Whiteness operates through perceptual paradox, invisible and normative simultaneously

Evidence

In the process of writing this essay I happened to visit an exhibition of the sculptor Anish Kapoor’s work at the Hayward Gallery in London. The first installation looked from a distance like a large rectangular painting of the deepest blue imaginable. Close up, it invited the viewer to locate its surface on a two-dimensional plane which seemed to retreat into the distance the more one tried to fix it. The security guard had her work cut out to prevent people from leaning over the ropes to touch the blue surface, to feel with their hands what their eyes refused to tell them. In another room, the installation described above by Homi Bhabha had a similar effect although this time it was white and the perceptual disturbance was produced by the surface protruding into the room rather than disappearing into the wall. It was a curiously exhilarating experience trying to fathom what had happened to the bulge as you looked straight at it, seeing only a dense white flat surface. Only when you moved to the side could you see the profile re-emerge, and make sense of the title of this piece. I encountered a similar sensation with Kapoor’s “White Dark” series as I stared into his hollow three-dimensional shapes without being able to see corners, sides, edges, and depths. The white space inside was uncannily vacant, but also powerfully empty. It was hardly surprising that many complained of dizziness once they left the building. … This experience of peering into the dark light, or the light dark, reminded me of the problems inherent in trying to speak about whiteness as a central feature of raciology — by which I mean the various discourses that bring and keep the idea of “race” alive. Richard Dyer, whose work on the representational power of whiteness has famously illustrated its all-or-nothing quality, was one of the first to draw attention to the way that whiteness can become invisible to those who are caught up in its glare (1988, 1997). From one angle whiteness appears as normality; in a white supremacist society those people and those ways of thinking, behaving, and talking that are deemed white, are the norm by which all else is measured. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 742

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens Dyer’s whiteness thesis: whiteness becomes invisible to those caught in its glare, appearing as pure normality.
• XREF: Connects to Dyer’s representational-power argument and to vault passages on racial formation as the norm-setting center against which races are measured. — connects to: Whiteness confers presumed belonging while nonwhiteness signals perpetual foreignness; An inserted black body makes invisible whiteness and its amnesiac temporality visible — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 519; Racism persists as unconscious normalized privileging of whiteness — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1466 (+2 more)
• SEED: The Kapoor-installation metaphor for whiteness — visible only at the edges, vanishing head-on — could anchor an essay on how whiteness resists direct critical gaze.

Broader Connections

• An inserted black body makes invisible whiteness and its amnesiac temporality visible #expands (0.90) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 519
• Whiteness confers presumed belonging while nonwhiteness signals perpetual foreignness #expands (0.85)
• Racism persists as unconscious normalized privileging of whiteness #corroborates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1466
• Whiteness is structurally fragile, needing constant self-assertion to sustain its privilege #qualifies (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1112