Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body, Essay Example

Introduction

George Yancy’s “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body” is a complex deconstruction of racism, with a consistent focus on how white dominance inevitably transforms – or deforms – black identity.  Yancy asserts from the beginning of the work that his perceptions and thinking are guided by personal experience; as a black man, he writes from within an existential context of blackness, which he presents as valuable but also requiring admission.  His goal is simple, if his analysis is complex: to comprehend how the black body is “returned” to the black individual, a process inevitable in a culture that invariably constructs that body through white perspectives.  As the following will examine, Yancy’s approach is relentless and unwavering; there is simply no exception to this process, even as it generates varying degrees of lesser identity for the black man or woman. In each instance of personal experience or reliance upon the work of black writers, what matters to Yancy is that the return of the black body is inherently a violation, in that the blackness is consistently construed through white needs, ambitions, and/or interpretations of its being.  It is difficult to refute Yancy’s thinking, and not merely because he writes from a black man’s perspective; the logic supports the evidence presented, so the reality of the unjust return is validated.  At the same time, what is conspicuously lacking in the analysis is any investigation as to how any such racist construction may be avoided when one race dominates a culture.  If whites are guilty of consistently attaching negative meaning to blackness, it must be wondered how much of this overt racism is due to an actual belief in blackness as inferior, or blackness as inferior because it is different, or not the most common race.  While Yancy’s article is a compelling case against white racism as both oppressive and universal, it is unfortunate that the author does not examine the mechanisms likely responsible for the process in question, as the work also suffers from repetition and deep resentment on the author’s part.

Discussion

As noted, and from the article’s opening, Yancy both asserts himself as a black man and expresses his intent to expose a particular reality: how the black body (or identity) is distilled through the imagination of the dominant white subjectivity, which creates a “lived” subjectivity for the black individual. This beginning, in fact, reveals a key aspect of the work as a a whole, in that it is virtually established from the start that there will be no trajectory of understanding or discovery.  Early on Yancy affirms: “The Black body’s ‘racial’ experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the ‘raced’ white body” (Yancy 216).  There is essentially no deviation whatsoever from this stance, but only a progression of ideas and examples supporting it.  In fairness to Yancy, there is no attempt to disguise this intent; he employs three epigrams from Malcolm X, Thomas Slaughter, and Ralph Ellison, and this is important because each quote unequivocally reflects black resentment at being the object of white authority and subjective violating, and in terms of basic identity.  In essence, Yancy is not exploring philosophical or ideological possibility, but instead presenting a damning case against white culture as denying black culture, and in every conceivable way.  It is no accident, very likely, that Yancy capitalizes Black but does not do this with the words, “white.”  This suggests the author’s agenda to give to Blackness a dignity or distinctive meaning so long denied it.

Yancy’s scholarship, however, also remains true to the title subject, which is that process wherein the black being or body is defined by white interpretation – typically in the form of ridicule, contempt, or fear – and then returned to its owners in this flawed and untrue state.  Perhaps the most moving account Yancy relates is an account of the great actor Ossie Davis who recalled having been taken to a police station as a young boy.  The white officers’ intent was only to frighten the boy and use him for their amusement.  They poured syrup on his head and sent him home with peanut brittle, as one would treat a dog who performed well.  In recounting this episode, Davis does Yancy’s work for him; he comprehends that the experience “niggerized” him, emphatically creating an identity for him as a toy or a buffoon.  What Yancy does is complete the understanding in a formulaic way.  The boy Davis is not only assigned an identity; he is blocked from attaining one of his own because it is established that “white eyes” alone create identity.  The white configures the black, in plain terms, and this is for Yancy the trick of white ideology.

