Love's Labors Lost: The visibility of Whiteness

April 8, 2010

The visibility of Whiteness

When it comes to race, a lot of people (including people of color) assume - if not outright state - that White is a lack of race, an empty ethnicity, the default, normal, invisible. As a result, when it comes to matters of race, Whiteness becomes impartial, objective, unbiased, rational, common sense.

I'm sure you can imagine how this plays out in racial discourse. Whiteness is positioned as true and therefore right.

Of course, no one thinks that consciously (duh!), but it often comes out in how, in a weird sort of way, White people seem to act like they're only White when the topic of discussion is racism and not every waking moment of their lives. And this confuses the shit out of me because that's like a straight person acting like they're only heterosexual when the issue of gay marriage crops up. Or a man acting like the only time he notices gender is when people bring up sexism. To which the only prudent response is to disengage before the intensity of delusion makes your head explode.

4 comments:

Anonymous4/08/2010 10:18 PM
In the novel I'm currently writing, it features and showcases a large and diverse cast of black women. It wasn't anything planned, it just naturally happened that way. Many of the characters in the novel are based on people in my life. Coincidentally, many are based on phenomenal black women with various backgrounds, looks, personalities, etc. Actually the cast itself is immensely diverse with compelling three-dimensional characters and I have no doubt that this story will appeal to a wide demographic.

However one of the biggest challenges is that I constantly have to qualify this character is black, this character is black, this character is Asian, because of society's fucked up view that white is the default race.

Because when I didn't do that in previous stories and folks found out that a character was a POC, they about flipped their shit.
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Inda Lauryn4/09/2010 11:56 AM
well as Stephen Colbert said, he is default America. by the way neo-prodigy, people don't want diverse black women. you're better off just going along with the flow. you'll never make any money that way. believe me. i know.
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macon d4/18/2010 12:17 PM
And this confuses the shit out of me because that's like a straight person acting like they're only heterosexual when the issue of gay marriage crops up. Or a man acting like the only time he notices gender is when people bring up sexism.

This confuses me too. I don't understand why the category of "white" is less visible to most of those in it than such categories as "male" or "heterosexual" are for those people. What exactly is it that's different this way about whiteness?
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modest-goddess4/19/2010 5:25 PM
this also blows my mind

similarly they have no problem expressing how unsafe they feel in non white neighborhoods but the fact that I feel unsafe in majority white areas completely goes over their heads
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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932