Through the Lens of Whiteness: Challenging Racialized Imagery in Pop Culture - Softcover

Grimes, Diane S.; Cooney, Liz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155896908X ISBN 13: 9781558969087

Verlag: Skinner House Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Skinner House Books

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Diane S. Grimes is an associate professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University. In her work, she explores the influence of organizational and popular culture on common assumptions about race and teaches students how to interrogate their own biases. Her scholarship has been published in various organizational and communication journals, including Management Communication Quarterly and Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, among others.

Liz Cooney is a queer author from Des Moines, Iowa. Her work focuses on helping people communicate more effectively through valuing differences and navigating difficult conversations. She is a facilitator, executive coach, and keynote speaker, and has served as Director of Training for the award-winning professional development firm Tero International.

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Introduction

When we set out to write this book in 2019, our vision was to get more white people talking, thinking, questioning, and reading about race, white privilege, and how they perceive the world because they are white. At that time, some white people—but too few—were talking openly about racism in our society. Then 2020 happened. Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, a racial reckoning started to unfold, sparked by the murder of George Floyd. The United States has a long history of racial injustice, and the Black Lives Matter movement had been founded in 2013, but now a newer wave of involvement and activism among white people was emerging. White people marched in the streets in numbers previously unseen in BLM protests. Books about racism, white supremacy, and how to be an antiracist ally were flooding the shelves. Podcasts, documentaries, and news stories were shared on social media.

Today, three years later, we are no longer seeing protests in the news every day or activists marching in the streets. We’ve seen a few changes to policies and laws around policing, some intended to protect police officers and others to protect activists. Through all of this, the two of us continued to write. We didn’t see other writers or scholars focusing on how to see images—all images, not just those directly related to racial issues—in terms of whiteness, or on how they reflect and amplify racism and white supremacist culture.

Some activists maintain that white people should never attempt to educate others, even other white people, about racism. Because how can someone who benefits from white supremacy know how not to perpetuate it? It’s like asking fish to see the water they swim in. They’re surrounded by it, they don’t realize they’re in it, and the water allows them to survive and thrive. The same is true for us as white people in white supremacist culture. Rather, these activists argue, white people should be led by antiracist activists of color, learning from them and amplifying their work, as well as paying them for the considerable knowledge and labor they put into educating white people.

Others believe that the labor of calling in and calling out white people, having dialogue, and working to change the behavior of people with racial privilege should not and cannot rest solely on the shoulders of people of color. White people must confront racism in themselves, their communities, and their relationships. Further, some activists feel that because white people created racism and have benefited from it for centuries, it is entirely white people’s responsibility to eliminate it.

Here’s our opinion. We decided to write this book because we believe it is our duty as white people to help call other white people in to conversations and in-group work on issues of race and white privilege. There is, of course, the obvious dilemma that in writing a book aimed at white people we are centering whiteness and white people’s education while attempting to do antiracist work. But we need to call out racism as insiders, as people whom white people will be more likely to trust or believe precisely because we are white. We want to move readers to a place where they will pay better attention to activists, writers, and scholars of color. We realize that this approach is problematic, but we believe it is worth it. We are not here to educate you on the history of race, racism, or white supremacy in American or “Western” culture and society. We imagine you have some awareness of it or you would not have picked up this book. We aren’t here to take credit for the work that people of color have done to identify how white people can act in solidarity with them. Some of the many excellent works on these topics by people of color are listed in appendix C, “Additional Resources.” We are here to amplify those voices—to link white readers to ongoing conversations about racism, white privilege, and white supremacy.

We are also here to share with you our own experiences of confronting racism in our lives and in the media we consume. We do this not to center our own stories and voices, but for three reasons.

The first is to establish some common ground with our readers. We all have to start somewhere. By sharing some of the ways we’ve learned to become more antiracist and work in solidarity with people of color—and some of the many mistakes we’ve made along the way—we illustrate that each of us is a work in progress.

Few people are talking about how images we encounter in our daily lives—both still and moving images, in the news, in entertainment, on social media, and elsewhere—contribute to white supremacy. Most of us white people interpret such images through a lens of whiteness, or with white ways of seeing (we use these terms interchangeably throughout this book). Our minds interpret the images presented to our eyes on the basis of our experiences as white people, whether or not we are aware of these experiences and their effects. Our second purpose is to help you recognize racism when it appears in these images—to change the way you see them. As white authors, we recognize that we risk perpetuating white ways of seeing even in our effort to dismantle them. Again, we think the risk is worth it.

Our third goal is, by teaching white people to see images differently, to change the way we think, act, and create, including the ways we perceive and treat people. We hope to help create more antiracist white people living and working in solidarity with people of color by helping you more fully understand the perspectives of antiracist activists of color. We hope that our readers will come to understand why their existing white ways of seeing are problematic, and will develop new, more productive ways to engage with and interpret our increasingly polarized world.

As you have no doubt guessed, this book is (mostly) written for white people. As coauthors we use the collective “we” to represent both our voices and also white people as a group. This is not a universal “we.” Part of white privilege is the prerogative to think of ourselves as individuals rather than as members (and representatives) of a community. Our aim is to break through that by speaking to you from a place in our society that we all, as white people, share. In other words, there are not “good white people” and “bad white people.” Rather, all white people benefit from whiteness in some way or other, though those benefits will shift depending on our other identities. Although our individual life experiences vary, we benefit from white privilege, are often unaware of our shared white ways of seeing, and often, even if unintentionally, contribute to a racist, white supremacist culture.

We expect you, readers of this book, to have a certain level of both openness and knowledge so you can work with what we’re offering. There may be moments when you are uncomfortable or feel defensive while reading. As white people, we are not raised to know how to handle these feelings. We want to hold each other accountable for working through them. Images, whether in entertainment, advertising, news, or other media, tend to reflect the perspective of the group with the most power. We were not taught how our biases and assumptions influence the way we create, interpret, and use images. So we understand them as uncomplicated reflections of society and ignore (or are oblivious to) the perspectives of people on the margins (we have a lot more to say about this in chapter 2). We’re here to talk about...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Skinner House Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 155896908X
• ISBN 13: 9781558969087
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 200
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland