go, perhaps convinced that Woodson will endorse his book about a Black body that defies the very metaphysics of race. His decision to postpone the conversation until later suggests that he is the one in control of how the racist narrative will play out. It is important that we call Handler on his racism and that we unambiguously communicate to him (and the white audience) that what he said at the National Book Award ceremony was not a mistake, a mere fluke in an otherwise racist-free life, but that what he said speaks to the logics of everyday white racism (his white racism) that does violence to Black people and people of color. Finally, I would argue that the racist violence that Handler perpetrated on Woodson can’t be propitiated through acts of monetary charity. I would reject both his offer to donate $10,000 to We Need Diverse Books and to match any donations of up to $100,000. This is just another way of seeking white shelter, a form of easy redemption, from the gravity of the pervasive reality of white racism in America. It is also a form of redemption that positions Handler as a white Hollywood savior figure through a dialectics of an oppressed other. 103 Handler again attempts to control the narrative, this time as the “good” white who committed an awkward social faux pas, but one that can be easily fixed through grand gestures of monetary dispensation. “The messiah fantasies,” as Vera and Gordon argue, “are essentially grandiose, exhibitionistic, and narcissistic.” 104 On the one hand, Handler functions as the white oppressor, the one who hurls racist insults. On the other hand, he gets to be the white “liberator,” to authorize his narcissistic role within a larger racist ideology of manifest destiny. In short, Handler continues to benefit from white power, hegemony, and privilege. I would rather Handler tarry with his racism and come to terms with how he and

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other “good whites” are complicit with more complex interpersonal and institutional forms of white supremacy that result in discursive forms of violence vis-à-vis Black and Brown bodies. I would rather Handler publish an engaged and critical analysis of how he thought that he knew the limits of his own white racism and how he was profoundly mistaken, how he is racist despite his best attempts not to be. Within each of these vignettes, there is an unasked question that is a necessary transposition of what white people silently ask of black people; that is, how does it feel to be a white problem? After all, the vignettes that I’ve explored above demonstrate that racism is not a Black problem but a white problem. What is necessary is that white people tarry with the reality of their own whiteness, which is a binary structure that is hegemonic and hierarchical. So the dangerous reality that white people must face is the reality of their own white racism. I say “dangerous” because seriously addressing that reality will involve the recognition that whiteness is an empty category in terms of which it needs Blackness to sustain its structural integrity. It will be a grave situation for white people when they realize that the social metaphysics of their whiteness is not only false and empty, but ethically inept and violent. Hence, what I’m suggesting is a different form of return and a different form of being stopped. White people must begin to see themselves through the eyes of Black people and people of color, to be prepared to see their own emptiness and to starve themselves of a form of Black surplus that they have created. In this way, whiteness stops in its voraciousness to hear a call from beyond itself, to look at itself through eyes that refuse to lie. If we are to truth tell in an age of moral crisis, “post-facts,” “alternative truths,” where there is apparent “blame on both sides” and where you have “very fine people on both sides,” then we don’t want whiteness to consume us, to eat us—we want whiteness to CHOKE!! This will require a form of interruption; indeed, an unmasking of whiteness as precarious, not complete, fixed, and total. Within the context of providing an account of what she calls a phenomenology of hesitation within the context of whiteness and racialization as sites of fixity, Alia Al-Saji writes, “That all is not given means that what is must be understood as tendency and becoming rather than thing; this is important not only for how we see objects and bodies, but for what it means to see, feel, and think.” 105 For James Baldwin, love is about becoming and undoing. It isn’t a place of stasis and false safety. So, with Baldwin, I conclude, “And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” 106 NOTES 1. Johnson, “Phenomenology of the Black Body,” 600.

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2. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161. 3. Snead, White Screens, Black Images, 4. 4. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161. 5. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110. 6. Ibid., 116. 7. Ibid., 112. 8. Ibid., 110, 111. 9. Ibid., 111. 10. Ibid., 109. 11. Ibid., 112. 12. Ibid., 116. 13. Ibid., 112. Note that the expression “sho’ good eaten’” is an English translation of the so-called African French “Y a bon banania.” “Y a bon” stands for “C’est bon.” In this quote, Fanon is making an important reference to the ways Blacks were caricatured not only in the French imaginary, but for purposes of selling French products. “Sho’ good eaten’” refers to Bonhomme Banania, a French breakfast food consisting of sugar, banana flour, and cocoa. The caption consisted of a picture of a Senegalese, with a broad smile, eating the Banania. Whether or not the image was originally intended for purposes of caricature, it is impossible to miss the “smiling, contented darky” that the image depicts. The Senegalese man appears nonthreatening and exemplifies the close association of Blacks with the process of serving (whites) food. Think here of the image of Uncle Ben used in the United States to sell rice. Political acts often come in the form of very small quotidian decisions. When I’m shopping for syrup, I consciously decide against purchasing the bottle of syrup that is constructed in the image of the so-called Aunt Jemima figure. Although her frozen smile is inviting and sweet, it belies the material and ideological conditions that positioned Black women in subservient roles. Her smile is not for me! 14. Ibid., 113. Lewis Gordon insightfully points out that Fanon deliberately uses the ambiguous French word nègre, which means both “Negro” and “nigger.” See Gordon, “Through the Zone of Nonbeing,” 22. 15. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 113–14. 16. Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans,” 203. 17. Hegel, “Geographical Basis of World History,” 134. 18. Ibid., 133. 19. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112. 20. Henze, “Who Says Who Says?” 238. 21. David R. Roediger reveals how something as “benign” as playing a child’s game is shaped through the white racist imaginary. Though he did not know any Blacks personally and lived in an all-white town, he notes, “I learned absolutely no lore of my German ancestry and no more than a few meaningless snatches of Irish songs, but missed little of racist folklore. Kids came to know the exigencies of chance by chanting ‘Eeny, meany, miney, mo/Catch a nigger by the toe’ to decide teams and first batters in sport. We learned that life—and fights— were not always fair: ‘Two against one, nigger’s fun.’ We learned not to loaf: ‘Last one in is a nigger baby.’ We learned to save, for to buy ostentatious or too quickly was to be ‘nigger rich.’ We learned not to buy clothes that were a bright ‘nigger green.’ Sexuality and blackness were of course thoroughly confused.” See Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 3. I recently learned that white children as far away as Australia still use the chant, “Eeny, meany, miney, mo / Catch a nigger by the toe.” 22. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 188. 23. While it is true that the young boy has come to internalize a form of negrophobia, I would not claim that he is in bad faith. 24. Alcoff, “Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment,” 21. 25. Smith, Killers of the Dream, 84. 26. Ibid., 27. 27. Sullivan, “Racialization of Space,” 89. 28. Smith, Killers of the Dream, 12–13. 29. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 85.

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30. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 108. 31. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110–11. 32. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161. 33. Ngo, Habits of Racism, ix. 34. Alcoff, “Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment,” 20. 35. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 111. 36. Ibid., 11. 37. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children, 38. 38. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 44. 39. Smith, Killers of the Dream, 90. 40. Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future, 7. 41. Warren, “Social Drama of a ‘Rice Burner,’” 190. 42. Keep in mind that this act should not be deemed an aberration, a single, isolated incident. It is the result of a larger process, no matter how subtle the forms of acculturation. Hence the newcomer’s performance of the glance is an instantiation of a larger system of white forms of policing Black bodies that secures white power and privilege. 43. Smith, Killers of the Dream, 90. 44. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 45. 45. Du Bois, “Conservation of Races,” 24 46. Ibid. 47. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 250. 48. King, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” 588. Although King says “every man,” within the overall context of this quote he is, as with Du Bois and Fanon, specifically pointing to the profound sense of self-interrogation that Black people undergo within a life-world saturated with anti-Black racism. 49. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 20. 50. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 395. 51. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 43–44. 52. Ibid., 43. 53. Du Bois, “Souls of White Folk,” 454. 54. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. 55. Ibid. 56. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 139. 57. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. 58. Ibid., 4. 59. Ibid., 5. 60. Ibid., 19. 61. Taylor, “Re-birth of the Aesthetic Cinema,” in The Birth of White-ness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 27. 62. Ellison, Invisible Man, 18. 63. Ibid., 517. 64. Ibid., 522. 65. Ibid., 518. 66. Ibid., 520. 67. Ibid., 521. 68. Ibid., 520. 69. Ibid., 521. 70. Ibid., 522. 71. Given the Brotherhood’s pro-proletarian emphasis, and its stress upon a classless society, one might argue that Ellison’s invisible man’s inner contradictions and existential plight within the context of his “raced” invisibility transcend the history of class conflict. I say this with some hesitation given my understanding of Ellison’s ambivalent “involvement” with the Communist Party. 72. Ellison, Invisible Man, 341. 73. Ibid., 303.

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74. Ibid., 303. 75. Ibid., 196. 76. Ibid., 202. 77. Ibid., 217. 78. Ibid., 3. 79. Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans,” 185. 80. Hwangbo, “Trauma, Narrative, and the Marginal Self,” 1. 81. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161. 82. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 147. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 147–48. 86. I would like to thank Eric Boynton and Peter Capretto for allowing me to reuse the Lorde example. I theorize the experience that Lorde undergoes within a larger chapter for their edited book on trauma. 87. Marable, “Conversation with Ossie Davis,” 9. 88. I would like to thank Bettina Bergo for our conversation regarding this point. 89. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 114. 90. Ibid., 114–15. 91. Bergo, “‘Circulez! Il n’y a rien à voir,’” 131. 92. Johnson, “Phenomenology of the Black Body,” 603. 93. Ibid., 607. 94. Sartwell, Act Like You Know, 45. 95. Gordon, Existentia Africana, 76. 96. Johnson, “Phenomenology of the Black Body,” 606. Within the context of the history of African American philosophy, Johnson’s article exploring a phenomenology of the Black body is an early and formative piece in the tradition of what is now termed Africana philosophy of existence. The article was written as early as 1975 and was subsequently published in the winter 1976 issue of Ju-Ju: Research Papers in Afro-American Studies. Johnson’s article actually appeared prior to Thomas F. Slaughter Jr.’s “Epidermalizing the World,” which was included as a chapter in Leonard Harris’s groundbreaking edited volume Philosophy Born of Struggle. 97. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112. 98. Ibid., 192. 99. Ibid., 112–13. 100. Ibid., 111. 101. Pieterse, White on Black, 199. 102. I would like to thank philosopher Janine Jones for this concept. 103. Sian, “Sara Ahmed,” 25. 104. Vera and Gordon, Screen Saviors, 3. 105. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 143. 106. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 9.

WORKS CITED Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68. http://fty.sagepub.com/content/8/2/149. Alcoff, Linda Martín. “Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment.” Radical Philosophy: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy 95 (May/June 1999): 15–26. Al-Saji, Alia. “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily S. Lee. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Modern Library, 1995.

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Bergo, Bettina G. “‘Circulez! Il n’y a rien à voir,’ Or, ‘Seeing White’: From Phenomenology to Psychoanalysis and Back.” In White on White/Black on Black, edited by George Yancy, 125–70. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent.” In “Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 166–203. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. 1641. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Conservation of Races.” In W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis, 20–27. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. ———. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: New American Library, 1982. ———. “The Souls of White Folk.” In W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis, 453–65. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1947. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. ———. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Gordon, Lewis R. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. ———. “Through the Zone of Nonbeing: A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon’s Eightieth Birthday.” CLR James Journal: A Special Issue: Frantz Fanon’s 80th Birthday 11, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 1–43. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 392–403. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Geographical Basis of World History.” In Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, 110–49. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997. Henze, Brent R. “Who Says Who Says? The Epistemological Grounds for Agency in Liberatory Projects.” In Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, edited by Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-García, 229–40. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Hwangbo, Kyeong. “Trauma, Narrative, and the Marginal Self in Selected Contemporary American Novels.” Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 2004. http://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/ UF/E0/00/73/02/00001/hwangbo_k.pdf. Johnson, Charles. “A Phenomenology of the Black Body.” Michigan Quarterly Review 32, no. 4 (1993): 595–614. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Where Do We Go from Here?” In A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington, 245–52. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chautal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso, 1985. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. Marable, Manning. “A Conversation with Ossie Davis.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 2, no. 3 (2000): 6–16. Ngo, Helen. The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1999. Sartwell, Crispin. Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

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Sian, Katy P., ed. “Sara Ahmed.” In Conversations in Postcolonial Thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Slaughter, Thomas F., Jr. “Epidermalizing the World: A Basic Mode of Being Black.” In Philosophy Born of Struggle: Afro-American Philosophy from 1917, edited by Leonard Harris, 283–88. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1983. Smith, Lillian. Killers of the Dream. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Snead, James. White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. Edited by Colin MacCabe and Cornel West. New York: Routledge, 1994. Sullivan, Shannon. “The Racialization of Space: Toward a Phenomenological Account of Raced and Antiracist Spatiality.” In The Problems of Resistance: Studies in Alternate Political Cultures, edited by Steve Martinot and Joy James, 86–104. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001. ———. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Taylor, Clyde. “The Re-birth of the Aesthetic Cinema.” In The Birth of White-ness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, edited by Daniel Bernardi, 15–37. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Vera, Hernan, and Andrew M. Gordon. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Warren, John T. “The Social Drama of a ‘Rice Burner’: A (Re)Constitution of Whiteness.” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 20 (2001): 184–205. Williams, Patricia J. Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997.

Chapter Ten

The Phenomenology of White Identity Linda Martín Alcoff

What does it mean to identify someone as white? In common usage, the term can designate one’s immediate family lineage, the geographical origin of one’s ancestors, skin color and other physical characteristics, or some combination of these. But the term is also used, increasingly, to describe a way of being in the world, an attitude or disposition or set of implicit framing assumptions that affect one’s perceptions and judgments. Phenomenology, I will suggest, can help us to make sense of this usage of the term, where whiteness refers less to a set of empirical facts about a person and more about their subjectivity, or some aspects of their subjectivity. In this paper, I will argue that the phenomenological concept of the “natural attitude” can help to elaborate the idea that, sometimes, there can be group-related aspects of our substantive orientation to the world. The idea of the “natural attitude” can also help to offset essentialist and determinist understandings of white identity that tie subjectivity too closely to lineage and physical appearance. Whiteness itself is contingent, variable, and dynamic, and its dynamic potential can be augmented by reflection on its sometimes hidden or subtle features. The phenomenological approach can thus help us to avoid fatalism. Phenomenological methods aim to reveal the complex and sometimes hidden structures constitutive of human experience. If we approach the phenomenal everydayness of our lives not as a simple transparent perception of the natural world but as always mediated and conditioned by our very particular history and experience, we can grasp more concretely the way what appears as the everyday becomes constituted by particularity, history, and contingency. We can also bring into view the ways the universal conditions of human existence, such as temporality, freedom, and anxiety, are manifest differently given one’s cultural and social location. 175

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Whiteness, I will argue, plays a role in constituting and mediating experiences that may seem to be highly individual or, conversely, transcendental and universal. Phenomenologists understand human experience as ineluctably embedded in the world, but there are many worlds, not merely one, with overlapping and complex interrelationships. One thing that is clear is that whiteness is a historical identity formation, not a natural condition. It emerged out of a combination of historical experiences and state-enforced advantages over other groups. In this sense, it is both a natural result of particular events and the contrived effect of intentional policies. It is natural that certain large events of history affecting groups differently would have an impact on aspects of our subjectivity, but it is also important to consider the intentional protections of whiteness in, for example, immigration policies or laws allowing neighborhood segregation or disallowing miscegenation. Thus, the lived experience of whiteness has been produced by some large-scale group-related events as well as purposeful state policies. Numerous scholars—particularly sociologists, social psychologists, political scientists, economists, and historians—have spent the last several decades measuring, dating, and tracking whiteness across time frames and social locations. 1 As such, whiteness has become more than ever a perceptible object in the world, and one that we can study with empirical methods. We can find the average and median white income and wealth, its fertility and mortality rate, its employment and voting patterns, its rate of incarceration, and compare these findings to those of other groups. We can also measure the differences within the category of whiteness, since it has always been significantly fractured by class, gender, sexuality, and other divisions, and the best scholarship on whiteness today is attendant to these. 2 Yet despite its variability, the category of whiteness remains an important correlate of many significant social patterns. Beyond whiteness as an empirical object, there is also a substantively distinct first-person consciousness, or lived experience, of whiteness that the empirical approaches can obscure, and that can operate across the intersections. Even within multiple white points of view we can discern some similarities. For this, the work of social psychologists has been most important in revealing significant patterns of white perception, judgment, affect, and response. We now can say incontrovertibly that whiteness has a particular effect on the formation of subjectivity, including typical patterns of entitlement, fear, and habits of social interaction. But the psychological study of whiteness can also tend toward treating it as an object with measurable characteristics rather than a dynamic hermeneutic horizon (or more correctly, a constellation of related horizons). As a number of philosophers have already made clear, in order to get at the first-person experience of whiteness, a phenomenological approach can yield some real insights. 3

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In what follows, I will develop the idea that we can best approach this distinctive white subjectivity through the Husserlian concept of the natural attitude, or what it is that is taken for granted without question. In this context, the idea of the natural refers not to something that has been spontaneously generated without human intervention but to a state that feels automatic, comfortably familiar, in no need of questioning. Using this concept, I will explore what is likely to be taken for granted from a white point of view. The natural attitude is far from static, so we should be careful to avoid positing it as fixed. But it can appear unresponsive to change, and in fact be quite difficult to change, precisely because it operates as an implicit grounding for the everyday work of being in and relating to one’s world. In other words, the natural attitude is operative within but not engaged by normal everyday disputes. It is not made visible in the normal course of social conflict. Yet it is possible to discern, and unearthing the natural attitude can help to dislodge the everyday feel of habitual orientations. It can also explain not only how we live in our worlds but how we participate in the constitution of our worlds. The first-person point of view of whiteness can often appear to outsiders to be locked up, unchanging, fixed in its orientation to self and others. Whether liberal or conservative, urban or rural, poor or middle class, whites can evince a blockish resistance to certain topics, an obliviousness and unknowingness about racial, and racist, realities that can only be explained in the twenty-first-century era of information overload as the result of stubborn, deliberate choice. Racial ignorance today requires more active work than it perhaps did in times past, given how many people live in urban areas and have multitudes of potential informational input. Thus, one must actively engage in a careful curating of schools, classes, neighborhoods, media sources, and entertainment. Today’s white racism involves new practices and takes new forms, and cannot be attributed as the inevitable holdover of historical legacies of racism. Just as white identity, like all identity formations, is multidimensional and dynamic, so too is white racism in constant process of reproduction, regeneration, and transformation to more updated forms. 4 Racism, then, is not based on a lack, or a lazy continuity, but must be understood as more purposeful. Yet this may not be experienced by the person as purposefulness on his part or as a conscious choice or the product of conscious reasoning in any way. The point of calling racism purposeful, then, is not to identify it as the necessary result of a process of reflective deliberation, but as an intentional orientation or way of being in the world nonetheless, that may or may not involve reflective deliberation. There is a coherence and organization to both the cognitive and affective ways of being in one’s social world.

