White Savagery and Humiliation, or a New Racial Consciousness in the Media

Abstract

It's tempting to say that Planet of the Apes is a white racist's nightmare, \nbut white racial self-representation is far from simply racist. To analyze representations of whiteness like those in Planet of the Apes, one needs to ask \ntwo basic questions about them: how do they reflect the ways non-whites \nview whites, and how do they reflect the way whites view themselves? These \nare the same questions, in reduced and simplified form, that racial minorities \nand minority scholarship have had to answer for several decades about \nwhites, in part because whites wouldn't do it for themselves. In her essay \n"Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination," for example, bell \nhooks describes the way blacks associate whites with "the mysterious, the \nstrange, and the terrible, "1 and reports that white students in her classes are \noften amazed when they hear blacks view them this way. They are in actuality, she continues, amazed that they can be "viewed" at all, since whites \nhave tended to imagine themselves racially invisible. Whites are said to consider themselves a neutral universal category, hence non-racial and superior \nto "racialized" others. Their self-image as whites is thus both underdeveloped and yet extremely presumptuous. In too many cases, perhaps, this is \ntrue. But as critics such as Eric Lott have painted out, white "dominant culture" oftentimes implicitly acknowledges a secret or not-sa-secret beholdenness to people of color, and even exhibits a sense of shame at having abused \ntraits in non-whites that whites know to exist in themselves. 2 In other words, \nthere is certainly a self-critical, and self-conscious, aspect to white identity, however faint, which demonstrates that whites are able to see themselves in \nthe same way oppressed racial groups often see them.

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