At the same time, the reader may easily wonder why Yancy is content to leave this tragic scenario as it is, and not perhaps question significant aspects of it.  This is not to suggest that the behavior of the officers was in any way excusable, nor that Yancy should deviate from his subject and intent.  That intent, however, can only be better served by more in the way of examination, as it seems likely that the most critical element in the scenario is why three police officers would wish to so victimize a black child, and in this specific way.  Racism is not to be explained away, but it seems important that these men did not hurt the boy overtly. More perniciously, they made him an object of fun, and it is tempting to speculate that the agenda, conscious or otherwise, was to emasculate a black male before he could grow to be a threat to them.  This in turn conveys the crucial element of fear in white racism, and it is interesting that Yancy does not discuss this at all.  In plain terms, some sense of actual white motive must be of benefit to reinforcing his insistence on the white violating of black being.  Yancy affirms the overt reality of Davis’s episode, and it is irrefutable: “To have one’s dark body invaded by the white gaze and then to have that body returned as distorted is a powerful experience of violation” (Yancy 217).  Nonetheless, it appears that there are layers beneath that reality which demand assessment, if Yancy’s conviction  is to be truly validated.

Yancy comes near to exploring layers in what follows, which is an equally moving – and disturbing – account of personal experience, and of a kind well known to many black men.  He writes of the painful hearing of car door locks clicking as he is seen walking down a street, and he become almost poetic in his description of what effect this sound has on his psyche: “The cumulative impact of the sounds is deafening, maddening in their distorted repetition” (Yancy 218).  Similarly, he discusses how white women reflexively clutch at their handbags when they see him approach.  The layer captured by the author here goes to his revelation of the perverse effect of these actions as creating a kind of compliance; he feels he wants to become the thing despised and feared,m and present himself to these whites as the demon they themselves have defined him to be.  It is here that Yancy’s reliance on personal experience, or the existential context in which he writes, is most validated, as only someone enduring such circumstances may fully know such an effect.  The reader’s mind goes to other experiences as related by black men and women, and uniformly reflecting this racial and racist dynamic. The black person in the department store is eyed by security as the white shoppers go on their way, and the news reports of racial profiling by the police also come to mind.  It is difficult for a white person to conceive of such social conditions; it may in fact not be possible, which goes to Yancy’s ultimate point.

Personal experience is taken further by Yancy’s account of having been profoundly discouraged in his high school ambition to become a pilot.  His math teacher made it clear to Yancy that such aspirations were “unrealistic” and that the boy would do better to aim for a carpentry or bricklaying career, which of course reinforced blackness in Yancy’s mind as inherently an insurmountable barrier to any identity other than the stereotypical servant or manual laborer.  Once again, the white reader faces the challenge of comprehending a reality beyond their experience, in which identity barriers are reinforced by virtue of race.  Yancy had projected his being into a certain role and the teacher had returned it to him as utterly marginalized and consequently lacking in appreciable worth.  The author adds the understandably smug speculation as to how his teacher would have responded to an ambition to become a philosopher, but this seems important beyond the obvious enhancement of the scenario as demeaning at the time.  It reveals a resentment that is deeply and personally felt, and it reveals defiance as well, and these are qualities which mark all of Yancy’s work here, its scholarly execution notwithstanding.  There is nothing intrinsically suspect about this as, as noted, Yancy affirms this aspect early on.  To acknowledge a certain kind of subjectivity and to surmount it, however, are two different things.  If Yancy’s personal accounts add weight to his argument, then, they also must be regarded as the expressions of personal reaction they are, no matter how neatly they conform to his presentation of ideas.  Put another way, and even at this point, the reader wishes that Yancy would admit to the anger this generated within him, in addition to analyzing the episode as another instance of a violated black body returned. As a scholar, he is in fact obligated to admit to this pertinent and inescapable reality, and apart from its serving to substantiate his views.

There is as well in these personal accounts the same lack of inquiry noted in regard to Davis’s abuse as a child.  Yancy in no way presents his teacher’s perceptions as anything more than rote white dominance demanding a compliance with the established black identity, and there seems to be a danger here going to scholarly integrity.  That is to say, Yancy presupposes an active intent on the teacher’s part, when it is reasonable to infer that this teacher – clearly respectful of Yancy otherwise, as indicated by the author’s admission of esteem for him – is only advising based upon social realities created by the racism, which does not necessarily translate to racism itself.  Put another way, Yancy is ignoring the universal impact of racism in that it is so ingrained in the culture, a white individual conforms to it with no actual sense of doing so or of being racist.  This no more excuse racism than does an examination into the motives behind it, but it is important in viewing racism as an agent in institutionalized behavior.  It is in fact ironic that Yancy, so concerned with the effects of white racism on black identity, does not pursue this extremely powerful aspect of racism itself, as well as the likelihood that his teacher in no way sought to demean him or deny him identity.  There is a world of difference between the three policemen abusing the young Ossie Davis and the math teacher refuting Yancy’s hopes, even as both are rooted in racism.  Consequently, t seems important to explore this difference, if only to reinforce the pervasive force of racism as so intense, it is a governing agent removed from actual racist intent.

From these more personal perspectives, Yancy goes on to reiterate at considerable length his primary point regarding the consistency of white interpretation transforming the black body and identity, with an emphasis on how this transformative process grossly debases.  Citing Charles Johnson and Frantz Fanon, the author goes to great lengths to emphasize how, for the white ideology, apartness in the black must translate to evil, dark,  savage, and depraved.  Employing an episode recorded by Fanon in which a white child screamed upon seeing him, “Look at the nigger!…Mama, a Negro!” (Yancy 223), the author repeats excessively, if in different language, his point that white perceptions create a culture in which negativity is an automatic attachment to to the black body.  There is here some attempt to connect actual and hateful racist agendas to the process of objectification.  The white boy is not consciously choosing to determine the black Fanon as bad, but the badness is so ingrained in the white culture, it must accompany and fuel the identification process and return Fanon to himself as dark and menacing: “The boy is already discursively and affectively acculturated through micro-processes of ‘racialized’ learning (short stories, lullabies, children’s games, prelinguistic experiences, and so forth) “(Yancy  224).  Yancy then moves on to discuss Ellison’s Invisible Man as a paradigm of the white return of the black body, all the more notable due to the liberal world in which Ellison’s protagonist moves.  He is told he is free to be what he chooses to be, but this is universally defied y white demands that he exist in terms of the blackness they individually require of him: “Ellison’s protagonist is never really in charge of who he is, which is another manifestation of his invisibility and powerlessness” (Yancy 229). To virtually an incessant degree, Yancy employs all of the authors he cites to reinforce his central argument and assert that white dominance inevitably constructs black identity, no matter the levels on which the process occurs.

Interestingly, and somewhat courageously, the author then turns to the work of Du Bois which, primarily owing to its early 20^th century creation, is more embryonic in regard to concerns of black identity in a white culture.  Yancy admits to Du Bois’s ambivalence, in that he records experiences of being simultaneously removed from white experience and yet aware of shared realities and experiences.  It is when Du Bois indicates confusion or a lack of coherence in his experience, however, that Yancy is enabled to apply his thinking of the return.  He does not devalue Du Bois’ seeking of a common realm of experience between white and black, but he focuses on how Du Bois himself came to comprehend how even this was marked by an illusory quality, and that all determinations of meaning emanated from whites.  Du Bois was faced with perceiving of himself as a “problem” because his innate sense of being was in conflict with white ideas of it, and for Yancy these are the stirrings of the true understanding of the white return of the black body: “The connection between Blackness and the concept of ‘being a problem’ is central to Du Bois’s understanding of what it means to be Black in white America” (Yancy 236).  The author her is in fact determined to encompass Du Bois’s dilemma within the scope of his views and, to Yancy’s credit, this is easily achieved.  Once again, a distinguished black author’s insights corroborate that whiteness does far more than racially judge blacks or deny them opportunity; it establishes a fixed state of being inherently negative, which in turn supports whiteness as beyond normalcy; it is normalcy as an intrinsic and stable good.  The formula is then rigid and omniversal, and blackness must always be returned to the black man and woman as shaped to accommodate the needs of the white culture.  It is a context in which identity itself is meaningless, and this is Yancy’s most devastating point.