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It is useful here to consider Sartre’s analysis of anti-Semitism, an analysis that also explains anti-Semitism as a coherent organization of one’s world and one’s self. Sartre famously described anti-Semitism as grounded in a commitment more than a belief. The anti-Semite, he argued, is committed to a refusal of reason and a refusal to engage with counterarguments and counterevidence. The intentional aspect of anti-Semitism is revealed in its refusal to engage with facts, arguments, and other sorts of evidence that might challenge the belief held by a gentile Frenchman in his own comparative value and superordinate claim to national rights. 5 In truth, anti-Semitism cannot be the result of a reasoning process, Sartre claimed, because one must have a prior commitment to a specific ordering and assessment of the facts. One’s bad Jewish landlord is interpreted in an a priori way as the result of his Jewish identity rather than his status as a landlord. Hence, rather than just responding to the natural condition of his or her social world, the anti-Semite is actively working to create evidence and to find supporting reasons that justify his antipathy and maintain his worldview intact. His ultimate motivation, Sartre argued, was to maintain his world, his self-understanding and his self-concern. Changing the view of how and why French Jews were treated as they were would challenge the status especially of those French gentiles lower down the social ranks. Anti-Semitism could not be abandoned without changing, and challenging, one’s own self-understanding of one’s condition. We might say, then, that the choice the anti-Semite is making here is to conserve one’s natural attitude, or what one takes for granted without reflection or challenge. Sartre claims that anti-Semitism “in its most temperate and most evolved forms remains a syncretic whole which can involve even bodily modifications.” 6 In other words, anti-Semitism is not a singular position, nor is it a mere belief, but it expresses an overall orientation to the world that organizes and unifies perceptual and cognitive practices with affective effects or components. Importantly, corporeal experience is also part of this “syncretic whole.” Some anti-Semites, he relates, express a physical discomfort in being around Jews, a felt experience of physical disgust. This indicates how anti-Semitism organizes one’s imagination, sensibilities, structure and direction of sentiment or empathy, as well as both the process and content of belief formation. It makes sense, then, to think of this orientation as a form of intentionality, as Sartre suggests. There is no other way to understand how the very presence of Jews could be a prompt for physically felt discomfort. It is madness, a kind of sickness that refuses treatment. Sartre’s analysis provided an important formulation of the willful character of anti-Semitism and an antidote to facile rationalist solutions focused on education or logical reasoning. He persuasively showed how the commitment to anti-Semitism operated as logically prior to the data dredged up to justify it, since the evidence of bad deeds or bad individuals could never

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actually indict an entire group as a permanent feature predicting their behavior forever into the future. Sartre’s account aims to produce a phenomenologically adequate account of the structure of anti-Semitic experiences, unearthing the project of selfmaking behind the attributions of othering. Yet Sartre’s account renders the anti-Semite too static, timeless, essentialist. Of course, he is writing during a period when little nuance was possible: French gentiles knew what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, and many were sanctioning it. An anti-Semite in 1944 could not but have a willful disregard for the murderous outcomes of these beliefs. While we can use elements of Sartre’s account, taking this to be a sufficient paradigm of the general problem of racism is a mistake. A phenomenological approach to racial identity and racism requires, I will argue, historical contextualization and the ability to discern variation, rather than a monodimensional explanation of racism through the category of bad faith. As Silva puts it, we need to be able to “track changes in racial identities and novel forms of racism.” 7 If the everydayness of our social identities includes a “natural attitude,” as I will suggest, we need to understand this as having local variability as well as a dynamic character. Unlike a psychoanalytic approach that offers an account of the purportedly universal structuration of self–other relations, phenomenology’s methods should remain open to dynamic possibilities in the formation of experience. Sartre’s own view of self–other relations was famously pessimistic, at least in his early writings. He described undifferentiated selves who must choose among antisocial, objectifying options in their relations with others, to express sadism or masochism, for example. The permanent temptations of bad faith, like original sin or the Oedipal Complex, prefigured the form that our affective relations take in his account, so that hell is indeed other people. Sartre’s minimalist definition of the for-itself secures its freedom by releasing it from the weight of substance, but the result is that any incursion of materiality and history seems to degrade our options. In actuality, as he knew, our relationships with others always involve their past (or what we know of it, and how this affects our orientation toward them) and their physical appearance, and he saw these as producing inevitable tendencies toward objectification (based on their appearance) and essentialism (based on their history). But there are other approaches within the phenomenological tradition that suggest there are variable forms of possible human interaction and also, linked to this, more reason for cautious optimism to believe that, occasionally at least, self–other relations can take the form of enhancing autonomy and agency rather than inevitably eroding our chance to escape the petrification of the in-itself. I suggest then that we consider the concept of the “natural attitude” as a means to think about quite particular and historically variable conditions of

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our experience, including our experiences with others. 8 This means that the “natural attitude” is not taken to be a version of original sin, as in the concept of “bad faith,” in which we are forever opaque to ourselves and doomed to repeatedly attempt to escape the freedom of others. Rather, the natural attitude is a historically created and dynamic part of our everyday actions and perceptions. The word “natural” has no ontological status in this sense: it does not denote that which is outside of culture, but precisely that which has been created by specific social and cultural conditions. It is simply a shorthand way to convey the idea that, whether in a philosophy seminar or a kitchen, we are always operating against a background of elements that are taken for granted as not requiring reflective critique and questioning. It is helpful, then, to explore the historical formation of the “natural attitude” of whiteness through which an increasingly complex social world will be interpreted. Toward this end, it is helpful to ask the following sorts of questions, here just given as examples of many such questions one might devise: What must the subjective core of whiteness contain such that ethnic history courses appear to be some form of “tribalism,” and the wide expanse of societies around the world can be judged by a single rubric and then ranked as more or less “advanced”? How can the outlandish differential shares of property and resources by diverse groups be perceived as “earned”? As stated earlier, Husserl describes the “natural attitude” as that which is “before being”: the basic support structure of everydayness that orients and allows one to make sense of his or her experience and perceptions, to bring the world into the sphere of the felt ordinary. One may have a low-level or semiconscious awareness of the contingency and precariousness of one’s ordinary orientation, an awareness, perhaps, that there are others who experience one’s shared social and natural world in different ways. But this awareness may stay in the background unless some sort of crisis changes the conditions of one’s life. For example, Merleau-Ponty describes his wartime experiences during the Nazi occupation of Paris as causing changes in the way he interacted with others. 9 He could no longer maintain his middle-class illusions that he was free to treat people as individuals but was forced to base interactions on uniforms and other markers of national identity. This instigated some reflection about his prior self-understanding of his apparently easy and automatic mode of individualism. Thus, the war made at least some aspects of his previous “natural attitude” visible and available for reflection and analysis, and he began to consider what social and structural conditions had made his prior attitudes possible in the first place. In most instances, however, we experience the “natural attitude” as simply an immediate intuitive understanding because it feels this way—as an uninterpreted, uncaused, direct perception of the real or the true. It is precisely because the production of the natural attitude has been hidden that blockish obliviousness prevails: this is the domain of not knowing what one does

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not know. The anthropologist Franz Boas was able to make some amount of progress toward unclogging the field of cultural analysis when he assessed one of the linguistic methods used to label a people as inferior or less advanced. 10 Westerners were labeling peoples as inadequately rational if their language use appeared inconsistent, without determinate, fixed meanings or consistent rules of use. This criterion appeared to researchers as a neutral and objective measure of analysis by which to demarcate the status of various cultures. The fact that it invariably placed Western cultures on top did not ring alarm bells since most assumed they already had adequate evidence to view Western cultures and languages as superior. In reality, Boas argued, anthropologists were misled by their own hubris: the gradations of meaning operative in the languages they were studying were misunderstood and consequently misdiagnosed by these outsiders. Westerners jumped to conclusions that felt familiar, obvious, and natural, and as a result their investigations and critical analyses were foreshortened. Hence the domain of what feels natural and in need of little justification must become the prime territory for analysis. In the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology, progress in understanding can be achieved through elucidating one’s natural attitude by a process of bracketing one’s assumptions and frameworks. This process of bracketing or epoche can make it possible to focus on the truly immediate perceptual content of one’s experience. I “know” that each hour in a day is constituted by an identical set of units of time, that each hour is thus identical. Yet, if I bracket this idea, I can focus on the actual way in which I live the hours of my day, and through this discover something about the nature of my experience of and relation to various activities. Another way to put this is that by bracketing my ordinary concept of equal units of “time,” I can gain an awareness of my experience of unequal units of “temporality,” or lived time, and through this I may gain a better understanding of my life. In actuality, focusing on the more immediate realm of experience may feel uncomfortable since it brackets our familiar judgments. Distancing oneself from the comfort of one’s assumptions can render experience more intense and more exotic, and this can be the means to assess the substance and effects of the natural attitude. One cannot step out of one’s own skin, or displace by an act of will all of one’s habits. But one can strive to work against what is customary and habitual. So then, what is this “natural attitude” of whiteness? What is its content? Can we plausibly attribute it to all white people? And how has it been formed? In what follows, my aim will be to consider one of the central elements of the natural attitude of whiteness: the sense that whiteness is exceptional as an extraordinarily uncommon way of being in the world. Although it is exceptional, whiteness is also taken to be more expressive of the uniquely human, the rational, even, perhaps, the divine. Whiteness is not

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one among others, subject to the sort of cultural relativism Boas advocated for, but a unique form of the particular with universal elements that can be used to normatively judge all other groups. This is not a mythic essence but a historically created self-understanding produced through mythic histories carefully protected from contestation. Whiteness is so often treated as a form of false consciousness or ideological mystification that a phenomenological approach can be rejected out of hand unless it intends to reveal the completely fallacious nature of white selfascription. Yet a phenomenology of white identity will reveal, I will argue, that whiteness has been formed by a historical process and is not reducible to the ideological. Whiteness is an identity born of both history and current practices, with some significant variation and fluidity, but there are common elements. Racism has constituted the ideas about the content or meaning of whiteness, its comparative attributes vis-à-vis others, but it did not constitute the identity ex nihilo. In what follows, I want to unpack one of the key elements that conditioned, and helped to create, the natural attitude of whiteness in the local context of the United States. Hector St. John de Crevecouer was a Frenchman who farmed in Orange County, New York, just south of Poughkeepsie. In 1782 he published a book entitled Letters from an American Farmer that became, and remains, widely influential. The book included a collection of twelve letters in which he made first-person observations of his experience of frontier life and also covered topics such as wildlife and agriculture. But he engaged in some acute social analysis. One of the letters is called “What Is an American?” and offers a definition that some credit as the founding document of a multicultural American identity. But as you might guess, the breadth of its imaginary multiplicity was limited. Crevecouer’s epistle was written during the buildup to the revolutionary war, a period of feverish debate over the justifications of monarchism and what other forms of political organization might be feasible. A central question of the day was whether democracy was even possible. No matter how desirable democracy may be, was it actually viable as a system of governance? Crevecouer answered this question thusly: democracy is possible for this particular group of people under these particular conditions. He argued that the “American people”—defined as those who had emigrated from Europe—were in a unique condition to launch the democratic experience. They were arriving unencumbered and fresh, motivated to invent new forms of social interaction. He describes their outlook as follows: “We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess, and the nature of our employment.” 11 European American immigrants freely chose to settle here out of a need to find refuge from “a variety of miseries and wants” inflicted by their countries of origin. 12 They were thus motivated to

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dispense with their prior allegiances and make themselves anew. In this way he imagined that their innate capacity for self-creation, both as individuals and as a collective, could develop without hindrance or check from the demand to follow tradition. And the Americans Crevecoeur describes are centrally farmers, that is, people who are devising new forms of interaction with these unfamiliar natural surroundings. Such an immigrant, Crevecoeur surmises, “must greatly rejoice that he lived at a time to see this fair country discovered and settled; he must necessarily feel a share of national pride, when he views the chain of settlements which embellishes these extended shores.” 13 Crevecoeur felt such national pride to be justified, as he exclaims, “There never was a people, situated as they are, who, with so ungrateful a soil, have done more in so short a time.” 14 Thus was set out the basic creed of American exceptionalism, still with us today. Americans (meaning European Americans) are an exceptional people precisely because they have freely immigrated and chosen to leave “old Europe” behind, with its irrational distinctions of rank that control social interaction and stymie creativity. Voluntary migration is a willful choice to leave this behind in order to create something anew. “We are nothing but” where we are at the present moment, based on our current volitional commitments and effortful labor, Crevecoeur is saying. Our particular histories no longer have meaning. All that counts is what we choose to do here, whom we choose to obey, and what ideas we choose to profess. Truth be told, European migration to the Americas was not entirely voluntary in a robust sense of the term. Most had experienced deprivation and some had also experienced political and religious persecution. Crevecoeur’s characterization works well with such white immigrants who had been starved and driven out of their countries and were thus motivated to leave their cultures behind. As he describes with some phenomenological insight, the new immigrant is arrived on a new continent: a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different from what he had hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess every thing, and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe. 15

Hence, these immigrants had little motivation to hyphenate their new identities: they were happy with a replacement term: “American.” They hoped for a new social world where they might achieve a new standing with more social equality.

