The racial gaze subjects the observed to a humiliating double-consciousness
Evidence
W. E. B. Du Bois had reflected in The Souls of Black Folk on black people’s ‘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’. Later black American writers also explored the Hegelian battle for control of perspectives. In 1953, James Baldwin described visiting a Swiss hamlet where no one had seen a black person before, and where they gawped at him in amazement. He reflected that, in theory, he ought to feel as early white explorers did in African villages, accepting the stares as tribute to his marvellousness. Like the explorers, he was more widely travelled and sophisticated than the locals. Yet he could not feel that way; instead he felt humiliated and ill at ease. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 878
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the phenomenological concept of the Other’s gaze from Sartre and the chapter’s own earlier treatment of the look; also resonates with Fanon’s work on racialized phenomenology. — connects to: Racial passing risk makes double consciousness itself an artistic dialectical tool.; Hypersurveillance racializes Muslim identity producing a double consciousness — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 237; Double-consciousness names the psychological cost of racial hierarchy — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 769 (+12 more)
Broader Connections
- Hypersurveillance racializes Muslim identity producing a double consciousness
#exemplifies(0.95) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 237 - Recognition in the racist gaze makes subjects alien to themselves
#corroborates(0.93) - The white gaze returns the black body to its owner distorted and demonized
#corroborates(0.92) - Double-consciousness names the psychological cost of racial hierarchy
#corroborates(0.90) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 769 - Oppressed groups internalize dominant categories through double consciousness
#corroborates(0.90) - Racist misrecognition is introjected so deeply it makes the subject Other to itself
#expands(0.88) - Klein’s doppelganger concept extends Du Bois’s double-consciousness into a theory of racial doubling
#expands(0.85) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 923 - Racial passing risk makes double consciousness itself an artistic dialectical tool.
#expands(0.82) - White-imposed dehumanization drives the black subject to seek whiteness
#complicates(0.82) - The Other’s look makes the self haunt an unreflective consciousness
#corroborates(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 727 - Racist depiction of minorities as ugly and uncool shapes later self-conscious bodily practices
#responds-to(0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2833 - The uncanny in racism arises from the Other within the self
#expands(0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1397 - Racist spectatorship mirrors the voyeuristic fantasy of the Freudian primal scene.
#expands(0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1411 - Blackness symbolizes Evil and Ugliness in white thought
#complicates(0.72)