Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fall 2005 Whiteness and the Return of the "Black Body" George Yancy Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Yancy, G. (2005). Whiteness and the Return of the "Black Body" (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1386 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Whiteness and the Return of the “Black Body” A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Department of Philosophy McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by George Yancy October 10, 2005 © 2005 by Yancy, George All rights reserved. Dedication To my grandparents Lillian, Matt, George, and Beatrice and my parents Ruth and George, El whose enduring Black Bodies have made this dissertation possible iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my dissertation committee, philosophers Fred Evans, Eleanore Holveck, and John H. McClendon, III, for providing the necessary latitude needed for expressing my intellectual and scholarly independence. Fred is to be thanked for providing not only significant feedback in terms of pertinent philosophical direction at just the right moments, but his own philosophically rich work overlaps with my own, particularly in terms of philosophical explorations that take seriously the relationship between theory and practice. As my director, I thank him for immediately seeing the importance of this project, his genuine respect for my philosophical insights, and for his wealth of scholarly output. I would like to thank Eleanore for her support and encouragement that I continue my graduate studies at Duquesne University. She is to be thanked for being instrumental in securing for me the McAnulty Fellowship, which was the first of its kind. I would also like to thank her for her intellectual honesty and for suggesting stimulating ways for me to rethink my dissertation project. Of course, both she and Fred are thanked for valuing my philosophical work, and for believing in the importance of my work on race to the intellectual life of Duquesne University. John is to be thanked for his incredible fund of knowledge concerning not only Africana thought generally, but African-American philosophical thought in particular. John’s philosophical work is not only conceptually rigorous, but historically rich. John and I share both the vision of doing original work on Black philosophers, and the importance of conceptualizing the dynamic role of the historical and material context within which these philosophers did their thinking and their living. John is a philosopher who, with great integrity, is not swayed by philosophical fads. He is a rare philosopher whose iv philosophical acumen is sharp and whose historical breadth of knowledge is enviable. I would also like to thank the former dean of the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, Constance Ramirez, for her continued interest in and support of my work. The last five months have been incredibly exhausting and rewarding. However, philosophers like myself, that is, those who find unspeakable delight in giving birth not only to ideas but to families as well, know how difficult it is to be productive philosophically, while asking of those whom we love to give us the privacy that we need. Hence, it is within this context that I sincerely offer my thanks and my love to Adrian, Gabriel, and Elijah. Of course, there are rewards. For example, I think that I have the only five year old who uses the term “dissertation” in a full sentence. This desire for privacy becomes all the more difficult when one’s significant other is also working to create her own scholarly identity and striving to make significant contributions to her own area of intellectual love. As for Susan, my wife, my gratitude is immeasurable. I am under no illusions regarding the importance of everyday necessities and comforts required to do philosophy. Many philosophers seem to forget that a comfortable space for philosophical thought presupposes a real world of stability, a world of the mundane, where things are ready-to-hand not by accident but through the sustained efforts of others. Susan provided me with such a context, and at no point do I want her to forget that I am thankful to her for having provided me with a context of love and reliability that made this dissertation possible. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments iv Chapter I 1 Why Whiteness Matters: My Existential and Epistemological Standpoint Chapter II 61 Whiteness: “Unseen” Things Seen Chapter III 114 Whiteness’s Manichean Divide: Colonialist Gazing and “Seeing” Hottentot Venus Chapter IV 166 Whiteness and the Phenomenological Return of the Black Body: Frantz Fanon, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, and W.E.B. Du Bois Chapter V 217 The Agential Black Body: Resisting the Black Imago in the White Imaginary Chapter VI 261 The Serious World of Whiteness: Frederick Douglass’s Autobiographical Incursions Chapter VII 326 Desiring Bluest Eyes, Desiring Whiteness: The Internalization of the White Gaze and Being Double Chapter VIII 403 Existential Conversion and Non-whitely White Bodies Conclusion 428 Bibliography 433 vi Chapter I Why Whiteness Matters: My Existential and Epistemological Standpoint “White” is a relatively uncharted territory that has remained invisible as it continues to influence the identity of those both within and without its domain. It affects the everyday fabric of our lives but resists, sometimes violently, any extensive characterization that would allow for the mapping of its contours. It wields power yet endures as a largely unarticulated position. —Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek Whiteness is everywhere in American culture, but it is very hard to see . As the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations. —George Lipsitz Whiteness and the Distortion of the Black Body: My Existential Standpoint The Black body has been confiscated. My Black body has been confiscated. 1 When followed by white security personnel as I walk through department stores, when a white sales person avoids touching my hand, when a white woman looks with suspicion as I enter the elevator, I feel that I have become this indistinguishable, amorphous, black seething mass, a token of danger, a threat, a rapist, a criminal, a burden, a rapacious animal incapable of delayed gratification. Within the space of these social encounters, I become other to myself. I feel alienated from my own body. Unlike the form of alienation described by the young Karl Marx, where workers are alienated from their labor, philosopher Charles Mills states that “under white supremacy, one has an alienation far more fundamental; since while one can always come home from work, one cannot get out of one’s skin.” 2 While I agree with Mills, I realize that class standing and its role in alienation can also follow one home. Think here of real 1 2 situations where low expectations constitute part of the lived normative framework of a lower-class white family. Within such families, it may not even occur to parents to imagine their children attending college or doing any other work than that characteristic of their lower-class standing. Indeed, lower class whites (particularly, non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant whites) in North America have also been characterologically described as shiftless, lazy, and worthless, and have even been victims of systematic sterilization during the American Eugenics Movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 3 However, despite this deplorable crime against poor white women and men, immigrants, and the physically and mentally disabled, such “innate” character traits attributed to poor whites were not conceptualized as resulting from a specifically “ Black essence.” 4 My understanding of my own body undergoes a process of slippage when the white imaginary, which has been historically structured and shaped through years of white hegemony, ruminates over my dark flesh and vomits me out in a form not recognizable by me. Phenomenologically, I feel “external,” as it were, to my body, 5 delivered and sealed in white lies. The reality is that I find myself within a normative space, a historically structured and structuring space, through which I am “seen” and judged guilty a priori. This suggests the sense in which each person finds him/herself within a context of shared intelligibility. I find myself within the context of North America where the discourse of race and racism constitutes a context of shared intelligibility, not only within which I actively negotiate my course of action, but it is also a space within which I am part of an interpretive stream that has configured my identity and shaped my course of action. On this score, I am said to bear the pernicious mark of 3 dark skin, but not as a natural phenomenon. My darkness is a signifier of negative values grounded within racist social practices that predate my existential emergence. The meaning of my Blackness is not intrinsic to my natural pigment, but has become a value- laden “given,” an object presumed untouched and unmediated by various discursive practices , history, time, and context. My Blackness functions metaphorically as a stipulatory axiom: “Blackness is evil, not to be trusted, and guilty as such.” From this, conclusions can be drawn. This “stipulatory axiom” forms part of a white racist distal narrative that congeals narrative coherence and intelligibility, providing a framework according to which the Black body is rendered “meaningful.” Whites “see” the Black body through the medium of historically structured forms of “knowledge” that regard it as an object of suspicion.