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With this picture in mind, we can begin to understand the formulation of the natural attitude of whiteness. Leaving history behind—denying the impact of one’s history—is politically advisable, even commendable, and not just amnesia or ignorance, given this particular experience of immigration. To reject the relevance of history is in fact the sign of enlightenment. Such sentiments may not in fact have ranged equally across differences of property so much as Crevecoeur imagined: the elites who led the new nation continued to pull rank with each other by the conventions of old Europe and hounded those like Alexander Hamilton whose lineage was modest. The mass of European Americans, however, were no doubt happy to leave such manners of judgment behind. Crevecoeur’s description can be taken to be the imaginary original moment, the mythic signing of the social contract, that united the new immigrants into a cohesive nation. Being white was a key element that made one free to invent oneself anew without historical encumbrance. By the 1800s, the poorest indentured Irish laborer could achieve freedom of employment after paying off transportation, usually within seven years. By the 1900s, homestead laws encouraged the poorest European immigrants to seek to acquire property up to 160 acres. The state ensured that whites were given political and economic advantages in creating new lives for themselves, but their motivation to create lives anew was also connected to their particular immigration histories. Those who were not European American immigrants may have found themselves wanting to hold onto their group histories, to retrieve and relearn their histories after having been torn from their societies unwillingly, but these were not included in Crevecoeur’s description. Nor were those who might have grievances against the new United States government, such as Native Americans or enslaved Africans, for the forcible way they came to be a part of the new nation. By his definition, then, such persons were not “American” either by fact or by will, not simply or only because they were not white, but because of the different and involuntary ways they came to be a part of the nation. Non-Europeans were also sharply differentiated by the legitimate grievances produced by these histories of enslavement, colonial annexation, and attempts at genocide. These groups were not necessarily motivated to be free of their past. And they would never have the same emotional relationship to the forming of the United States, never seeing it as a salvation as white immigrants could, never feeling the same patriotism or loyalty to the same extent or in the same way. Patriotism calls for different sacrifices for different groups. For European immigrants, patriotism calls on them to forgo ties to an old and unjust Europe from which they sought refuge. It calls on them to privilege their new community over their old one, to accept a new identity, but it is a community to

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which they feel grateful and also a part of. For other groups, patriotism calls for loyalty to the nation that tore their families apart. Whites, then, are at the center of the new American identity, even to the point of conflating what it means to be white and what it means to be American, not simply because of the ideology of white supremacy but because of their different historical experience of migration. For Crevecoeur, the possibility of democracy and national cohesiveness is the result of the particular conditions of European immigration. Such Americans can debate the public good without nursing grievances and can view and assess others by what they do here and not what they have been elsewhere. A lack of patriotism, as in the taking of the knee, for example, is then perceived as a lack of loyalty to the white immigrant polity and the society they imagine themselves to have made. American exceptionalism is a central feature of the natural attitude of whiteness in the United States, I would argue, affecting both how whites see the country’s controversies as well as how whites view other whites as well as other others. It would be incorrect to attribute this to all whites, but it is an idea very much with us across the political spectrum. Suzy Hansen calls it the “indispensable-nation complex” and found it manifest equally in statements made by presidential candidates Trump and Clinton during the 2016 election. 16 In a speech to the American Legion a few weeks after the Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton credits the veterans for their sacrifices to “protect the greatest country on earth.” Then she goes on: “If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this. The United States is an exceptional nation. I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope of Earth. We’re still Reagan’s shining city on a hill. We’re still Robert Kennedy’s great, unselfish, compassionate country.” 17 This sort of view is available to nonwhites, of course; President Obama invoked American exceptionalism repeatedly. But consider here the word “still” that is repeated several times in Clinton’s statement, a word that invokes continuity more than change. The word “still” is invoking a history that does not need to be escaped from, or redeemed, but returned to, maintained. Clinton goes on to state that what is great about America is not just its military: America is also great because of its values, how hard the American people work, and how big they dream. This is what makes America not only exceptional but an indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable nation. . . . When we say America is exceptional, it doesn’t mean that people from other places don’t feel deep national pride, just like we do. It means that we recognize America’s unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity. 18

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What can justify such grandiose claims? The idea that the United States is unique in the world hearkens back to Crevecouer’s argument about why democracy can (only) work here: because a new people has created itself anew. If the concept of American exceptionalism is taken to demarcate a political superiority rather than mere military might, as Clinton suggests, it is thus in reality a white exceptionalism. Whites are superior, on this view, not because a racialist ranking preordains it, but because their unique historical experience makes it possible. Only white immigrants come to the United States without grievances against this nation—their grievances are against the societies they left behind. Hence only they can engage in a grievance-free form of rational deliberation over the public good. Those with grievances (non-Europeans) will become special interest groups incapable of truly rational deliberation over the common good, with arguments circumscribed by a prior agenda of demands for acknowledging and repairing specific injustices. This is why white political candidates can be seen to speak for all, while nonwhite candidates are seen as speaking only or primarily for their racial/ethnic group. Whites are more capable of rationality because of their specific political positionality in the polity, given by their distinct history. Note that this is not about being given silver spoons when they got to these shores—many whites suffered hardships and many forms of injustice, but they nonetheless had different relations to their previous societies and to their new government, and different relationships to the act of immigration itself. In this context, it is interesting to note Thomas Jefferson’s predictions for the future of the new country, predictions that resonate in another way with Crevecoeur’s ideas about democracy. Jefferson believed slavery would end, and on some level, despite his well-known racism, he acknowledged that it was morally wrong. In Notes on the State of Virginia he wrote that the nation’s political leaders would have a set of serious challenges on their hands when slavery was abolished. In his view, abolition would have to be quickly followed by a forced return of African peoples to Africa. Their grievances would be too great to be a part of the new democracy or to become part of a democratic polity with their former oppressors. Jefferson wrote that “the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” 19 Note that he chooses to say “cannot” rather than “must not.” He argues that the just grievances of former slaves after abolition “will lead to convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.” 20 It is important that, for Jefferson, the legitimacy of the grievances made no difference. He does not claim their grievances are imagined or based in resentment. Yet the fact of grievances by former slaves would block their ability to be incorporated into a democratic polity together with whites, sharing the task of collective self-invention.

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The effect of Crevecouer’s explanation and Jefferson’s prediction was that the political culture of the United States never set itself the agenda of creating a nation that could unite groups with such disparate experiences and histories. We have never had a political culture that set itself the task of acknowledging these divergent histories and developing reparative policies, with the brief exception of Reconstruction. We have never had a state that understood itself as in need of moral reform. So the project of creating not only a multicultural and multiethnic nation, but a nation made up of millions of citizens with legitimate grievances, both historical and ongoing, against the state and against some portions of the population, has not been on the agenda. And without having ever tried, there is widespread skepticism that it can be done, precisely because of Crevecouer’s answer to how democracy is possible, by severing the ties of the past. Note what this implies for the nature of rationality: it needs a free hand. Otherwise, a political culture devolves into positional negotiation among fully articulated group interests—the possibility of common interests and the production of new unencumbered identities is curtailed. Hence, when there is no longer a white majority, there will no longer be a democracy, ‘”a great, unselfish, compassionate country” that has something to offer the world, in Clinton’s words. The current attacks on “tribalism” and “identity politics,” on the left and the right, are holdovers of Crevecouer’s and Jefferson’s view. That view is that history and group differences are problems for democracy. Now what does one do in the face of historical injustices that include slavery, genocide, colonization? Immigrants today largely come from parts of the world that have suffered from colonialism and imperialism by the United States. They cannot be assimilated, not simply because of a racial difference but because of a historical difference and a different relation to the state. I suggest this history can give us a fuller understanding of the natural attitude of whiteness, that which is taken for granted, informing current controversies. NOTES 1. See Painter, History of White People; Feagin, White Racial Frame; Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness; Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth. 2. See Sokol, There Goes My Everything; McDermott, Working-Class White; Ste. Claire, Cracker. 3. See, e.g., Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness; Beauvoir, America Day by Day; Yancy, White on White/Black on Black. 4. Silva, “Embodying a New Color Line.” 5. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew. 6. Ibid., 6 7. Silva, “Embodying a New Color Line,” 68.

188 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Linda Martín Alcoff See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations and Experience and Judgment. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense. Boas, Race, Language, Culture. Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 45. Ibid., 40. Ibid. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 40–42. Hansen, “Corruptions of Empire.” Quoted in ibid., emphasis added. Quoted in ibid., emphasis original. Jefferson, “Autobigraphy,” 44. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 138.

WORKS CITED Beauvoir, Simone de. America Day by Day. Translated by Carol Cosman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Boas, Franz. Race, Language, Culture. New York: Free Press, 2018. Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer. Edited by Susan Manning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1782. Feagin, Joe R. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Hansen, Suzy. “Corruptions of Empire.” Baffler, December 2016. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/ corruptions-of-empire-hansen. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Translated by D. Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988. ———. Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Edited by L. Landgrebe. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Jefferson, Thomas. “Autobiography.” In Thomas Jefferson: Writings, edited by Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Library of America, 1984. ———. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited by William Peden. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955. Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. McDermott, Monica. Working-Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-sense. Translated by H. L. Dreyfus and P. L. Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Painter, Nell. The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Oliver, Melvin L., and Thomas M. Shapiro. Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. New York: Routledge, 1997. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. New York: Schocken Books, 1965. Silva, Grant. “Embodying a New Color Line: Racism, Anti-immigrant Sentiment, and Racial Identities in the Postracial Era.” Knowledge Cultures 3, no. 1 (2015): 65–90. Sokol, Jason. There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Ste. Claire, Dana. Cracker: The Cracker Culture in Florida History. Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1998. Sullivan, Shannon. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of White Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Yancy, George, ed. What White Looks Like: African American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. New York: Routledge, 2004. ———, ed. White on White/Black on Black. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Chapter Eleven

Seeing Like a Cop A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property Lisa Guenther

In the neighborhood where I lived for ten years in East Nashville, there was a sign on many front lawns: “Something Suspicious? Don’t Wait—Call [the nonemergency number for the Metro Nashville Police].” For a reason I never quite understood, the sign featured a pair of sultry feminine eyes with arched eyebrows, more like something you might see on a 1980s strip club than a neighborhood watch sign. Mixed messages aside, it’s not clear that residents needed much encouragement to practice surveillance on each other. The East Nashville listerv was full of reports of “suspicious” activity, including “Nervous guy ringing doorbell” (“We did not get to the door but we have video surveillance”), “Mulch Guy” (“He wanted to charge $6.85 a bag, but charged by the plastic bucket—much less than a ‘bag’. He also did not follow my wife’s and my instructions to avoid smothering the monkey grass”), and “URGENT ALERT! Dog Thieves in the neighborhood” (“There was an attempt to steal his Dalmatian [with a hot dog]”). 1 Signs and messages like these function as cues for a set of perceptual practices that I will call “seeing like a cop.” Such practices include watching for abnormal activity, listening for strange sounds, and tracking the movement of unfamiliar people, usually from the safety of one’s home or car. Seeing like a cop typically leads to calling the cops, and this call can have disastrous consequences for those who are perceived as strange, out of place, and potentially dangerous. East Nashville changed a lot in the ten years I lived there. By the time I left, condos and luxury apartments were springing up everywhere. One building, called Stacks on Main, tapped into the excitement of rapid gentrification with a frankly neocolonial advertising slogan: “Get Your Piece of the East.” 2 The website features young white people posing with vintage cameras and 189

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playfully entangling each other in Christmas lights. Prospective buyers are encouraged to “put a ring on it” and submit an application. They are told, “You shouldn’t have to choose between modern amenities and a historic neighborhood. . . . You deserve an experience, not just another apartment.” 3 But the history of East Nashville is more complicated than the current map of coffee shops, microbreweries, and yoga studios would suggest. At the end of the block is a road sign announcing the Trail of Tears Auto Tour Route, which spans the Cumberland River close to the place where thousands of Cherokee people were forced to cross in 1830 as they were driven off their land toward Indian Territory in what is now known as Oklahoma. 4 In the 1970s and 1980s, East Nashville became home to impoverished people of color displaced from the downtown core by “urban renewal” projects. When a tornado swept through East Nashville in 1998, damaging over three hundred homes, the disaster set off a wave of gentrification by people who celebrated their adventurous frontier spirit with bumper stickers featuring the 37206 zip code and slogans like “Over the river and through the hood,” or “We’ll steal your heart—and your lawnmower.” Now there’s a second wave of gentrification underway, as luxury apartments replace housing projects and companies with names like Strategic Hospitality claim their own “Piece of the East.” 5 The aesthetics of hipster gentrification may seem a far cry from the suburban paranoia of first-wave gentrifiers, with their dated clipart and their covert or overt racism. There is no mention of security concerns at Stacks on Main; the selling point is not the comfort of gated enclosure but rather the promise of affordable access to a plethora of “experiences” to which you are entitled, and which the website is designed to help you imagine. And yet these experiences are only marketable on the basis of a reasonably secure investment in a “Piece of the East” whose value can be expected to stack up fairly quickly. The unstated assumption of the gentrifying pioneer is that if you don’t enjoy your experience of other people’s poverty, homelessness, or racial difference, you can call on state violence to have them removed. The aesthetics of securitized edginess comes to signify neighborhood investment and “improvement,” even though it typically intensifies the exposure of longtime residents to police surveillance, harassment, displacement, arrest, and even homicidal violence. 6 In February 2017, a thirty-one-year-old black man named Jocques Clemmons was shot dead by a police officer in the parking lot of Cayce Homes, a housing project just a few blocks from Stacks on Main. 7 The projects are now being redeveloped into mixed-income housing due to their lucrative proximity to downtown. What is the relation between “seeing like a cop” and “getting your piece” of neocolonial urban territory? To what extent are these practices racialized as white, even if those who participate in them are not exclusively white? How do property, personhood, and race intersect with the security appara-

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tuses that serve and protect some people while exposing others to lethal and nonlethal, but exhausting, forms of state violence? And how might phenomenological methods help to make sense of this complex intersection? In what follows, I propose a critical phenomenology of whiteness as property and as a collective investment in state violence to protect white property interests. By critical phenomenology, I mean a phenomenological method that does not grant absolute priority to the first-person experience of individual consciousness but rather situates lived experience in a material, historical, and social context that is both prior to the individuation of any given subject and also shaped by the historical sedimentation of perceptual practices and existential styles. 8 From this perspective, the world is not constituted by the intentional acts of a singular consciousness; rather, Being-inthe-world is, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “instituted-instituting,” both passively received or inherited and actively reopened to fresh horizons of possibility. 9 I will return to the concept of institution later, in my account of the sociogeny of whiteness as property. The concept of whiteness as property was developed by critical legal theorist Cheryl Harris to name the effect of legal, political, and economic structures developed in the early Virginia Colony on the twin foundations of settler colonialism and slavery. Prior to the investment of settlers and planters in getting their own piece of America, whiteness did not exist as a social category. People of European descent may have identified as English, Norwegian, and French, or as Christian rather than heathen, but they did not identify as “white” until whiteness was consolidated in law and in social practice as a kind of property whose possession exempted one from being owned by another, thus distinguishing indentured servants of European descent from slaves of African descent, the latter of whom were marked by law with a permanent, inheritable status as chattel. 10 Harris argues that, long after the Thirteenth Amendment (partially) abolished slavery, whiteness has continued to function as a property interest that protects white people from being at the bottom of a social hierarchy, even if they are otherwise marginalized on the basis of class, gender, sexuality, or ability. An investment in whiteness as property may not guarantee financial stability to individual white people, but it does pay what W. E. B. Du Bois calls the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness. 11 In proposing a critical phenomenology of whiteness as property, I do not claim to describe the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, or desires of white people, understood as individual subjects. My project is not an account of white consciousness, nor even of the white unconscious, but rather a phenomenological critique of whiteness as a sociogenic force that (re)produces the spatiotemporal order of what Fanon calls “the white world,” as well as the bifurcation between, for example, white neighbors and black strangers as inhabitants of the white world. I am particularly interested in the phenomeno-

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logical structure of whitespace, understood as a spatial order that has been securitized or “cleansed” 12 of impediments to the fusion of personhood and property, in which “subjects of human capital” or “entrepreneurs of the self” invest, 13 and which they routinely call on state violence to protect. Not every subject of human capital is phenotypically white, and not every white person is deeply invested in whiteness as property. Nor is the practice of suspicious surveillance limited to white people. Whiteness is not an ahistorical essence, but rather a particular form of social (but also asocial or socially destructive) existence that emerged in the early modern period, at the intersection of settler colonialism and transatlantic slavery, and through the intellectual collusion of liberal political philosophers like John Locke with colonial regimes of racial capitalism. But precisely as such, the structure of whiteness as property incentivizes perceptual practices and sociogenic schemas that naturalize and normalize what George Lipsitz calls “a possessive investment in whiteness.” 14 I will argue that this investment in whiteness also entails a tacit investment in racist state violence to protect whiteness as property. 15 In order to dismantle or abolish whiteness as property, we must understand how it works. The aim of this paper is to contribute to abolitionist theory and praxis by exploring how whiteness functions as a sociogenic force to produce subjects of propertied personhood who are invested in racist police violence with various degrees of impunity. 16 TO SERVE AND PROTECT (WHITENESS AS PROPERTY) Cheryl Harris argues that in the United States whiteness functions as property in a range of different senses: as a value and a right, as in James Madison’s definition of property; as the basis of an expectation of advantage, as in Bentham’s definition; and as an exclusive right of possession, use, and disposition, as in liberal political definitions of property. 17 Understood as an exclusive property right, whiteness implies the right to police its own boundaries for the sake of excluding and selectively including others as white, and therefore as rightfully shielded from becoming the property of others. 18 This right to exclude others is crucial for understanding how proper(tied) personhood is deputized as an agent of suspicious surveillance. But how exactly does this happen? How does whiteness operate as a sociogenic force with the capacity to (re)produce subjects who invest in themselves as a form of property and seek to protect this property in different ways, including seeing like a cop and calling the cops? By sociogenic force, I mean a material, historical power to generate and intensify particular forms of social being, including individuated subjects and the spatiotemporal social order that Fanon calls “the white world.” The concept of sociogeny was introduced by Frantz Fanon and developed by Sylvia

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Wynter 19 and her readers, including David Marriott 20 and Lewis Gordon. 21 In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes, “Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny. . . . Man is what brings society into being. The prognosis is in the hands of those who are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the structure.” 22 Sociogeny is not a causal mechanism but rather a conditional process that unfolds both on the basis of established social practices and existential styles, and also in relation to an indefinite horizon of possibility for becoming otherwise. I find Merleau-Ponty’s account of institution helpful for understanding the temporal dynamics of sociogeny. Institution is an active-passive process whereby an event or experience both arises on the basis of sedimented practices and also establishes its own “durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, and will form a thinkable sequel or a history . . . as a call to follow, the demand of a future.” 23 The event may be the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a police officer, or it may be the construction of a luxury apartment building in a historically black neighborhood. What marks this event as a moment with institutional power is its capacity to issue a “call to follow,” or to operate as an organizational node for a future that emerges on the basis of a past that remains open to being interpreted or appropriated in different ways. But institution is more than a hermeneutic framework; it is the establishment of a rhythm that organizes both the meaning and the materiality of existence. This rhythm may be already felt in our bodies and our world, but it must be picked out and invested with durable dimensions in order to establish itself as institution. The intensity and consistency of this investment has the power to generate social forms like white subjects in a white world, with a set of perceptual practices that include seeing like a cop. The process of institution presupposes an “intersubjective or symbolic field of cultural objects, which is our milieu, our hinge, our jointure.” 24 This field includes lawn signs and advertising slogans, as well as surveillance cameras, alarm systems, fences, gates, swipe cards, and secure parking facilities. Merleau-Ponty argues that “the instituted exists between others and myself, between me and myself, like a hinge, the consequence and the guarantee of our belonging to one selfsame world.” 25 But the bifurcation of social space into neighbors and strangers, or potential investors and removable barriers to investment, suggests that while we may all find ourselves in “one selfsame world” structured by whiteness as property, we do not all belong to this world, nor do we have the same chance of claiming a piece of it as our own. Fanon argues in Black Skin, White Masks that the black man has no ontology in a white world, given that blackness is constructed in opposition to whiteness and can only be perceived as a lack or absence in relation to the white mask that he is forced to wear if he wants to show up as intelligible on a white horizon of meaning—or to survive in a world that is constructed and

