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The Matter of Lmages The Matter of lmages Essays on representations Richard Dyer fqq3 HI London and New York Chapter 13 140 The Matter of lmages of the exercise of liberalism and understanding remained uppermost. White One of liberalism's cardinal virtue{ is tolerance, and it is not one that much of the left has a good track recort on. There is a difference however between tolerance based on a complacent assumption that we're all the same anyilay and tolerance that acknowledges the stubborn core of differ- ences betweln peoples. The first form of tolerance imposes the liberal's own sense of how piople are in her/his own world on to other parts of the world (including otheiclasses, minorities, even the opposite sex) - it is this self-satisfied libiral tolerance that assumes western Marxism is entirely appropriate to the situations of the Third world, or that women or blacks oi'guyr in political parties do not inhabit specific and different situations ."q:oirirg ai least some of the time separate organization. The other kind of just enter and understand differ- Thisisanarticleaboutasubjectthat,muchofthetimeasl,vebeenwritingthe tolerancE acknowledges that one cannot ,ot ,o be there as a subject at all' Trying to think about judgement or the interference oJ 'understand- t,:;;t film is ence, and withdraws from ;p;;"ai.n or y.Uf"*ss as an gthnic category in mainstream *t The film A Passage to India invites us to take up the forher tolerance, dominance by seeming not ing'. difficult, partly because white power secures its an-d this matters. It ii not a wrangle over protecting a 'great author's' when whiteness qua \thite' ,, to be anything in particular Uut also because' is not worrying about a story set in the dim and distant past. In emptiness, absence' vision, it does come into focus, it is often revealed as r,l Britain, in a world still entangled in imperi- ness multi-cultural contemp&ary a kind of death' real tolerance denial or even alisms of many kinds, we need more than ever to foster the --iiir, to try to make some headway with grasping I uff the same, important of real difference. 'Images of' studies havc rl whiteness a, a cutturaliy constructld category' h subordinate.- women' i";k; at groups deflnei as oppressed, marginal or I Marxism Today (APril 1985)- lesbiaLt gay menr class, ethnic ana oiner minorities (e'g'' Td I ;;;.k#g for such work lies in the sense l'. disabled people, tfre elderly)' The impulse is part of the process of thoir li,r FURTHER READING that how rrr"t grorir*u'J""p'"t"nied range and fertility of tf,. oi subordination' The the whale" it Imaginary flomeland. London: -urli.tuflrutiot' E, Rushdie, Salman (1992) 'Outside "ppr"r.i.r, Books, 125-38. suchworkhasputtt'"'"g'o"psthemselvescentre-Stageinbothanalytical H Penguin/Granta issue of representation as p and campaigning activitv] u"a highlighted the ,,.J long recognizcd in politics. It has, to*"u"i, had on"e drawback' 'J'io"t such passion and single' 1I debates about women', Looking' with 't"di"*' the effect of reproducing the mindedness, ut ,tor-do..tinant groups has had of these.groups, the sense of the oddness, differentness, exceptionality Meanwhile the norm httt* feeling that they u." i"puttt"gs frol the norm' way of being humun' carried on as if it is the iratural, inevitable, ordinary Someeffortsarenowbeingmadetorectifythis,tosee.thatthenormttlei has anything approaching tr is constructed, although onlf with masculinity here+ bcfore proliferation ot t"*t.Lgo"' e"tnupt it. is worth signalling two convolutions "pr."""Ji"g, two of ,t pitt"ut in the path,of such work' " masculinity guilt and mc' that especiatty ct ara"ilii ze malewriting about - here as a. white person about too-ism. Let me t,ui" ittut, while writ-ing the expiation o.f my guilt about whiteness, I do not *"un to display ", (trccause it is un nor to fti"itttut"itt it is also awful to be white I U"iig-*tli" inadequate,limitingdeliniti<mofheinghuman'hocttuscfcelingguiltyis the dominunt should not deny tlto such a burclen). stuiie, of dominance by L 142 The Matter of lmages White 143 place of the writer in relation to what s/he is writing about it, but nor precisely for our purposes, do they help to reproduce blackness and should they be the green light for self-recriminatior\ or trying to get in on Englishness as mutually exclusive categories? . why are contempor- the act. \ ary appeals to 'the people' in danger of transmitting themselves as Power in contemporary society habitually passes itselfgff as embodied in appeals to the white people? the normal as opposed to the superior (cf. Marcuse 1964). This is common (1987: ss-6)2 to all forms of power, but it works in a peculiarly seductive way with whiteness, because of the way it seems rooted, in commonsense thought, in things other than ethnic difference. The very terms we use to describe the On the other hand, if the invisibility of whiteness