Whiteness passes unclassified in nature while blackness is pre-classified as natural

Evidence

The uneasy circuits of sublime pleasure are directly related to another dilemma: What does it mean, in the fullest sense of the phrase, to be absorbed by nature? In terms of a post-Enlightenment ecology of spectatorship, how are Kincaid (an anticolonial botanical enthusiast) and Ndebele (an avid antiapartheid bird-watcher) to circumnavigate the repressive legacy of racial classification that figured their ancestors as “natural”? White nature tourists, I would suggest, have less troubled access to sublime natural absorption in a postor neocolonial environment because they can experience their whiteness as an unselfconsciously unclassified state. Ndebele, by contrast, is painfully alive to the problematics of natural union and a historically freighted politics of looking: “[W]hen [black tourists] go game viewing, it is difficult not to feel that, in the total scheme of things, perhaps they should be out there with the animals, being viewed.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 529

Categorization

• XREF: Reader’s eco-justice land/place thread: nature’s unselfconscious absorption depends on not being read through a racializing gaze. — connects to: The race-ethnicity distinction is not a culture-versus-nature divide — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 723; Blackness is a social location, not actual skin pigmentation — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 460; Racial groups are perceived as natural kinds though they are artifacts
• SEED: Essay angle on ‘who gets to be absorbed by nature’ as an environmental-justice measure of belonging.

Broader Connections

• The race-ethnicity distinction is not a culture-versus-nature divide #qualifies (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 723
• Blackness is a social location, not actual skin pigmentation #expands (0.80) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 460
• Racial groups are perceived as natural kinds though they are artifacts #corroborates (0.75)