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maintained through racist police violence. In the final section of this paper, I will argue that white skin is also produced by white masks, but in a different way, through an investment in propertied personhood that makes your status intelligible as a subject of human capital in a world where you are entitled to have an “experience” and to “get your piece.” To put this somewhat differently, white masks are the condition under which some people “think they are white.” 26 In his essay, “On Being White . . . and Other Lies,” James Baldwin reflects on the impact of a possessive investment in whiteness on both white subjectivity and on the instituted structure of the world: America became white—the people who, as they claim, “settled” the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the black presence, and justifying the black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie. White men—from Norway, for example, where they were “Norwegians”—became white by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping black women. And how did they get that way? By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. . . . And [they] have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. 27

To think you are white is to be invested in whiteness as property to the point of accepting or even demanding the exclusion, exploitation, or annihilation of others as a condition of securing your own investment. Or to put this another way, whiteness is what grants you the right to be served and protected by law enforcement officers. For Baldwin, investing in whiteness is a “moral choice” that both exposes communities of color to genocidal violence and also diminishes the humanity of white people, the latter of whom give up “the power to control and define themselves” in exchange for the power to “control and define Black people.” 28 But from a phenomenological perspective, the development of a racial epidermal schema is—at least initially—less a choice than a prereflective, pre-predicative, and even prepersonal investment. This is not to say that white people cannot be held accountable for our investment in white supremacy, but rather that we are accountable less for choosing to be white than for choosing to continue to invest in whiteness as property in the face of multiple tensions, disruptions, and contradictions. What are the perceptual practices through which people who think they are white and invest in whiteness as property choose to police the boundaries of whiteness? SEEING LIKE A COP The word cop, understood as a slang term for police officer, originated in mid-nineteenth-century England, soon after the establishment of a profes-

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sional police force in the city of London. Cop is short for copper (or “one who cops”), which is derived from the verb, to cop, meaning “to capture, grasp, lay hold of, ‘nab.’” The Latin root is capere, meaning to take or seize, but also to “take in” in the sense of understanding. Capere gives us words such as capture and captivity, but also concept and perception (from concipere and percipere). 29 Beyond this etymological curiosity, what can we say about the relation in practice between “seeing like a cop” and capere in the threefold sense of understanding or perceiving, taking or seizing, and capturing or arresting? What are the epistemic dimensions of policing, and how are they related to the racial, economic, and legal order of whiteness as property? In his 1968 book Varieties of Police Behavior, James Q. Wilson describes the job of the patrolling officer as a perceptual practice of detecting signs of abnormality in order to remove them from public space: The patrolman confronting a citizen is especially alert to two kinds of cues: those that signal danger and those that signal impropriety. A badly dressed, rough-talking person, especially one accompanied by friends and in his own neighborhood, is quickly seen as a potential threat—he may, out of his own hot temper or because of the need to “prove himself” in front of his buddies, pull a knife or throw a punch. A teenager hanging out on a street corner late at night, especially one dressed in an eccentric manner, a Negro wearing a “conk rag” (a piece of cloth tied around the head to hold flat hair being “processed”—that is, straightened), girls in short skirts and boys in long hair parked in a flash car talking loudly to friends on the curb, or interracial couples—all of these are seen by police officers as persons displaying unconventional and improper behavior. 30

Nearly fifteen years later, in 1982, Wilson cowrote an influential article with George L. Kelling called “Broken Windows,” which advocates the arrest of “disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people” such as “panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed” in order to make “decent folk” feel safer in their neighborhoods, even if the actual crime rate remains unaffected. The basic argument is that broken windows, if left unrepaired, send a signal that more serious forms of disorder and crime may be tolerated. According to Wilson and Kelling, “the first broken window” is not an inanimate object but rather the “unchecked panhandler,” whose very existence poses a threat to normal, propertied personhood. Wilson and Kelling frankly endorse the use of “informal or extralegal steps” by police officers—even tactics that “probably would not withstand a legal challenge”—in order to produce an aesthetics of safety and order for residents with good, middle-class (white) values. 31 In his trenchant critique of “broken windows” policing, Bernard Harcourt observes that the perception of “regularity on the street depends on irregularity in police practice,” which can have disastrous consequences for those

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who appear abnormal or out of place to police. 32 For Harcourt, this amounts to “a straightforward policy of aggressive misdemeanor arrests masquerading as a neighborhood beautification program or as an innocent phenomenon of social influence.” 33 Broken windows policing has been instituted and normalized across the United States and exported to Canada, Australia, and Europe. 34 In New York alone, the NYPD conducted “a staggering 4 million stops and some 2.3 million frisks [between] 2004 and 2014. More than 81 percent of these targeted the city’s black and Latino residents. Only 1.5 percent of these police actions resulted in the discovery of a weapon and only 6 percent of all stops resulted in arrest.” 35 The effect of such practices on the everyday lives of people of color has been documented and critiqued by the Morris Justice Project, the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and other organizations. 36 In his phenomenology of policing, Jonathan Wender argues that “modern police work involves armed bureaucrats encountering their fellow human beings in various states of crisis and predicament.” 37 Officers are trained to reduce these complex predicaments to finite “problems” that can be solved through state intervention. To see like a cop, then, is to scan the horizon for abnormality, viewing people as potential problems and mobilizing the force of law to solve these problems. Sometimes this force is lethal. In his grand jury deposition for the shooting death of Michael Brown, Darren Wilson presents a narrative to justify his own use of lethal force, beginning with suspicious surveillance, the detection of abnormality, the perception of persons as problems, and the attempt to “solve” this problem. According to Wilson, he was driving west on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, when he “observed two men in the middle of the street . . . walking along the double yellow line single file order.” 38 As a result of this “manner of walking” (as it is classified by the Ferguson Police Department for the purpose of issuing fines), “they couldn’t have traffic normal.” Wilson tells the grand jury that he asked the men, “Why don’t you walk on the sidewalk?” Mike Brown’s companion Dorian Johnson responded, “We are almost to our destination.” When Wilson persisted in questioning the men, Brown allegedly responded, “Fuck what you have to say.” Wilson comments, “When he said that, it drew my attention totally to Brown.” 39 In the course of his testimony, Wilson compares himself to “a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. . . . Hulk Hogan, that’s how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm.” 40 At the time of the shooting, Wilson was six-four, 210 pounds, and twenty-eight years old; Brown was six-five, 290 pounds, and eighteen years old. Wilson describes Brown looking at him with “the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.” 41 As Wilson fired rounds of ammunition at Brown, hitting him six times and eventually killing him,

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Wilson claimed that “it looked like [Brown] was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.” 42 Throughout his testimony, Wilson exaggerates his own vulnerability and his perception of Brown, not only as dangerous, but as monstrous and inhumanly powerful. As a perceptual practice, the violence of policing is both mundane and spectacular, and it is woven into the very fabric of racial capitalism in the United States. Not every white person is issued a police badge and authorized to carry a SIG Sauer handgun, but any of us can be recruited to engage in the perceptual practices of seeing like a cop and deployed as a “drone” for the racialized order of whiteness as property. 43 In his essay “The Whiteness of Police,” Nikhil Singh defines policing as “those preventive mechanisms and institutions for ensuring private property within public order, including access to the means of violence, their legal narration, and their use.” 44 Drawing on the history of slave patrols and colonial police forces, Singh argues that, from the inception of liberal democracy in the Americas, police have enforced a racialized property order founded on the elevation and protection of whiteness and the extraction and appropriation of value from the labor of slaves and the land stolen from Indigenous peoples, both of whom are “imagined to harbor a potentially criminal disregard” for whiteness as property. 45 Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton argue that police are not just protectors of whiteness, but “the avant-garde of white supremacy,” given the “ethic of impunity” with which police wield state violence against people of color, not just in spectacular examples of homicidal violence but also in daily rituals of surveillance, racial profiling, harassment, arrest, and detention. 46 The relentless repetition of overt and covert police violence normalizes a Manichean distinction between “those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying.” 47 For Martinot and Sexton, “the security of belonging accompanies the re-racialisation of whiteness as the intensification of anti-blackness.” 48 Building on the work of Martinot and Sexton, Frank Wilderson defines policing as a practice of instituting and reinforcing the distinction between “those bodies that do not magnetize bullets and those that do.” 49 He argues that “white people are not simply ‘protected’ by the police, they are—in their very corporeality—the police.” 50 Wilderson’s point is not that all white people consciously identify with the police; he is not positing whiteness as a timeless essence, but rather analyzing the political structure of whiteness as a subject position whose interests have been historically aligned with civil society and the racist state violence that serves and protects the material interests of (white, male, propertied) citizens. 51 One need not display a neighborhood watch sign or report unfamiliar doorbell ringers on community listservs to be implicated in the structural relation between whiteness and

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police. For Wilderson, propertied personhood is so deeply built into the structure of civil society that—unlike white women, workers, and immigrants, all of whom are eligible for conditional status upgrades—“Blackness cannot become one of civil society’s many junior partners.” 52 Rather, “from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of white life.” 53 Wilderson asks, “How is the production and accumulation of junior partner social capital dependent upon an anti-Black rhetorical structure and a decomposed Black body?” 54 In other words, how are white people—even or especially white people in relatively marginalized positions with respect to gender, class, and ethnicity—recruited to police the boundaries of a social order that promises advancement in return for complicity with racist state violence? What forms of emotional and material investment does this recruitment demand as a condition for feelings of safety, belonging, and propriety? These questions move us beyond the perceptual practices of seeing like a cop, toward a sociogenic account of whiteness as property. WHITE SKIN, WHITE MASKS In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon develops a critical phenomenology of “the lived experience of the black” in relation to three basic structures: the corporeal schema, the historico-racial schema, and the racial epidermal schema. Fanon’s analysis emerges from his own experience of anti-Black racism, and yet it also discloses much about white subjectivity and the “white world” that supports and protects it. To what extent might the basic structures of Fanon’s analysis help us understand how whiteness as property (re)produces the lived experience of those who think they are white? Corporeal Schema Fanon argues that “in the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema.” 55 Fanon calls this a “corporeal malediction.” 56 The organizing principle of the modern world is whiteness, understood as both the contingent outcome of a history in which Europeans colonized the globe and trafficked in human flesh, and as a sociogenic force that naturalizes this history by equating (white) personhood with property. While the white world disrupts the corporeal schema of those who are racialized as black, it supports the coherence of white corporeal schemas and facilitates their operative intentionality, or their implicit sense of “I can.” 57 Standard phenomenological accounts of the corporeal schema presuppose a white subject whose implicit awareness of the world allows for a “slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world. . . . It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring

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of the self and of the world.” 58 The naturalized, normalized schema of white embodiment posits an ideal of unimpeded capacity—a fluid passage from I want to I can and I do—that facilitates a sense of comfort and ease in a wide range of different situations and spaces. 59 It even fosters a sense of entitlement to feel comfortable and capable in the (white) world. 60 For example, in the Virginia Colony, white men wanted to own slaves but disown the children they fathered with enslaved women, so they constructed a legal order that facilitated this practice. They wanted to extract wealth from the labor of black people and from the land of indigenous peoples, so they developed different racialization schemas to facilitate this extraction: the one-drop rule for blacks, and the fractional logic of blood quantum for indigenous peoples. 61 Not every aspect of the white world is so deliberately constructed, but the overall effect is to provide a context for the naturalization and normalization of whiteness as property, and for the lived experience of those who think they are white. This is not to say that nothing can ever go wrong for white people, or that we never experience any friction between ourselves and the world that has been constructed to serve our interests. Rather, it means that the logic of whiteness as property normalizes the smooth coordination of (masculine, straight, middle-class) white bodies with a spatiotemporal context that affirms and supports their existence. If the analysis stopped here, we might be led to believe that the black man is simply excluded from white ontology, the latter of which maintains its proprietorial claim to disclose Being as such through its operative intentionality. But as we will see, the corporeal schema of whiteness as property generates a fundamental contradiction for those who think they are white between the desire for enclosure and the desire for territorial expansion. This contradiction will become clearer as the analysis unfolds. Historico-racial Schema Reaching an impasse with standard phenomenological accounts of embodiment that assume a fluid interchange between self and world, Fanon sketches a historico-racial schema generated not by his own lived experience, but “by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.” 62 This historico-racial schema is an artifact of the white world, and it reflects the dominant interests of those who think they are white. It includes images of black men as inherently suspicious or dangerous, especially when spotted in one’s neighborhood or in the vicinity of one’s property. Is there a historical-racial schema of whiteness, and if so, how is it (re)produced? Reading Fanon alongside Baldwin and Harris, we might argue that whiteness is also constructed by white people “out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” that support the innocence, entitlement, and impunity of

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white self-investment. The white historico-racial schema disavows both its historicity and its racialization in order to frame its desires, capacities, and interests—its “I want,” “I can,” and “I ought to be able to”—as a fluid, natural body schema that dovetails fluidly with the white world. If Indigenous peoples are racialized as disappearing or diluting into whiteness, and black people are racialized as permanently marked in opposition to whiteness, while “foreigners” are marked for exclusion or selective inclusion within a border or national boundary as legal or illegal aliens, then the one constant in these divergent and sometimes contradictory racialization schemas is the racialization of whites as owners of land and other property, as extractors of wealth from the bodies of others, and as excluders or selective includers of the right to claim whiteness as property. 63 This threefold structure is, I would argue, the historico-racial schema of whiteness as property. Racial Epidermal Schema Fanon rounds out his critical phenomenology of black experience in a white world with a third concept: the racial epidermal schema that replaces the racialized subject’s crumbled body schema, to the point where he feels like an entity that “occupie[s] space” rather than a dynamic, relational Being-inthe-world. 64 The tension between the black man’s first-person experience as an embodied subject and third-person representations that constitute the historico-racial schema of blackness in a white world produces a racial epidermal schema that both incorporates and resists white representations of blackness. This tension fragments the racialized subject into three distinct persons: a living, embodied subject of experience; a degraded artifact of white history; and a third being whose skin is formed both in and against a white mask. What—if anything—is the racial epidermal schema that produces the skin of those who think they are white? If we understand the racial epidermal schema as a “device” 65 through which the sociogenic force of whiteness as property is individuated and incorporated as skin, then the epidermalization of whiteness is an active-passive process by which someone who expects to pass as white (even or especially if they are phenotypically white) invests in whiteness as property. This cannot happen without the assumption of a white mask that is woven from “a thousand details, anecdotes, stories,” 66 as well as the laws, institutions, and philosophical concepts that are both invented and inherited by white people for the sake of protecting whiteness as property. There is no white skin without the support of a white mask in a white world that both (re)produces and disavows its own dependence on the prosthetic supplement of historico-racial schemas. The assumption of a white mask by those who think they are white produces the effect of a white skin that will have been prior to the mask. This mask covers over a wide range of differences in skin tone (pink, beige, ivory, olive, blotchy, tanned, and so on) and

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in ethnicity or nationality (English, German, Swedish . . . and more recently, Irish, Italian, and Jewish), as well as the discontinuous and often contradictory histories and narratives through which whiteness has been granted or revoked. With the assumption of a white mask, flesh becomes body, and the threshold of one’s skin as a chiasmatic zone of interface with others becomes a boundary or fence, the condition of passing as white, that is, as a selfowning, self-improving, self-investing form of property. The felt sense of naturalness and ease in white corporeal schemas does not precede but rather follows and depends upon this epidermalization of white masks in a white world. Fanon writes of his racial epidermalization as a black man in a white world as a form of dislocation and incarceration: “On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object.” 67 I would argue that white people are also constructed as objects in a white world, but in the very different hybrid sense of a self-owning property that inherits and invests in its own value. The spatiotemporal effect of this construction is not imprisonment but rather self-seclusion in a securitized zone that is served and protected by racist state violence. While there are many material benefits to be drawn from this construction, and while the white world is structured to normalize and incentivize the fusion of personhood with property, whiteness is a (very privileged) form of “corporeal malediction” in the sense that it degrades others and diminishes its own social capacity for ethical connection and community. This fusion of property and personhood through the racial epidermalization of whiteness compels us to revisit the corporeal schema of white people and to interrogate its common sense. But for this, we must take a brief detour through whitespace. Whitespace is securitized space. It is the space that cops protect and serve. It is also “cleansed” space, as the carceral aesthetics of broken windows policing suggests. 68 Whitespace reduces places to real estate to be improved, flipped, and inherited at a private individual level, and to territory to be expanded through colonial violence at the collective level. Whitespace does not refer to the phenotypic race of its inhabitants; everyone in the modern world is forced to negotiate with whitespace in some way. 69 What makes whitespace white is an enforced collective investment in personhood as property: a historico-racial schema that owes its existence primarily to the intellectual and material legacies of European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. Suburban whitespace feels safe to those who are included in it to the extent that the aesthetics of stability and self-enclosure corresponds with a lived experience of friendly police officers and reliable security staff. 70 Gentrified whitespace is shaped by a different aesthetics of edgy security or securitized edginess, where the aim is to expand one’s access to diversity, excitement, and the opportunity for growth without taking too