colonizes the definition of major ethnic divide presented by western society, 'black' and 'white', are other norms - class, gender, heterosexuality, nationality and so on - it also imported from and naturalized by other discourses. Thus it is said (even in masks whiteness as itself a category. White domination is then hard to liberal textbooks) that there are inevitable associations of white with light grasp in terms of the characteristics and practices of white people. No one and therefore safety, and black with dark and therefore danger, and that would deny that, at the very least, there are advantages to being white in this explains racism (whereas one might well argue about the safety of the western societies, but it is only avowed racists who have a theory which cover of darkness and the danger of exposure to the light); again, aq! with attributes this to inherent qualities of white people. Otherwise, whiteness more justice, people point to the Judaeo-Christian use of white and black is presented more as a case of historical accident, rather than a character- to symbolize good and evil, as carried still in such expressions as 'a black istic culturaUhistorical construction, achieved through white domination. mark', 'white magic', 'to blacken the character' and so on (cf. Jordan 1969 The colourless multi-colouredness of whiteness secures white power by and Fryer 1984). I'd like to look at another aspect of commonsensical making it hard, especially for white people and their media, to 'see' conflations of black and white as natural and ethnic categories by consider- whiteness. This, of course, also makes it hard to analyse. It is the way that ing ideas of what colour is. black people are marked as black (are not just 'people') in representation I was taught the scientific difference between black and white at primary that has made it relatively easy to analyse their representation, whereas school. It seemed a fascinating paradox. Black, which, because you had to white people - not there as a category and everywhere everything as a fact add it to paper to make a picture, I had ilfrays thought of as a colour, was, - are difficult, if not impossible, to analyse quawhite. The subject seems to it turned out, nothingness, the absence of all colour; whereas white, which fall apart in your hands as soon as you begin. Any instance of white looked just like empty space (or blank paper), was, apparently, all the representation is always immediately something more specific - Brief colours there were put together. No doubt such explanations-of colour Encounter is not about white people, it is about English middle-class have long been outmoded; what interests me is how they manage to touch people; The Godfather is not about white people, it is about Italian- on the construction of the ethnic categories of black and white in dominant American people; bfi The Color Purple is about black people, before it is representation. In the realm of categories, black is always marked as a about poor, southern US people. colour (as the term 'coloured' egregiously acknowledges), and is always This problem clearly faced the makers of Being White, a pioneering particularizing; whereas white is not anything really, not an identity, not a attempt to confront the notion of white identity. The opening vox pop particularizing quality, because it is everything - white is no colour because sequence vividly illustrates the problem. Asked how they would define it is all colours. themselves, the white interviewees refer easily to gender, age, nationality This property of whiteness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of or looks but never to ethnicity. Asked if they think of themselves as white, its representational power. On the one hand, as one of the people in the most say that they don't, though one or two speak of being 'proud' or video Being Whiter observes, white domination is reproduced by the way 'comfortable' to be white. In an attempt to get some white people to that white people 'colonise the deflnition of normal'. Paul Gilroy similarly explore what being white means, the video assembles a group to talk about spells out the political consequences, in the British context, of the way that it and it is here that the problem of white people's inability to see whiteness whiteness both disappears behind and is subsumed into other identities. He appears intractable. Sub-categories of whiteness (Irishness, Jewishness, discusses the way that the language of 'the nation' aims to be unifying, Britishness) take over, so that the particularity of whiteness itself begins to permitting even socialists an appeal in terms of owe' and 'our' 'beyond the disappear; then gradually, it seems almost inexorably, the participants margins of sectional interest', but goes on to observe that: settle in to talking with confidence about what they know: stereotypes of black people.
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