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Whiteness As Surveillance

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Whiteness As Surveillance CHAPTER 8 WHITENESS AS SURVEILLANCE Policing Brown Bodies in Education Consider: A Poem about Power That which makes you feel THREATENED e-x-p-o-s-e-d revealed UNcovered B A R E naked Discovered UNfolded disclosed Unmasked Unearthed What will you do… when you know you have the power to cover it up? Though seemingly innocent, the poem above not only divulges what it feels like to be revealed, but also how power operates in such a way that it can, with all its might, stop the revealing. In essence, the power of whiteness is nothing more than a policing of what can and cannot be said, divulged, examined, and exposed due in part by white fragility (DiAngelo, 2011). So often in racial justice work, those who are “revealed” as having racist ideologies, behaviors, and/or discourses become so emotionally unfettered that they opt to further exert their power in whiteness by shutting down, silencing, and/or dismissing the revealer. In doing so, this dismissal becomes a sad and pitiful display because, if we as a society so commit to racial harmony, how can we even fathom its fruition if individually we are more concerned about a label than how we may, in fact, be acting racist. This chapter delves into how 115 Chapter 8 whiteness acts as a policing entity constantly surveilling its own white interests at the expense of dehumanizing us all. THE LEGAL PRECEDENCE FOR WHITE SURVEILLANCE The phenomenon of policing is not new to U.S. race relations. For one, the racist science, Eugenics, was used in the U.S. to justify the maltreatment of Black slaves, claiming Blacks were inferior beings through phrenology, muscular studies, etc., a delineation that made it right and just for their subjugation. Essentially, eugenics was a just way to police Black bodies in order to re-conceptualize who was a part of humanity and who was not; the delineation justified its enforcement of capitalistic racism. In fact, Coates (2015) describes the U.S. legacy of disembodying the Black person from humanity to a point at which the Black body is rendered nothing but property; such rendering has left a legacy of denigration to Black peoples in the U.S. Second, laws throughout U.S. history were created to delineate the inhumanity of Black bodies so that legalization of slavery – or in modern day terms: high incarceration – was justified (Alexander, 2012). Sadly, this plays out too often in current U.S. contexts with the overzealous, racist shootings of unarmed Black men, women, and – in the case of Tamir Rice – children. Additionally, Whites were given legal privileges through the use of colorblind racist laws (Haney López, 2006). Two such court cases stand out. In Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922), Takao Ozawa claimed he should be afforded citizenship via naturalization after his 20-year stay in the U.S. because his skin color was whiter than that of most Whites. His argument was based on the Naturalization Act of 1906 which dictated that only “free white persons” were eligible for citizenship via naturalization.1 For the verdict, Justice George Sutherland wrote, “the words ‘white person’ were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race.” Since Ozawa was of Japanese descent, he was then ruled ineligible for the label “free white person” and thus denied naturalization. Later, Bhagat Thind challenged this ruling in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), claiming that although he was of northern Indian descent, his ancestry did hail from Aryan (read: Caucasian) blood lines so thus he met Sutherland’s Caucasian requirement and, by virtue of this classification, be deemed a “free white person,” afforded all the rights and privileges of naturalization. While Thind’s initial naturalization petition was granted, federal attorneys filed suit and ultimately the Supreme Court again ruled that Thind was not “white” and thus not deserving of citizenship. Again, Justice Sutherland wrote the majority opinion and denied Thind’s request, because through “common speech” and “common understanding,” Thind could not be White. Sutherland’s common understanding dismissed the reality: the 1920 Encyclopedia Britannica in fact claimed that Aryan invaders of the Hindu culture were considered White. Moreover, the Court masked the power structure that allowed certain “common” men to make the racial decisions about other “common” men. That is, although Ozawa and Thind were common men who obviously had 116.
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