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much of a risk on one’s investment. There is also a temporal dimension to whitespace; it implies both a future of growth, improvement, and expansion and also a past to be inherited, conserved, developed, and handed down to others. This is ultimately a cryogenic structure; in opting for safety over life, I freeze myself now in order to preserve and resurrect myself later, in a future that is enriched by past and present investments. Given this double investment in security and expansion, we must revise and complicate our initial sketch of the corporeal schema of whiteness as property. The two dimensions of whitespace—enclosure and territorial expansion—suggest a white corporeal schema with two divergent tendencies: on one hand, an investment in the body as an impenetrable shell, like a turtle that carries its house wherever it goes, and on the other hand an investment in the body as a site of continuous growth, like a snake that keeps shedding its skin, or a colony of yeast that keep doubling its size. The tension between these divergent tendencies produces conflicts and contradictions for the lived experience of whiteness: How can I both secure my investment and also take the risks that will allow my investment to grow? How do I accumulate stacks of wealth while maintaining my access to “experiences”? This is the predicament of the parasite that misperceives itself as a host: even as I extract wealth from others to strengthen my own fortifications, I continue to feel insecure; and even as I extend myself into unfamiliar territory for the sake of growth, I rely on a buffer zone of whiteness as property to catch me if I fall. But if this is the case, then white people may have a material interest in preserving and expanding whiteness as property, but this structure is, or at least ought to be, a source of corporeal malediction for us. The way through this impasse is to abolish whiteness as property. This cannot be accomplished by an individual commitment to divest from whiteness, and yet it does demand such a commitment. But it also requires collective action to change the structure of whitespace, and to generate and recuperate forms of Being-inthe-world that resist the fusion of white personhood with property and with the security apparatuses that serve and protect this property. How do we do this? By refusing to think we are white. By resisting perceptual practices of seeing like a cop and creating viable alternatives to calling the cops. By halting gentrification and redistributing wealth. By fostering a sense of mattering that goes beyond white capitalist valuation and accumulation. By abolishing the black/white binary that erases the multiplicity of differences among human beings. By becoming accomplices to Indigenous movements for decolonization. And by dismantling the white world so that another world may be brought into existence.

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NOTES Thanks to Reginald Dwayne Betts, William Paris, Eric Ritter, and Emily Lee for their critical feedback on this chapter. All remaining errors are my own. 1. East Nashville Listserv. 2. Stacks on Main. Special features include a “bark park for pups” and “music room for jam sesh.” 3. Stacks on Main, “‘Stacks of What?’ Glad You Asked.” 4. Harris and Cummins, “Nunna-daul-Tsuny.” 5. Rau and Alfs, “High-End Restaurant Group Linked to Cayce Homes Overhaul.” 6. Harney and Moten, “Improvement and Preservation.” 7. Cardenas, Alund, and Sawyer, “What We Know.” 8. For a more detailed account of critical phenomenology, see Guenther, “Critical Phenomenology.” 9. Merleau-Ponty, Institution in Personal and Public, 6. 10. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 277–79. 11. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 700. 12. Wang, “Against Innocence,” 4. 13. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 215–33. 14. Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness. 15. Few, if any, prospective buyers of luxury apartments in East Nashville would explicitly endorse racist police violence, and some may even be people of color working to dismantle racist structures in their communities, workplaces, and homes. In a world that is structured by capitalism, white supremacy, and heteronormativity, one may find oneself “putting a ring on it” in spite of the ad campaign rather than because of it. And yet, precisely as an embodied Beingin-the-world whose lived experience is shaped by whitespace, one cannot help but be affected by the structure of whiteness as property. This does not mean that everyone is affected in the same way, or that “the white world” is permanent or inexorable. But it does mean that each of us, as subjects who are individuated in whitespace, must negotiate with these structures in some way, with results that are routinely predictable but ultimately contingent. 16. On the impunity of white supremacist policing, see Martinot and Sexton, “Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” 175. See also Lewis Gordon’s work on white “license”: “The racially dominant group presumes self-justified reality (license), which means it doesn’t call itself into question. And the designated racially inferior group? Lacking justification, their access to being is illegitimate. This means their absence is a mark of the system’s legitimacy” (“Thoughts on Two Recent Decades,” 4). 17. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 279–81. 18. Ibid., 279. 19. Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle.” 20. Marriott, “Inventions of Existence.” 21. Gordon, “Is the Human a Teleological Suspension of Man?” 22. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 4. 23. Merleau-Ponty, Institution in Personal and Public History, 77. 24. Ibid., 6. 25. Ibid., 76. 26. Baldwin, “On Being White . . . and Other Lies,” 178–79. 27. Ibid., 178–80. 28. Ibid., 180. 29. These definitions come from the Oxford English Dictionary. 30. Wilson, Varieties of Police Behavior, 39–40. 31. Wilson and Kelling, “Broken Windows.” 32. Harcourt, Illusion of Order, 129. 33. Ibid., 135. See also Durkheim, for whom the role of punishment is “to maintain inviolate the cohesion of society by sustaining the common consciousness in all its vigor. . . . [P]unishment is above all intended to have its effect upon honest people” (quoted in ibid., 137). For Durkheim, law is the “‘perceptible effects’ of social solidarity” (quoted in ibid., 137–88).

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34. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor. 35. Singh, “Whiteness of Police,” 1098. 36. For representative websites, see http://morrisjustice.org/stop-and-friskbroken-windows, http://www.stoppoliceterror.org/, https://ccrjustice.org/stop-and-frisk-human-impact, and https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data. 37. Wender, Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life, 2. 38. Wilson, “Testimony in State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson,” 207. 39. Ibid., 207–8. 40. Ibid., 212. 41. Ibid., 224–25. 42. Ibid., 228. 43. Harney and Moten, “Leave Our Mikes Alone,” 19. 44. Singh, “Whiteness of Police,” 1092. 45. Ibid., 1091. 46. Martinot and Sexton, “Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” 175. 47. Ibid., 174. 48. Ibid., 176. 49. Wilderson, “Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” 20. 50. Ibid., 20. 51. See also Rodríguez, “Policing and the Violence of White Being”: “There isn’t just one way of White Being, and we cannot overemphasize enough that White Being cannot be conflated with ‘white people.’ Undoubtedly, Fanon is still correct in stressing the epidermalized, physiologically activated structure of power that inheres in white bodies (however white bodies are socio-politically formed and institutionalized in a given moment). My point here is that White Being constitutes another layer of dominance precisely because it is capable of hailing other beings, inviting them, seducing them—and this is yet another method to humiliate and degrade (perhaps even ‘de-humanize’) the ‘underside peoples’ I am referencing. . . . What, then, would it mean to not only decisively displace the ascendancy of White Being (Civilization), but to also seek to thrive as the descendants of our particular, differentiated conditions of historical vulnerability?” 52. Wilderson, “Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” 18. 53. Ibid., 23. 54. Ibid., 20. 55. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110. 56. Ibid., 111. 57. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 159–77. 58. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 11. 59. For phenomenological critiques of the “I can” in relation to gender and disability, see Young, “Throwing Like a Girl”; and Salamon, “Phenomenology of Rheumatology.” 60. DiAngelo, “White Fragility.” 61. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387–88. 62. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 111. 63. See Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” on the three pillars of white supremacy: slavery/capitalism, genocide/colonialism, and Orientalism/war. 64. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112. 65. hooks, Black Looks, 27. 66. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 111. 67. Ibid., 112. 68. Wang, “Against Innocence,” 4. Another way of saying this is that whitespace is “defensible space.” Defensible space is a design strategy that seeks to inculcate the habits, practices, and proprietorial feelings of the white middle class and its cops in those who continue to be excluded from property ownership and from the material benefits of homeowner-citizenship. See Newman, Defensible Space. 69. Elijah Anderson argues, “While white people usually avoid black space, black people are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence” (“White Space,” 11).

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For a more developed phenomenology of whiteness in relation to space and embodiment, see Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness.” 70. Not all people who thinks they are white or invest in whiteness as property feel comfortable in suburban whitespace, and not all people who want to feel comfortable in suburban whitespace are perceived by neighbors, police, security guards, or real estate agents as properly belonging in such spaces. A further analysis is needed to explore the complex tensions between the ubiquity of whitespace and the plurality of ways people who are differently situated in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, or disability negotiate both suburban and gentrified whitespace.

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Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. Marriott, David. “Inventions of Existence: Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Sociogeny, and ‘the Damned.’” CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (Winter 2011): 45–89. Martinot, Steve, and Jared Sexton. “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 169–81. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Institution in Personal and Public History and The Problem of Passivity: Sleep, the Unconscious, Memory. Course Notes at the College de France (1954–55). Translated by Leonard Lawler and Heath Massey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. ———. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes. New York: Routledge, 2012. Newman, Oscar. Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Environmental Design. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Rau, Nate, and Lizzy Alfs. “High-End Restaurant Group Linked to Cayce Homes Overhaul.” Tennessean, September 8, 2016. http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2016/09/08/highend-restaurant-group-linked-cayce-homes-overhaul/89968460/. Rodríguez, Dylan. “Policing and the Violence of White Being: An Interview with Dylan Rodríguez.” Black Scholar, September 12, 2016. http://www.theblackscholar.org/policingviolence-white-interview-dylan-rodriguez/. Salamon, Gayle. “The Phenomenology of Rheumatology: Disability, Merleau-Ponty, and the Fallacy of Maximal Grip.” Hypatia 27, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 243–60. Singh, Nikhil Pal. “The Whiteness of Police.” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (December 2014): 1091–99. Smith, Andrea. “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy.” In The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 66–73. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006. Stacks on Main. http://www.stacksonmain.com/. ———. “‘Stacks of What?’ Glad You Asked.” http://www.stacksonmain.com/about-stacks. Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Wang, Jackie. “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety.” LIES Journal 10 (2012). http://www.liesjournal.net/volume1-10-againstinnocence.html. Wender, Jonathan M. Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Wilderson, Frank B., III. “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal.” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (2003): 18–27. Wilson, Darren. “Testimony in State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson.” Grand Jury Volume V, September 16, 2014. https://www.scribd.com/document/248132491/Darren-Wilson-testimony?ad_group=58287X1517246Xf20268a62492f3a5fb52d084694875f2&campaign= Skimbit%2C+Ltd.&content=10079&irgwc=1&keyword=ft750noi&medium=affiliate& source=impactradius. Wilson, James Q. Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling. “Broken Windows.” Atlantic Monthly, March 1982. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. Wynter, Sylvia. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black.’” In National Identity and Sociopolitical Change in Latin America, edited by Mercedes Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana, 30–68. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Chapter Twelve

Becoming White White Children and the Erasure of Black Suffering Shannon Sullivan

In order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it.—Maurice Merleau-Ponty It’s time for our 1st field trip! Let’s load up the buses and head to Huntersville to visit the historic Latta Plantation. Students will enjoy: plantation life . . . —flyer for third grade field trip, Charlotte, North Carolina

How are habits of whiteness developed in young white children, before those habits become relatively sedimented in adulthood? This is both a phenomenological and a transgenerational question: How does the adult world pass down and embed raced habits in the next generation and, in the case of whiteness, do so “invisibly” such that those habits do not even seem to exist? This essay will tackle those questions by examining a particular type of white habit, that of not perceiving the suffering of people of color. I will focus on Black suffering, providing a phenomenological account of an elementary school field trip to a historic plantation, which took place in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area in May 2017 and which I attended as a parent escort. I choose this example because it is something of a rite of passage in elementary schools in the South. All third graders in our school district “do” the plantation field trip, and many adults who grew up in North Carolina and South Carolina anecdotally told me about their trip to a plantation at some point in their elementary school years after I mentioned the one I attended. The event is mundane, not extraordinary, in other words, and precisely for that reason it is important to the general question of how white habits are formed. 207

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Through an analysis that ranges from the regional context of Charlotte to the informational flyer describing the field trip to the lived space of the plantation itself, I will argue that (1) the erasure of Black suffering is a crucial form of support for ongoing white class privilege, white priority, and other patterns of white domination of people of color; (2) this erasure often takes the form of transforming Black suffering into white enjoyment; and (3) plantation field trips as currently practiced in the American South implicitly teach children white habits of erasing/enjoying Black suffering. I offer a particular example of this erasure, but it is not an exceptional one. By digging into the details of the plantation field trip experience, one can discover general ways that the elimination of Black suffering, via its concealment, is a routine practiced in the United States, sedimented all the more firmly in American life as it is transmitted from generation to generation. Two important points to note before I begin: First, Black lives cannot be reduced to a situation of suffering, and this essay does not assume or attempt such a reduction. Black lives and the lives of people of color more generally are rich, complex, and include much more than pain. (This richness and complexity also is something that white people generally do not perceive, but full treatment of that topic would deserve another paper.) The erasure of that suffering nevertheless is important to understand as a component of white habits. Second, I am not claiming that Black suffering is the sole or quintessential form of the suffering of people of color. White habits of not perceiving suffering also are evident, for example, in the case of Latinx immigrant families’ being torn apart by deportation when the children but not their parents have documentation to remain in the United States. In this situation as well, I would argue that white habits of erasing suffering are at work. The invisibilization of immigrant situations and suffering in the United States also deserves full treatment in a separate essay. My more limited goal here is to use a concrete example of the erasure of Black suffering to identify and challenge an aspect of white habits that is a failure to perceive white domination and that allows it to “succeed” through that very failure. 1 PERCEPTION AND HABIT Phenomenology makes the familiar strange so that one can understand it in ways that its familiarity typically prevents. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty claims in the first epigraph above, rather than adhere to the familiar, we need to break with it. As paradoxical as it might sound, the more one remains in the comfortable zone of familiar relationships with the world, the less one generally understands it. Breaking with the familiar requires setting aside, if only temporarily, what Merleau-Ponty calls the natural attitude: a commonsensical way of understanding things in the world as if they are nonperceptu-

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ally independent and meaningful. With the natural attitude, all sorts of things “are taken for granted, and go unnoticed.” 2 We see them, and yet they are invisible in that we are not consciously aware of them or the ways that they come to have meaning in our lives. We engage with them as if their meaning were ready-made and did not depend on layers of history, situations, and experiences, or what Linda Martín Alcoff has called “sedimented contextual knowledge.” 3 Taking up a natural attitude toward the world not only feels comfortable and familiar, but it also tends to naturalize the world’s meaning. Nothing seemingly could be more familiar, ordinary, and independent of me than the much-used coffee cup on my desk, for example. Its meaning and use as a device for holding hot liquids seems basic and unremarkable in its mundane familiarity. The layers of context and history that give it value and meaning are invisible to me as I “naturally” go about my day, generally oblivious both to the conditions of production sedimented in the cup and my learned habits of using it. To suspend the natural attitude is to become aware of how perception works. Perception is how we “see” and otherwise experience the world as given to us implicitly in all its meaning, value, and usefulness. This does not happen primarily through geometric, analytic, or other calculations. Put another way, perceiving the world is not the same thing as interpreting it. If interpretation is the conscious process in which one examines sensory and other data in order to determine what a thing is, perception is what makes interpretation unnecessary. 4 To navigate the world successfully, we do not need to make explicit how the world and its “system of meanings [composed of] reciprocities, relationships and involvements” are available for us to use them. 5 We resort to doing that only when perception falters or is unclear. 6 In contrast, when perception is working unimpeded, the world simply is there in all its fullness and reality, implicitly ready for our engagement with it. The simple presence of the world given to us by perception tends to mask the perspectival nature of perception, however. Here again is how the natural attitude tends to be manifest, through an assumption that human meaning and reality are nonsituated and acontextual, existing apart from particular points of view. In contrast, phenomenological analysis reveals that perception is always situated and embodied. 7 “The system of experience is not arrayed before me as if I were God,” as Merleau-Ponty argues; “it is lived by me from a certain point of view . . . , and it is my involvement in a point of view which makes possible both the finiteness of my perception and its opening out upon the complete world as a horizon of every perception.” 8 The perspectival nature of human perception might seem like a limitation in comparison with a godlike being who (somehow) can see everything at once, but it also is the necessary background of and opening to the world as human beings live it. The perspectival nature of perception per se is nothing necessarily to lament (or to celebrate). What is crucial phenomenologically is to

