On White Loss

A Side
(substackcdn.co...) Human Zoos in Belgium at the 1958 Brussels World Fair
I start with this image-the image of a white Belgian girl gawking into the cage of a black girl. The white girls’ gaze is a powerful example of colonial curiosity and that of white innocence. The remainder of the white observers at the non-white as objects of fascination.
The cage that divides the two people in this photo also divides one who has agency and one who is objectified. White innocence is socialized into white supremacy and colonial dominance without conscious awareness. This experience and image functions as a reminder for both the whites and the blacks of the power dynamics and colonial dominance without critical understanding.
The black girl in the cage is subjugated. Susan Sontag has posited that the camera gaze can be an instrument of power, particularly for categorizing and exoticizing the other. In this photo, the child in the cage is deemed as subhuman.
When we analyze photography's history, particularly images, we uncover a troubling narrative of Western voyeurism. The bodies of the 'other' are transformed into a spectacle for Western consumption. As Edward Said has astutely observed, the Western project is deeply intertwined with the Western gaze and the construction of racial difference through visual and cultural representation.
And what is the analysis of the camera’s gaze?
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In the film The Great Debaters (2007), directed by Denzel Washington, there is a vital scene where the protagonists, the students from Wiley College, travel through the Jim Crow South, and their car accidentally runs over a pig. The students, accompanied by their professor, were confronted by the white farmers, who demanded compensation for the pig. However, the farmers’ confrontations were racist and hostile, as well as humiliating. The farmer demands an exorbitant amount of money for the pig, taking advantage of the power dynamic that exists under the system of Jim Crow segregation while enjoying the degradation of the black man in front of the children and women. Despite the whites being in an economically more challenged position than the black travelers in an automobile, the white supremacists can enjoy the excess of white supremacy.
In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), Michelle Alexander shows that the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a new racial caste system, disproportionately targeting Black and Brown individuals under the guise of colorblindness. Today, the white liberal complicity comes into play when they fail to recognize how their economic, social and political privilege is maintained through the same system. Just like the farmers who were at a clear economic disadvantage in contrast to the black family, they abused the existing structural power dynamics to extract further gains, going well beyond the bounds of moral and social contracts.
In times of economic downturn, white liberals often experience a decline in sympathy for racial justice, similar to the white farmer’s hostility toward the Black students in the Great Debaters scene. Economic struggles lead to a focus on self-preservation, and white liberals may view conversations about racial inequality as irrelevant or divisive. This is how white victimhood plays a central role in the ongoing structure of white imperialism.
The white liberal is no different from the white conservative, as it is during times of economic duress that they reveal their adamancy to maintain white privilege. The fight for social equality is meant to improve as many lives as possible. However, the confusion and oversimplification of civil society as entirely a zero-sum game brings out the racist attitudes even amongst the most educated and well-meaning whites and white adjacents.
Similarly, many modern white liberals are unconsciously invested in racial hierarchy, for it is here where they can practice their generosity as well as differentiation from other whites in their pecking order. The liberals require the maintenance of marginalization as a comforting reassurance for white dominance while they distance themselves from overtly racist practices. This explains the reason why when the white bourgeoisie pointed out their hypocrisy within a black-and-white framework, they often threatened the racialized that they might receive a worse master, such as Trump or the AfD. However, the ruling liberal elites have alienated themselves for so long from even the majority of the lower classes of whites that their platform is shrinking in size. T...