In terms of assessing Yancy’s argument and presentation, it must be reiterated that his central claims are difficult to dispute, a reality certainly enhanced by the personal experience in racist subjectivity Yancy offers.  It is in fact to his credit that the author restricts himself to only a few, distinct episodes and experiences, and he presents these to great effect.  Moreover, Yancy’s scholarship is impeccable and his body of knowledge clearly expansive.  A real issue in the article, however, lies in what is an excessive reiteration of the primary argument.  There are variations presented and examinations of some related facets of the issue.  Then, Yancy is careful to employ psychological and sociological elements as needed.  Nonetheless, and these qualifying factors aside, there is so relentless a repetition of the same thinking that the reader becomes impatient for another perspective.  It is unfortunate that one of the two drawbacks to Yancy’s work here is a lack of judicious editing, simply because the reiteration weakens the force of his argument.  It renders it, in fact, something of a personal complaint, as excess of emphasis suggests a non-academic drive.

The other drawback gos to the absence of inquiry noted earlier.  Clearly, it is necessary for his purposes that Yancy focus on whiteness and blackness, and this is completely valid.  At the same time, he is also referring – and often directly – to race as a dominant agent, and this then obligates him to investigate the process of return on other levels.  The culture of which Yancy writes is predominantly white, just as blacks represent the largest population of the  marginalized, in the past and today.  It would appear, however, that this alone warrants a wider understanding of how and why any one race so creates and insists upon the processes discussed.  For example, Yancy never quite explains or inquires into why blackness is returned as inferior or “savage,” save due to the need for whites to define it as such in order to retain white dominance as representing the correct order.  Why, it must be asked, is there no reference (beyond the stereotypically racist ideas of the prostitute in Ellison’s book) to this process as initially fueled by a white determination of a natural superiority?  Even the most cursory examination of white attitudes toward blacks historically blatantly reveals a Western idea of the black man or women as genetically inferior, and this would seem to be a profoundly important element in why whiteness insists upon black as  “non-being.”  It is then baffling why Yancy would not incorporate some measure of this into his argument, as white racism against blacks is so linked to  extreme bias based upon ideas of blackness.

It is also questionable that Yancy does not seek to examine the subject process in terms of all racial behavior.  More exactly, it seems his argument would be furthered a great deal by noting that this imperative to return a racial identity as lesser to a race is not limited to white dominance. Research affirms, for example, that a variety of non-white races, victims of white racism, practice racism themselves (Cohn-Sherbok, Leahy  2005).  The issue is then why it is felt to be essential for a dominant race to affirm itself by means of negating other races, which racism on any level supports as the case.  If whiteness has this prerogative to an extraordinary extent, it is still only a variation of a process that is then human, and not exclusively whit, and it would be interesting to see this approach amplify Yancy’s thinking.  What the readers receives instead is then more of a diatribe, ts foundations in reason notwithstanding, because it is “racially limited.”  This is exemplified in Yancy’s conclusion: “Reproduced through circuits of desire and power, whiteness strives for totalization; it desires to claim the entire world for itself and has the misanthropic effrontery to territorialize the very meaning of the ‘human’  (Yancy 238).  That he ascribes this agenda to whiteness alone betrays, ironically, racism, and weakens what would be a compelling presentation of an important reality.

Conclusion

There can be no refuting that George Yancy’s “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body” is a powerful and analytically strong statement regarding how whiteness invariably creates black identity, perpetually returning to the black man and woman a definition of themselves both demeaned and vastly limited in scope or even basic humanity.  It is in essence a set of parameters as much as it is a process, and Yancy spares no thinking in underscoring the legitimacy of the statement.  Regrettably, some sparing would be helpful; even with digressions pursuing other facets of the primary issue, the article still suffers from excessive repetition.  There exist also the issues of Yancy’s ignoring of seemingly critical matters relevant here, such as the underlying ideologies behind white racism toward blacks and how this process may be employed by any dominant race.  Then, while there are moving and important aspects to Yancy’s work, there is as well an undercurrent of hostility which belies its integrity and is powerfully expressed in the final lines.  Ultimately, Yancy’s article is a compelling and scholarly case against white racism as both oppressive and universal; however, it is unfortunate that the author does not examine more closely the mechanisms likely creating the key process examined, as he also relies too heavily on repetition and personal feeling.

Works Cited

Con-Sherbok, Dan, & Leahy, Michael.  The Liberation Debate: Rights at Issue.  New York, NY: Routledge, 2005.  Print.

Yancy, George. “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body” Journal of Speculatative Philosophy  19 (4):215-241 (2005)