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recognize how particular points of view work in concrete situations “to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being.” 9 Without that recognition, the experience and world produced from one particular point of view tend to be normatively naturalized as the experience and world of all. Finally, perception functions through habit, which is a structured form of bodily agency that operates apart from conscious thought. 10 Found in predispositions toward or styles of engaging with/in the world, habit enables us to do things without consciously walking ourselves through each step of the thing that we are doing. This can happen in nonconscious ways, that is, in ways that we happen not to consciously focus on but could if so needed. It also can happen unconsciously, in ways that are difficult to notice and that evade conscious attention because they are too painful, embarrassing, or (inter)personally difficult to acknowledge. Habit contributes to the familiarity of the world, allowing significant features of the world to be invisible to us because of their familiarity. When habits are functioning smoothly, we tend not to consciously notice them or the aspects of the world which they engage. When I get up from my chair, for example, I will walk to the refrigerator, thinking about this essay and oblivious to my habits of locomotion and the floor that cooperates with my feet and legs to allow me to walk. It is when I stumble to my feet because the floor is six inches lower than I expected—having forgotten that I am sitting at the bar stool in the kitchen rather than at my desk—that I suddenly become aware of the chair, the floor, and my habitual leg extension for standing up. When habit is interrupted by an unexpected relationship between bodily self and world, it can become evident, revealing both itself and its “trick of allowing us to forget it.” 11 PERCEPTUAL HABITS OF WHITENESS The trickiness of perceptual habits is particularly relevant when considering habits of whiteness, especially habits of white class privilege and white priority. With the term “white class privilege,” I highlight the role that class plays in the racial benefits and privilege that are disproportionately granted to middle- and upper-class white people in white-dominated societies, such as the United States. With the term “white priority,” I designate white people’s sense of coming before people of color, a felt sense that tends to be shared by white people of all classes in America. 12 Unlike habits of locomotion, habits of white class privilege and white priority tend to be unconscious, making their disappearing trick more difficult to detect and foil than the trick of nonconscious habits. They are unconscious because most white people find it personally and socially difficult to think of themselves as engaging the world in ways that perpetuate unjust advantages for white people and that contrib-

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ute to the oppression of people of color. Habits of white class privilege and of white priority thus deviously and stubbornly resist becoming objects of conscious awareness, functioning through various defense mechanisms to ward off their detection and elimination. This allows white people to see themselves as good people who are not complicit with systems of racism and white domination, even as they benefit from and perpetuate those systems. While there likely are many habits of white class privilege and white priority in need of analysis, 13 the one I focus on here is the white habit of erasing Black suffering. This habit has a long history, dating at least to the days of chattel slavery in the United States, when white people experienced Black suffering as a form of white entertainment. Transforming “abjection into contentment,” as Saidiya Hartmann has argued, white people often took pleasure in slaves’ singing and dancing as evidence of Black people’s happiness with their lot. 14 Their alleged gaiety demonstrated that Black slaves were immune to pain and sorrow, and thus chattel slavery could be a source of “innocent amusement” for white people, causing no harm to Black people and providing entertainment to white people. 15 This habit did not disappear in the nineteenth century with the end of chattel slavery. Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and white people continue to manifest racialized habits of erasing Black existence through its transmogrification into white pleasure and entertainment. More generally, anything having to do with race needs to be turned into something for white people to enjoy; otherwise, it is unbearable and thus impermissible. “Enjoy diversity,” as one recent poster promoting diversity on a college campus demands, with the words plastered against an array of differently colored gummy bear candies. 16 Differently colored people are something for (white) people to delight in. They and their different cultures are a source of pleasure (for white people), perhaps even something to be consumed, and for that reason—so the implicit argument goes—white people should welcome rather than resist the presence of diverse people on campus. Diversity is not an impediment to the pleasures and privileges of whiteness. It is a new, post–civil rights era source for them. In fact, the end of American chattel slavery did not even spell an end to erasing Black suffering through white pleasure in chattel slavery. Consider the example of several subdivisions in the metro Charlotte, North Carolina, area that are named plantations, one of which is Providence Plantation. Naming things for plantations is fairly familiar and unremarkable, at least within the South, and the strangeness of this fact is magnified by its familiarity. As Providence Plantation’s website makes explicit, one of the key advantages of their neighborhood is that it allows homeowners to enjoy life as it was on the plantation. Nostalgically recalling the land’s history from an unacknowledged upper-class white perspective, it invokes “white columned mansions, rocking chairs on the wide veranda, Mint Julips, hoop skirts whirling to the

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Virginia Reel, a thousand acres of white cotton that turns to gold, a ‘Gone With the Wind’ picture of the Old South, and plantation life in pre-Civil War days.” 17 Even as it goes on to acknowledge that “most of our settlers had little time for rocking chairs and Mint Julips [since] survival was the first priority”—perhaps broadening its white point of view to include nonwealthy white people—it leaves in place the plantation as the fantasy that white people (should) desire. The “Providence settlers” were “hardy Scotts [sic] and Irish” who “began hewing homesteads from a wilderness populated by the Cherokee, Catawba, Sugaree, and Waxhaw Indians,” and with all that hard work, “a new era of prosperity began to emerge.” The romantic history presented by the subdivision ends with a levelheaded acknowledgment: “Truly nostalgic, but in practicality its [sic]—‘Gone With the Wind.’” It is too bad that plantations are gone, the subdivision website wistfully suggests. The good news, however, is that by moving to a $600,000+ home in Providence Plantation—managed and cared for by God, no less—one can get as close as possible to recapturing the luxury and pleasure of living the plantation life. Who is it, however, who thinks that plantations were divine and that it is unfortunate that they and their era are “gone with the wind”? Whose point of view does the subdivision website give voice to and encourage? At the risk of stating the obvious, it is not the point of view of the Black slaves who lived on the plantations. Nor is it the point of view of the Cherokee, Catawba, Sugaree, and Waxhaw Indians who were pushed off the land so that white colonists could build on it. It is the point of view of the white masters and want-to-be masters (i.e., “the hardy Scots and Irish,” who were to become the South’s so-called poor white trash). De jure segregation and red-lining real estate practices have long been outlawed, and so homeowners of any race are free to purchase homes in Providence Plantation. This does not change the fact that what the subdivision is selling with its narrative of the lost great days of the South is an opportunity to participate in a white class privileged point of view and partake in the divine white pleasure of plantations. From this point of view, plantations are not a cursed place of terror and pain; they are a blessed site of luxury and enjoyment. INSTITUTIONAL HABITS AND THE FIELD TRIP FLYER These and other historical and contemporary practices of enjoying/erasing the suffering of nonwhite people, and Black people in particular, were part of the horizon of my daughter’s elementary school plantation field trip, serving to naturalize and normalize the trip before it took place. The plantation field trip also had been normalized through the institutional structures of the educational system in my town’s school district. The Latta field trip was part of

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the elementary school’s routine, or institutional habit, of taking several field trips each year, and it gained its significance from that routine. Third graders went on field trips, for example, to Emerald Hollow Mine for “a ‘hands on’ learning experience” to learn about geology and prospect for gems, and to the local high school to watch the Virginia Rep Touring Theatre’s performance art show about the Wright brothers’ first flight in North Carolina. 18 These trips took place, moreover, in the context of past trips in first and second grade, to the nearby Tiger World, a nonprofit animal conservation and educational center devoted to “exotic” animals, and to the Reed Gold Mine, the first documented site at which gold was found in the United States. 19 The point of these mundane details is that Latta Plantation was supposed to fit right in with them; there allegedly is nothing unusual about a plantation. It is one historical or educational site among others, in easy driving distance from the Charlotte area and set up to accommodate large groups of elementary school children. The Latta field trip was and is fully institutionalized in the state’s educational system, documented as fulfilling some of North Carolina’s Common Core and NC Essential Standards, for example, the state’s social science goal 3.H.1 to “understand how events, individuals and ideas have influenced the history of local and regional communities.” 20 In this way, it is interchangeable with any other 3.H.1 site in North Carolina, and any other of those sites could be substituted for the plantation visit if the plantation were too busy or unexpectedly closed. Visiting a plantation was unremarkable, so the students implicitly learned, part of the routine business of an elementary school curriculum. Routine does not mean boring, however. While field trips are supposed to be educational, they also are supposed to be fun—something like a holiday for both teachers and students alike, a break from the regular routine to learn in a different way and in a different setting. The fun factor of field trips is crucial to understanding them. In my experience, children scarcely care where the field trip will take place; that they get to go on a field trip is all that matters. Wherever they are going, they thrill in the adventure of leaving the school during regular school hours. The sheer pleasure that children take in field trips stands out even if there are aspects of a particular trip (standing in line, staying quiet when listening to the tour guide) that they tend to dislike. Children find field trips to be entertaining, and that also is why they appeal to teachers, who often are looking for ways to motivate children to learn. Just as one can sneak grated zucchini into chocolate cake to increase its nutritional value without a child’s noticing, 21 with field trips one hopefully can sneak learning into entertainment, and children will gobble it up without realizing that it is good for them. The flyer for the plantation field trip that showed up in my daughter’s backpack one afternoon also was characterized by a combination of normalcy and fun. It was much like all the other correspondence that the elementary

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school sent home with kids: routine and fairly nondescript. Photocopied on basic copy paper, it resembled other notifications about purchasing school Tshirts, joining the PTO, turning in book orders, and the like. As I learned from my neighbors later on, it was the same field trip that takes place every year for the third graders at this particular school, using the same flyer year after year with a few dates and teachers’ names changed. After noting the location, dates, and cost at the top of the page, the flyer detailed the activities that “students will enjoy” on a day off from regular school activities. The flyer thus fit into the genre of field trip flyers. The plantation field trip would be enjoyable, as all field trips are supposed to be, and there was nothing special or unusual in terms of notification or preparation that marked it. It is natural to go to a plantation to enjoy oneself and learn about history, so the flyer implicitly asserted. The particular things that children are supposed to learn and experience on this field trip are worth noting. As the flyer listed them, the main topics were (emphasis in bold added): Plantation Life—This program explores the dynamics of a 19th-century backcountry plantation and the lives of those who lived and worked at Latta Plantation. Students will tour the plantation house, cook house, and slave cabin. Mind Your Beeswax—The amazing lives of honeybees (NC’s state insect) and their importance on farms in the 19th century and today. Students will see the evolution of the hive from colonial times to the present, learn about the processes that create honey and beeswax, visit Latta’s three hives of honeybees, play a game, and make small beeswax candles to keep! Back Country Mercantile—Students will learn about the ways people obtained goods they could not produce themselves, and how those goods varied according to economic status. They will also get to try their own hand at trading! 19th-Century Schoolhouse—Students will learn about 19th-century schools and how they compare to modern learning experiences. Children get to use hornbooks, slates, and more as they go back in time for an educational experience they will not forget!

By underscoring the fun of plantations as places for playing games and for making cool stuff with beeswax, this list naturalizes and erases Black suffering on the plantation. This is so even though the existence of slaves, via mention of the slave cabin, is included. To help reveal the white point of view structuring this list and make strange its mundane familiarity, let me ask a series of questions targeting the sections in bold: • Which dynamics of a plantation will be examined? Will this include, for example, the torment of the female house slaves at the hands of the master

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and his wife alike? 22 Will this include the brutal practices often used by the overseer, sparing the master—but certainly not the slaves—from routine beatings and other cruelties? What does it mean to “work” at a plantation when one is a slave? As the students tour the plantation, will they learn which tree slaves were tied to for whipping when they allegedly did not work hard or fast enough? 23 • Which goods will students learn about, including the goods that slave owners could not produce themselves? Through what mode of production? Was this, for example, a plantation whose master had a difficult time (re)producing goods—slaves—himself? Will students learn about rape as a mode of production and wealth generation? What goods will students get to try their hand at trading, and will this include slaves? Will the plantation simulate the trade block, and will students get to practice breaking up families through their sale? 24 • As they sit in the schoolroom for an educational experience they won’t forget, will students be reminded that Black children would never have been allowed inside the schoolroom and, more generally, were denied education? Will they discuss how that compares to modern learning experiences? Will they make explicit comparisons between plantation education systems and the United States’ post–civil rights era school-to-prison pipeline? This list probably seems like an absurd set of questions for third graders to study, which is all the more reason that the field trip to Latta Plantation should seem strange. A field trip that addressed this list of questions would be extraordinary in most school districts in the United States, to say the least. As I will demonstrate next, what the field trip did instead was to stick to the ordinary and the familiar, which is to say that it erased Black suffering from plantation life, implicitly teaching children that slavery was “not that bad.” TOURING THE PLANTATION After reading the flyer and meeting with my child’s teachers, I considered exempting my child from the field trip but ultimately decided to try to use it as a counterlearning experience for her instead. 25 As with all field trips at my child’s elementary school, parents were allowed to attend, and so along with a handful of other parents I went to Latta Plantation with all the third grade classes and their teachers in May 2017. We were a large enough group that upon arrival we split up into smaller groups with different guides to begin the tour at different places on the plantation. My daughter’s class happened to be part of the group that began the tour in the slave cabin. While I realized that not every class would have the same experience, I appreciated that our group

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began with the slave cabin, and I hoped—against all evidence from the school’s flyer—that it might make somewhat visible the terrors of slavery in ways that would frame the entire field trip. In the slave cabin, a stern-faced guide explained to the children that enslaved Africans lived and worked on the plantation. They were not free and had to do what their owners told them to do, and they were not paid for their work. He explained that the plantation had thirty-three slaves at its peak and that a woman named Suckey was the first house slave for the Latta family. He also underscored the uncomfortable living conditions for slaves, pointing out that wooden cots and thin straw pallets behind where the children sat on the dirt floor were the slaves’ beds. It was an appropriately somber beginning to the field trip, I thought, complemented by the plantation brochure’s comment that “slavery in every form was a cruel practice . . . it is difficult to imagine how this callous system could have been accepted.” 26 While I wasn’t sure what to expect next, it seemed that the tour might tell the story of the plantation in ways that included the slaves’ perspectives and experiences. Only months later, after the field trip was over, did I realize that my initial perception of the slave cabin was thoroughly framed by a master’s and not a slave’s perspective. 27 In fact, the slave cabin was probably the only place on the plantation where slavery did not exist. Legally, of course, it still existed, but not existentially: the slave cabin was where slaves could have some time to themselves and care for one another rather than for the Latta family. This observation does not gloss over the harsh realities of living in the slave cabin but rather reveals it to be a different kind of space than perceived and experienced from a master’s point of view. Here, as with the entire field trip experience, one can see how white perceptions of the world—of both historical and contemporary white people, such as myself—are empowered to erase Black and enslaved people’s perceptions. At the time, however, I thought that the field trip was off to a relatively good start. That impression quickly changed. The next stop on the tour was the schoolhouse. It originally was not located on the plantation but had been moved there in the twentieth century when the plantation began giving tours. We sat on the wooden benches in the one-room building, and the children looked with amazement at the odd chalkboards and other supplies that nineteenth-century children used to learn to read, write, and do math. A guide dressed up as a schoolteacher explained how children of all ages were in the same classroom and that the classroom was a strict place following the old saying that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. (She assured us that “most of them knew the difference between abuse and a swat on the butt to set you right.”) We learned that the children at Latta Plantation had to walk miles to school and that girls were not allowed to do so without being escorted by a male relative. This meant that girls might not receive the same amount of

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education because sometimes it was difficult for male relatives to get away from plantation business to make the trek to the schoolhouse. It was at this moment that I became aware that to foil the trick of white habits of perception, one had to listen to the silences in the tour. As Luce Irigaray has argued, We need to listen (psycho)analytically to its procedures of repression, to the structuration of language that shores up its representations. . . . This does not mean that we have to give ourselves over to some kind of symbolic, point-bypoint interpretation of [the tour guides’] utterances. Moreover, even if we were to do so, we would still be leaving the mystery of “the origin” intact. What is called for instead is an examination of the operation of the “grammar” of each figure of discourse, its syntactic laws or requirements, its imaginary configurations, its metaphoric networks, and also, of course, what it does not articulate at the level of utterance: its silences. 28

As I began to realize, the grammar of the plantation tour was riddled with things that were not said. Those unsaid things were its most important lesson. They provided the unspoken structure of the tour, giving the tour its shape and coherence. A point-by-point analysis of what the tour guides said would miss the main point of what the tour implicitly and unconsciously taught about the alleged primacy of whiteness and the supposed nonexistence (erasure) of Black suffering. That is “the origin” of the plantation, which is allowed to remain hazy and mysterious through silence about it. In the specific case of the schoolhouse, while educational differences for girls and boys who lived on the plantation were briefly acknowledged, the difference that race made for children on the plantation was never mentioned. Simply put, African American children (slaves) were not allowed to attend school, but visitors would not know that fact from the tour or the plantation’s informational brochure. It was as if slavery only existed in the slave cabin and then disappeared. Once out of the cabin, race and slavery seemingly were irrelevant to understanding life on the plantation. This disappearing trick is both constitutive and productive of white habits of perception, especially in their contemporary manifestation of alleged color blindness. White habits of race tend to be constituted by not seeing race and its impact on the lives of both people of color and white people. Those habits helped produce the erasure of race from the schoolhouse at the same time that this erasure helped reinforce the strength and functionality of those habits. The loud silence about slavery and race on the plantation continued when our group reached the main attraction on the plantation: the Latta House, where the master and his family lived. We wound our way through the twostory Federal-style home, learning about the architecture of the main rooms and seeing the furniture and dishware that the family used. The highlight of this part of the tour was the upstairs bedrooms, where we saw the old-

