Blacks experienced white surveillance as panoptic, driving total self-regulation.
Evidence
Respectability demanded that every individual in the black community assume responsibility for behavioral self-regulation and self-improvement along moral, educational, and economic lines. The goal was to distance oneself as far as possible from images perpetuated by racist stereotypes. Individual behavior, the black Baptist women contended, determined the collective fate of African Americans. It was particularly public behavior that they perceived to wield the power either to refute or confirm stereotypical representations and discriminatory practices. The Baptist women spoke as if ever-cognizant of the gaze of white America, which in panoptic fashion focused perpetually upon each and every black person and recorded his or her transgressions in an overall accounting of black inferiority. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 900
Categorization
- XREF: Foucault’s panopticism applied to race — the white gaze disciplining black bodies, a mechanism echoed in later theories of the white gaze (Fanon). — connects to: Knowing one is visible makes the subject self-police by internalizing power’s constraints — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1585; Black Baptist women infused words like respectability with their own meanings through self-definition — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1541; Surveillance itself racializes target groups into a suspicious race — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 75 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Surveillance itself racializes target groups into a suspicious race
#expands(0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 75 - Modern surveillance is structured by anti-Blackness
#qualifies(0.75) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 2569 - Post-enslavement black people faced total inescapable white supremacy
#qualifies(0.72)