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fashioned beds that the Latta family slept on—somewhat rough looking by today’s standards, but luxurious compared to the beds in the slave cabin— and the old-fashioned clothes that Latta family members would have worn. This part of the tour included a story and an interactive component that were meant to be amusing as well as educational. Pointing out how the bed slats under the mattress were tied to the edges of the bed frame, the tour guide explained that a typical trick to pull on newlyweds on their wedding night was to untie the ropes so that the bed collapsed when someone sat on it. The couple would then have to spend the first hours of their first night of marriage retying the bed slats rather than “doing what married couples do.” The tour guide caught himself when recounting the memorized anecdote, realizing that he was talking to eight-year-olds and that he needed to modify the story a bit, which he did. He then moved on to the interactive component of selecting one boy, who was Black, and one girl, who was white, to stand at the front of the group and put on the old-fashioned petticoats, dresses, vests, coats, and so on that a young couple would have worn. The children hooted with laughter as their peers added layer after layer of oversized clothes and stood before them as an early nineteenth-century gentleman and lady. It was a surreal experience. The huge elephant in the room that no one acknowledged during the clothing game was that a Black boy or man on the plantation would never be allowed to wear a gentleman’s clothes, would never be in the main house bedroom except perhaps to deliver wood to the fireplace, and above all would never be positioned socially as a peer—not to mention a romantic partner—of a white girl or woman. The silence on this last point is particularly powerful. The issue is not just that, like the schoolhouse tour, the clothing game made it seem like Black children had all the same opportunities and freedom of movement that white children did. It is also that the clothing game invisibilized the fact that a crucial way that white supremacy functions centers on relationships between Black men and white women. For centuries, white people have been anxious about Black men’s and women’s sexuality, albeit using their sexuality against them in different ways. In the case of Black men, the myth of the hypersexualized Black rapist was a key justification for Black lynching and other methods of terrorizing Black communities after the end of chattel slavery. 29 The dangerous Black man supposedly is a threat to the innocent white woman, who in turn needs white men’s protection. This myth is not, moreover, a historical artifact. It persists today, using white women’s racialized fear as a weapon of white terrorism. As one Black man claimed in the wake of the 2017 Unite the Right marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacists carrying tiki torches are merely a “visual inconvenience” for him. The real danger is the nervous white woman in her German SUV with a “Coexist” sticker who calls the cops when he is in the neighborhood. 30

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I am not arguing that the (white male) tour guide in the main house intentionally set up the clothing game to make it seem as if anxieties over interracial relationships between Black men and white women did not exist. I also am not arguing that this issue could have been avoided if only he had selected a white boy to play the game with the white girl. Our group of children was somewhat racially diverse (approximately 60 percent white and 40 percent nonwhite), and it is likely that the tour guide was deliberately attempting to be inclusive by choosing one Black and one white student to play the game. Choosing two white children would have been, or at least seemed to be, problematic in a different way, by restricting the game to the white kids. The problem of how to deal with sexual/romantic relationships between Black and white people on the plantation would exist no matter what the race of the children selected, and that is the point. Choose a white boy and a Black girl, and the particular elephant in the room becomes white slaveholders’ rape of Black female slaves out of both lust and greed, producing more “property.” Choose a Black boy and a Black girl, and the elephant becomes the fact that slaves were not legally allowed to marry and could be separated from their romantic partner (and their children) at their owner’s whim. All of this was part of the main grammar of the plantation, and none of it was spoken. Switching metaphors, all of this was part of the “architecture” that supported the main house—even more so than the handmade chimney bricks that we learned about—and the tour was absolutely silent about its particular features and enduring strength. In contrast to silence, what would it sound like to speak the grammar of white supremacy and Black suffering that structure plantations? More pointedly, how could or should a plantation tour guide talk with eight-year-olds about the terrorizing myth of the Black rapist, the vicious sexual assault and rape of Black slave women by white slaveholders, and the systematic destruction of Black relationships and families? I do not have answers to these questions. I admit that I cannot imagine a plantation tour guide speaking openly and honestly about these matters, nor can I imagine elementary schools deciding to take field trips to plantations if its guides did so. And perhaps this lack of imagination is precisely the point: white people generally do not know how to perceive Black suffering. They (we) do not know how to talk about it, only how to be silent. They (we) certainly do not know how to talk about it with young children. Elementary school plantation field trips take place and can only take place on the condition that all Black suffering has been erased, so that the plantation can continue to be a site of pleasure for white people. Like the Providence Plantation subdivision, the contemporary plantation tour reenacts the nineteenth-century plantation from the point of view of white masters: those who are accustomed to experiencing white class privilege and racial priority over people of color. There supposedly is nothing disturbing to see, learn, or experience at a plantation, merely “white

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columned mansions, rocking chairs on the wide veranda, Mint Julips, hoop skirts whirling to the Virginia Reel, a thousand acres of white cotton that turns to gold, [and] a ‘Gone With the Wind’ picture of the Old South.” Learning to yearn for the good ol’ days of the South, white children implicitly learn to perceive the world whitely and to eradicate historical and contemporary forms of nonwhite perception. CONCLUSION I have provided a phenomenological analysis of an elementary school field trip to a historical plantation, arguing that it both uses and creates white perceptual habits of erasing Black suffering. These are habits that not only operate on plantation tours but also extend across and help constitute the selves of white people in the United States. The plantation tour offers an example of the invisibilization of “slave-labor work-to-death camps, euphonized as plantations and haciendas, thereby euthanizing their meaning,” as Janine Jones argues. 31 To euphonize something is to make it sound agreeable and pleasant—in this case, to white ears, who do not want to hear about working Black slaves to death. The euphonization of American slave-labor camps takes place not only by calling them plantations and haciendas but also, as I have argued, by producing volumes of silence as we talk and learn about them. To drive home Jones’s point, imagine the website for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which also provides historical tours, declaring that it too “offers a unique wedding location. Enjoy the Historic setting as a backdrop for the most special of occasions ranging from Weddings and Receptions, to Corporate Picnics, Family Reunions, Birthday Parties and more!” 32 Such a website would be unimaginable and offensive to most white people in the United States, yet it is unremarkable in the case of Southern plantations. Interrupting white perceptual habits would make these lines seem as shocking and inappropriate to describe a nineteenth-century plantation as they would be to describe a Nazi-era concentration camp. The plantation field trip is one way that white children in the South implicitly and unconsciously learn how to be white in all aspects of their lives—not just on the field trip—which is by transforming Black suffering into something for white people’s enjoyment and pleasure. 33 The plantation does not impact the racial habits of children exclusively, of course. It also strengthens white adults’ habits of white class privilege and white priority. I focus on white children here because of the important issue of how white habits are initially learned. Childhood is a crucial site for the examination of racial (and other) habits because it is when habit is at its most malleable. This is true for Black and other children of color as well. The plantation field trip did not impact the racial habits of white children only. It also

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impacted the habits of the nonwhite children on the trip, teaching them to perceive from the point of view of whiteness and its erasure of Black suffering. While I do not have space here to address adequately this phenomenon, the plantation field trip tended to treat children of color and especially Black children like “the invisible children” who first integrated all-white schools in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. 34 Integration meant (and often still means) assimilation, which entailed blending in and becoming “just like us,” that is, becoming as much like a white person as possible. When that happened, there was no need for the topic of race to come up. Black children would be so invisible that the regular, white-prioritizing school curriculum could continue uninterrupted. Indeed, in the newly integrated schools of the 1970s, “it would [have] be[en] a sign of the failure of the [integration] program if the racial consciousness of the students, both black and white, had been raised.” 35 Likewise, on the plantation field trip, Black children were treated as invisible vis-à-vis their race. They were “just like” the other (white) children, learning the same lessons about the supposed nonexistence of Black suffering and the premium the United States places on white comfort and pleasure. Is the solution to this problem to eliminate elementary school field trips to plantations? Yes and no. The answer is yes in that, as practiced, the plantation field trip implicitly teaches young children of all races vicious habits of whiteness, and thus it would be better to discontinue it. But the answer also is no in that eliminating merely one source of the white habit of erasing Black suffering will not eliminate or alter the more general root problem. That problem is white people’s invisibilization of Black suffering so that it can be enjoyed as something other than suffering. While admittedly difficult to imagine, it would be better for my daughter’s school to continue the annual Latta Plantation field trip and use it as an opportunity to grapple openly with the United States’ history and present of white terrorism targeting Black people. 36 Until we can figure out how to do that—with or without plantation tours—the transgenerational practice of passing down to young children white habits of erasing Black suffering is sure to continue. 37 NOTES 1. Julia Robinson Moore and I also examine the erasure of Black suffering in Moore and Sullivan, “Rituals of White Privilege.” 2. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xiii. 3. Alcoff, “Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment,” 18. 4. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 152. 5. Ibid., 129. 6. Ibid., 342. 7. For more on phenomenology, race, and embodiment in particular, see Lee, Living Alterities; and Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes. 8. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 304.

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9. Ibid., xxi. 10. In addition to Merleau-Ponty, American pragmatist John Dewey has provided a useful account of habit in Human Nature and Conduct. 11. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 57. For more on habit and race, see Ngo, Habits of Racism. 12. For more on white class privilege and white priority, see Sullivan, “White Privilege” and “White Priority.” 13. I previously have focused on habits of ontological expansiveness; see Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness and “Ontological Expansiveness.” 14. Hartmann, Scenes of Subjection, 23. 15. Ibid., 17. 16. A picture of the poster can be found in Ahmed, On Being Included, 70. 17. See the “About” page at http://www.providenceplantationliving.com/providence-plantation-charlotte.html. 18. For Emerald Hollow Mine, see http://www.emeraldhollowmine.com/. 19. See http://www.tigerworld.us/ and https://historicsites.nc.gov/all-sites/reed-gold-mine, respectively. 20. Public Schools of North Carolina, “North Carolina Essential Standards: Third Grade Social Studies,” http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/curriculum/socialstudies/scos/3-5.pdf. A full list of North Carolina Common Core goals and Essential Standards in science and social science fulfilled by a Latta Plantation tour can be found at https://www.lattaplantation.org/ education. 21. This is true, especially if you frost the cake. 22. See, e.g., Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 23. In this context, the phrase “if these trees could talk,” describing the “spectacular” live oak trees at Boone Hall Plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, is particularly—and bitterly—ironic. See the rotating “Featured Offers” banner on the Charleston Area Convention & Visitors Bureau website, https://www.charlestoncvb.com/plan-your-trip/tours-attractions~204/ plantation-tours~1156/. 24. This last question might sound sarcastic, but after writing it, I discovered that similar things have happened in northern New Jersey and Los Angeles–area schools. See Anderson, “What Kids Are Really Learning about Slavery.” 25. I do not have space here to discuss whether I was successful in this attempt, but I can say that it was incredibly difficult. 26. The children and teachers did not receive plantation brochures, nor did the parents unless they explicitly asked for one when separately paying their entrance fee upon arrival. 27. I thank an audience member at the University of Kentucky for this realization. 28. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 75. Irigaray says “philosophers’ utterances” rather than “tour guides’ utterances,” but her point about philosophy applies equally well to the plantation tour. For more on Irigaray and phenomenology, see Lehtinen, Luce Irigaray’s Phenomenology of Feminine Being. 29. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings. 30. Chris Newman, Facebook post, https://www.facebook.com/sylvanaqua/posts/ 1036321936499106:0. 31. Jones, “To Be Black, Excess, and Nonrecyclable,” 320. 32. Latta Plantation website, https://www.lattaplantation.org/plan-your-event/. See also the website for the Charlotte, North Carolina, area Historic Rosedale Plantation, which makes similar claims about “help[ing] make your wedding a truly memorable event!” (https:// www.historicrosedale.org/plan-an-event/weddings). 33. The North has its own ways of erasing Black suffering, often by assuming that Black suffering is located solely in the South, but I do not have space to examine regional differences here. Also, one should not assume that it is only or even primarily Southern tourists who visit plantations. 34. Rist, Invisible Children. 35. Ibid., 195.

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36. According to National Geographic Traveler, the Whitney Plantation tour in Louisiana comes closer to doing that than most plantation tours. As reporter Heather Greenwood Davis claims, “much like a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, there is no joy in visiting Whitney Plantation. . . . You won’t leave feeling better about humanity, especially in light of recent racial tensions across the United States.” At the same time, the tricky question of how to teach children about white terrorism and Black suffering persists: Davis acknowledges that the Whitney Plantation tour guide was “careful with specifics of brutality owing to the children on the tour” (Davis, “Plantations Are a Dark Chapter in American History—Here’s Why to Visit”). 37. My thanks go to Emily Lee and audience members at Furman University and the University of Kentucky for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

WORKS CITED Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Alcoff, Linda Martín. “Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment.” Radical Philosophy 95 (May–June 1999): 15–26. Anderson, Melinda D. “What Kids Are Really Learning about Slavery.” Atlantic, February 1, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/02/what-kids-are-really-learning-about-slavery/552098/. Davis, Heather Greenwood. “Plantations Are a Dark Chapter in American History—Here’s Why to Visit.” National Geographic Traveler, February 8, 2019. https:// www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/intelligent-travel/2016/02/01/the-plantation-everyamerican-should-visit/. Dewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct. Vol. 14 of The Middle Works, 1899–1924. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Hartmann, Saidyia V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001. Jones, Janine. “To Be Black, Excess, and Nonrecyclable.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, 319–30. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Lee, Emily, ed. Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Lehtinen, Virpi. Luce Irigaray’s Phenomenology of Feminine Being. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1962. Moore, Julia Robinson, and Shannon Sullivan. “Rituals of White Privilege: Keith Lamont Scott and the Erasure of Black Suffering.” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 39, no. 1 (2018): 34–52. Ngo, Helen. The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Rist, Ray C. The Invisible Children: School Integration in American Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Sullivan, Shannon. “Ontological Expansiveness.” In 50 Concepts for an Intersectional Phenomenology, edited by Ann Murphy, Gayle Salamon, and Gail Weiss. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming. ———. Revealing Whiteness: Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. ———. “White Priority.” Critical Philosophy of Race 5, no. 2 (2017): 171–82. ———. “White Privilege.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, 331–41. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. On Lynchings. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2014.

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Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

Index

ableism, xiv, 69, 74, 78, 80 accountability, 19, 129 affect, xv, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96, 108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 118–119, 126, 143, 147, 148, 149, 176, 177, 178, 179; affective disposition, 94, 97; affective work, 63, 65 Afro-modernity, 135 Afro-Muslims, 130, 132 Ahmed, Sarah, xv, 59, 138; phenomenology of being stopped, 143, 144, 145, 150, 159, 160 Al-Saji, Alia, 9, 97, 108, 109, 116, 118, 119, 168 Alcoff, Linda Martín, xv, xvi, 3, 87, 91, 92, 98; disjointed, 150; sedimented contextual knowledge, 209 Algeria, 61, 62 American exceptionalism, xvi, 183, 185, 186 antisemitism, 136 Anzaldúa, Gloria E., xiii, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19–21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 32; being-at-ease, xiii, 18–20, 22, 24, 25, 31–32; la facultad, 17; los atravesados, 16; mestiza, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 32–33 Arendt, Hannah, 65 Arisaka, Yoko, 6 assimilation, 3, 6–7, 11, 59, 221

Baby Loup, 63, 64 bad faith, 128, 129, 138, 144, 179, 180 Baldwin, James, 168, 194, 199 being, 8, 9, 19, 22–23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 55, 62, 70, 71, 74, 110, 112, 118, 126, 129, 137, 145, 147, 148, 149, 162, 164, 177, 184, 192, 199; being-in, xiii, 20, 24–25, 149; being-in-theworld, x, xii, xiv, 21, 23, 24, 96; beingtoward-death, 19 Bentouhami, Hourya, xiv Bettina, Bergo, 162 black: body, 7, 8, 143–146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156–157, 158, 159, 160, 161–163, 165, 166, 167; exteriority, 164 Black Lives Matter, 47, 50 black male: action, 39, 40; as having access to patriarchal power, 41–42, 50; as objects of suspicion, 38; body, 36, 37, 40, 42, 79, 156; existence, 39; guilt, 37, 39 black suffering, xvi, 207–208, 211, 214, 215, 217, 219, 220–221 black women, xiii, 35, 36, 41, 43, 44–46, 47, 49, 50; as collateral damage, 36, 43, 44, 47; stereotypes, 47 blackness, 8, 38, 41, 42, 134, 146, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 158, 162, 168, 193, 198, 200; as erotic, 156; as political, 158

225

226

Index

Boas, Franz, 181, 182 body: alterations, xiv, 69, 71; image, 76, 150; objective, xiv, 69, 71, 76; one’s own, 1, 27, 29, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 128, 155, 159, 178, 181; schema, 76, 150, 200 bracketing, 126, 144, 181 Brentano, Frantz, 125 Brown, Michael, 166, 196 Carel, Havi, xiv, 70, 76, 77, 80 chattel slavery, 133, 191, 211, 218 Clinton, Hillary, 185, 186 colonial blindness, 57 colonialism, 12, 63, 80, 153, 187, 191 communication, 22, 118, 128, 129, 130, 134, 152 consciousness, xi, xv, xvi, 9, 10, 32, 108, 110, 116, 125, 125–126, 127, 128, 130, 133, 136, 138, 150, 151, 162, 163, 176, 191; self-consciousness, x, 78, 147 constitutionality, 127, 146, 150 corporeality, 7, 150, 197; malediction, 8, 150, 152, 198, 201, 202; schema, xvi, 8, 146, 198–199, 201, 202 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, xiii, 36, 44–46; double-discrimination, 46 creolizng phenomena, 137 critical phenomenology, 191, 198, 200 Curry, Tommy, 38, 41–42, 43, 44, 79; negrophobia, 38 Dasein, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 29, 73 Dastur, Francoise, x de jure segregation, 212 decenteredness, 26 Deleuze, Gilles, xii, 9, 10; cinema, 9, 10; a people to come, xiii, 3, 9, 11, 12 Descartes, René, 56, 153 disability, 69, 72, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81 discursive, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 162, 165, 168; constructions, 144 Dorlin, Elsa, 59; phenomenology of prey, 59 Dotson, Kristie, 41 double consciousness, 134, 135, 152 Dreyfus, Hubert L, 149

Du Bois, W. E. B., 134, 151–152, 153–154, 191; double consciousness, 134, 135, 152; The Souls of Black Folk, 151 East Asian people in a white-supremacist teleology, 135 Ellison, Ralph, 151, 154, 155, 156–158, 162; hypervisibility, 36, 56, 155, 162; Invisible Man, 154, 155 embodied, xvi, 26, 27; being, 71, 162; experience, xi, 75, 78, 80, 81; subjectivity, 70, 71, 73, 81 epistemic confidence, 40 essentialism, 179; racist, xii, 166 Euromodernity, 135 existential continuity, 27, 33 existentialism, 128 externality, 4–5, 6, 9, 12 externalization, 145 Fanon, Frantz, xvi, 8, 38, 62, 129, 134, 147, 151, 152, 156, 164; anti-black racism, 146; Black Skin, White Masks, 37, 193, 198 Feder, Ellen, 47 femininity, xiii, 56, 64, 65, 78 Ferguson, Missouri, 196 Firmin, Anténor, 136 Floyd v. the City of New York, 40 France, xiv, 56, 57–59, 60, 61 freedom, 12, 76, 80, 91, 98, 114, 116, 117, 128, 175, 179, 180 Gallagher, Shaun, xiv, 70, 76, 77, 78, 80 game of seduction, xiv, 59 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, xii, xiv, 69, 71–73, 74, 75, 80; fit, 71, 72, 73, 74; misfit, 71–73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80 gender, xiii–xiv, 19, 21, 24, 25, 36, 42, 44, 45, 49, 50, 56, 58, 63, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74–75, 77, 78, 101, 118, 176, 191, 198; body, 63, 64; colonialism, 63; gendered racialization, 56; inequality, xiv, 60; norms, 78, 79; performance, xiv gentrification, xvi, 189, 190, 202 Gordon, Jane Anna, 135, 137 Gordon, Lewis, xv, 163, 167, 193 Guenther, Lewis, xvi

Index Hall, Stuart, 153 Hansen, Suzy, 185 Harcourt, Bernard, 195, 196 Harris, Cheryl, 191, 192, 199 Hartmann, Saidiya, 211 Hatab, Lawrence, 29 Hegel, George, 135, 147 Heidegger, xii, xiii, 15–21, 22–24, 27–30, 70, 73, 74, 91; anxiety, xiii, 19, 25, 88, 175; project toward the future, 28; resoluteness, 19; temporality, xiii, 11, 28–29, 33, 119, 175, 181 Henry, Paget, 134 heteronormative, 56, 60 hijab, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64 historicity, 149, 164, 200 homo duplex, 57 Hume, David, 28 Husserl, Edmund, xv, 91, 97, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 136, 137, 163, 177, 180, 181 hyper-dialectic, x, xi identity, 3, 4, 5–7, 9, 11, 19, 26, 27, 32, 47, 57, 58, 59, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 81, 91, 98, 112, 145, 148, 150, 152, 153; affirmative, 5, 7; collective, 4, 9, 10 Iezzoni, Lisa, 80 impairment, xiv, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81 inbetweenness, 23 individualism, 50, 154, 180 intentionality, 109, 111, 114, 136, 137, 138, 163, 178, 198, 199; relational, 127 interpretation, xii, 21, 30, 77, 79, 88, 89, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98, 130, 148, 209 intersectionality, xiii, 15, 25, 26, 36, 44, 50, 74 Irigaray, Luce, 217 Islam, 55, 58, 61, 65; as an immigrant religion, 58 Islamophobia, 58 Johnson, Charles, 163, 164 Jones, Janine, 220 Kafer, Alison, 74 Kafka, Franz, 10

227

Kant, Immanuel, 28, 130; transcendental ego, 27 Kelling, George L., 195; “Broken Windows,” 195 Khiari, Sadri, 4 knowledge, 38, 40, 42, 70, 102, 108, 109, 129, 131, 138, 149, 150, 154, 165; know-how, 17, 18, 73; knowing-that, 18 Kyeong, Hwangbo, 159 laïcité, xiv, 55, 56–58, 59, 61; nouvelle laïcité, 56 Latina feminism, 16 Lee, Emily S., xv, 77, 102 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 62, 162 lived experience, xii, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 70, 71, 74, 76, 77, 80, 81, 89, 125, 191, 199, 201; of blackness, 36, 37, 198; of whiteness, 176, 199, 202 lived history, 143, 150 Lorde, Audre, xvi, 151, 160, 161 Lugones, Maria, xiii, 15, 16, 17, 18–21, 22, 24, 30, 31; world-traveling, 15, 22, 24 lynching, 41–42, 218 Madva, Alex, xiv–xv Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 129; decolonial reduction, 129 Manichaeism, 134 Marable, Manning, 2 marginalization, marginalized, 4, 15, 16, 17, 19, 23, 24, 26, 72, 74, 191, 198 Martinot, Steve, 197 mass incarceration, xiii, 42, 43, 47, 49, 50 material anonymity, xiv, 69, 70, 71, 72–73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81 materiality, 113, 115, 179, 193 maternal trepidation, 44 melancholia, 135 Mensah, Shaeeda A., xiii Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, x, xii, xiv, xv, 27, 55, 69–71, 73, 74–75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 89–90, 92, 96, 97, 100, 108, 109–111, 112, 117, 118, 120, 130, 137, 180, 191, 193, 207, 208, 209; Phenomenology of Perception, 69, 70 mineness, xiii, 28, 29–31, 33 model minority, 6

228

Index

multiplicitous self, 15–16, 17, 20, 21, 22–23, 25–31, 32; amasamiento, 15; being-between-worlds, xiii, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 30, 31; being-in-worlds, xiii, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30, 31, 32; oneness, xiii, 15, 20, 26, 27, 29, 33 multiplicity, 15–16, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 29, 32, 182, 202 natural attitude, 126, 163, 175, 177, 178, 179–182, 184, 185, 187, 208–209 Ngo, Helen, 150 normality, xiv, 69 O’Day Bonnie, 80 Obama, Barack, ix, 37, 115, 166, 185 objectification, 75, 111, 179 Olson, Kevin, 4 Omi, Michael, xii ontic, 17, 22, 23 ontology, xi, xii, xv, 125, 144, 163, 193, 199; ontological suspension, 126, 127, 129 oppression, 2, 16, 19, 25, 26, 44, 45, 69, 93, 95, 153, 211 Ortega, Mariana, xiii, 73, 74 Our Black Sons Matter: Mothers Talk about Fears, Sorrows, Hopes, 42, 43 particularities, x, 17, 24, 71, 73, 81 patriarchy, 41–42, 50, 61 patriotism, 184, 185 Paye, Ndella, 56 people of color, ix, xiii, xvi, 2–4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 11–12, 76, 80, 166, 167–168, 190, 196, 197, 207–208, 210, 211, 217, 219 perception, 55, 56, 57, 59, 64, 88, 91, 97, 108–109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 120, 131, 132, 146, 147, 162, 175, 176, 180, 191, 195–197, 216; as embodied, 75, 111; as habit, 148, 209–210, 217, 220; as situated, 90 Perrault, Pierre, 10 phenomenology, ix–x, xi, xii, xv–xvi, 7, 16, 17, 27, 55, 56, 71, 78, 89, 101, 113, 114, 125–126, 127, 128, 129–130, 135, 136, 175, 179, 181, 182, 191, 196, 198, 200, 208; bracketing, 126, 144, 181;

lived experience, xii, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 70, 71, 74, 76, 77, 80, 81, 89, 125, 191, 199, 201; of being stopped, 143, 144, 145, 150, 159, 160; of the erotic encounter, 56, 62; of trauma, 159, 160; political, 55 philosophy of race, x, xi, xii, xiii, 116 physicalism, 137 plurality, 20, 30, 31, 65 police state, 40, 49 power relations, xv, 10, 16, 22, 30, 88, 98, 102 practical orientation, 18, 24 problematic blackness, 134 proletariat, 9, 118 race, ix–x, xi–xii, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 19, 21, 24, 25, 36, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80–81, 88, 89, 90–91, 93, 94, 97, 101, 107, 108, 109, 116, 118, 125, 130–131, 133, 134, 136–138, 143–144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 164, 167, 186, 190, 201, 207, 211, 212, 217, 219, 221 racial: capitalism, 63, 192, 197; eliminativist, 136; epidermal schema, xvi, 146, 151, 165, 194, 198, 200–201 racialization, xvi, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 56, 63, 119, 144, 168, 199, 200 racialized: embodiment, 143; interpellation, 159; invisibility, 155 racism, ix, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, 2, 6, 22, 41, 42, 44, 50, 55, 56, 65, 70, 74, 77, 78, 80, 87, 89, 102, 108, 112, 120, 130, 131, 136, 137, 138, 146, 148, 151, 152, 153, 164, 165, 166, 167–168, 177, 179, 182, 186, 190, 198, 207; affective response, 143; culture, 144; essentialism, xii, 166; gaze, 56, 58, 79, 146, 153, 156, 157, 160; world, 144, 149, 163 raza, 131, 132, 135, 136 Reconstruction, 187 resistance, 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 21, 26, 65, 134, 145, 177 Reynolds, Joel Michael, 69 Richie, Beth, 43 Ritchie, Andrea, 80 Rochefort, Florence, 61

Index

229

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xiii, 4; the “People,” 4; popular sovereignty, 4

surveillance, xvi, 80, 160, 162, 189, 190, 192, 193, 196, 197

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 98, 128, 130, 178–179; anti-Semitism, 178–179; L’etre et le neant, 128; syncretic whole, 178 Schutte, Ofelia, 22 Scott, Joan, 59, 60, 61, 212 Scully, Jackie Leach, 74 secularism, xiv, 56, 57 seduction, xiv, 56, 59, 60; mythication, 60 seeing like a cop, xvi, 189, 190, 192, 193, 195, 197, 198, 202 self-determination, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11 selfhood, 15–16, 20, 25, 26 self-narrative, 157, 159 self-production, 63 sexism, xiv, 22, 44, 70, 74, 77, 78, 108 Sexton, Jared, 3, 197 sexual: liberation, 60; orientalism, 57, 61 Shaw, Theo, 159 Singh, Nikhil, 197 situatedness, x, 17, 118 Snead, James, 145 social: construction, xi–xii, 45, 128; factivity, 144; identities, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 91, 179; model of disability, 69; ontology, 144 sociogenic, 134, 150, 151, 155, 191–192, 198, 200 St. John de Crevecouer, Hector, 182 state violence, xiii, 35–36, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50, 190, 191, 192, 197–198, 201 stop-and-frisk, 159 subaltern, 64 subject, x, xiii, xiv, xv, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 36, 37, 38, 41, 44, 49, 70, 102, 108, 110–111, 112, 113–115, 117, 118, 120, 126, 127, 129, 130, 136, 144, 154, 161, 191, 192, 194, 200; Cartesian, 29; epistemic, 17, 29; normal, 69–70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80 subject/object duality, 16 subjectivity, x, xiii, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 27, 70, 71, 115, 117, 155, 157, 164, 175, 176–177, 194, 198; embodied, 70, 71, 73, 81, 110, 200 Sullivan, Shannon, xvi, 111

temporal, 3, 7, 8, 11, 27, 29, 72, 193, 198; dimension, 7, 27, 202; dissonance, xiii, 8, 9, 10, 11 terrorism, 111; intimate, 16, 25, 32; white, 218, 221 theonaturalism, 132 theory of appearance, 57, 59, 61 Toombs, S. Kay, xiv, 70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80 transcendental, x, xi, 110, 111, 125, 127, 128, 130, 138, 161, 176 Trump, Donald, ix, xi, xv, 107–108, 109, 111–112, 115–116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 185 Tuan, Mia, 6 veil, xiii, xiv, 55–65; battle of the veil, 61 Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador, 2 vulnerability, 72, 197 Walsh, Catherine, 132 War on Drugs, 47 Weiss, Gail, xii, 87, 111 Wender, Jonathan, 196 white: anti-black world, 143; class privilege, xvii, 208, 210, 211, 212, 219, 220; consciousness, 163, 191; embodiment, xvi, 160, 199; gaze, 38, 146, 160, 162, 163, 166; historical identity, 176; imagination, 36; male patriarchy, 42; narcissism, 152; normativity, 3, 5, 6, 11, 149; perception, 160, 176, 216, 220; priority, 208, 210, 211, 220; racism, 148, 151, 152, 153, 166, 167, 168, 177; subject, 9, 36, 38, 40, 44, 144, 193, 198; subjectivity, 5, 177, 193, 198; supremacy, 3, 7, 12, 87, 134, 168, 185, 194, 197, 218, 219; taboo, 156 whiteness as property, xvi, 191–192, 194, 198, 199, 200, 202 Wieseler, Christine, xiv Wilderson, Frank, 197, 198 Wilson, Darren, 38, 166, 196–197 Wilson, James Q., 195; Varieties of Police Behavior, 195 Winant, Howard, xii

230 woman of color, 1, 25, 50 Woodson, Jacqueline, xvi, 151, 164–167

Index Yancy, George, xv, xvi, 8, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 79; Black Bodies, White Gazes, 37 Young, Iris Marion, 78

About the Editor and Contributors

Linda Martín Alcoff is a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. She is a past president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. Recent books include Rape and Resistance (2018); The Future of Whiteness (2015); Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (2006), which won the Frantz Fanon Award for 2009; and Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). She is originally from Panama. For more information, go to www.alcoff.com. Hourya Bentouhami is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toulouse (France) and an associated expert at the Center for Intersectional Justice (Berlin). She has published on postcolonial perspectives in feminism and political theory. She authored Le dépôt des armes: Non-violence et désobéissance civile (2015) and Race, cultures, identités: Une approche féministe et postcoloniale (2015). She coedited (with Mathias Möschel) Critical Race Theory: Une introduction aux textes fondateurs (2017). Lewis R. Gordon is a professor of philosophy at UCONN-Storrs and honorary president of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. His most recent books are his coedited anthology with Fernanda Frizzo Bragato, Geopolitics and Decolonization: Perspectives from the Global South (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018); his forthcoming monograph Fear of Black Consciousness; and his collection of essays 论哲学、去殖民化与种族 (On Philosophy, Decolonization, and Race, trans. Li Beilei). Lisa Guenther is a Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies at Queen’s University in Canada. She is the author of 231

232

About the Editor and Contributors

Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (2013) and coeditor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015). She is currently working on a critical phenomenology of carceralcolonial power. Boram Jeong is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research focuses on the intersection of the formation of political subjectivity and theories of temporality. She is currently working on two research projects: the first, Capitalism and Melancholia, examines the temporality of debt and the production of subjects in capitalism; the second develops a philosophical reading of the writings of the “New Women” in colonial Korea through the notion of colonial temporality. Emily S. Lee is a professor of philosophy at California State University at Fullerton. Her research interests include feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and phenomenology. She has published articles on phenomenology and epistemology in regard to the embodiment and subjectivity of women of color. She is editor of Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (2014). Alex Madva is an assistant professor of philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona. His research and teaching center on the questions that developments in social psychology raise for philosophy of mind, philosophy of race and feminism, and applied ethics, especially prejudice, discrimination, and implicit bias. Shaeeda A. Mensah is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Temple University. Dr. Mensah’s areas of specializations are social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, and ethics. Her research focuses on the marginalization of Black women’s experiences in analyses of state violence, which she takes to include both mass incarceration and police violence. Mariana Ortega is an associate professor of philosophy; women’s, gender, and sexualities studies; and Latino/a studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of research are women of color feminisms (Latina feminisms), phenomenology (Heidegger), philosophy of race, and aesthetics. She is coeditor with Linda Martín Alcoff of the anthology Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (2009) and author of In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (2016). She is the founder and director of the LATINA/X Feminisms Roundtable (formerly the Roundtable on Latina Feminism).

About the Editor and Contributors

233

Shannon Sullivan is the chair of philosophy and a professor of philosophy and health psychology at UNC Charlotte. She is author or editor of nine books, including Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007; edited with N. Tuana), Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White AntiRacism (2014), The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (2015), and White Privilege (forthcoming, 2019). Christine Wieseler is an assistant professor (term) in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. Her areas of specialization are biomedical ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of disability. She has published numerous journal articles and is coediting The Disability Bioethics Reader with Joel Michael Reynolds. George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of more than twenty books and is known for his influential essays and interviews in the New York Times philosophy column “The Stone.”