Black counter-gazes in a white room
pp. 65-71
in: Sarah Travis, Amelia M. Kraehe, Emily J. Hood, Tyson E. Lewis (eds), Pedagogies in the flesh, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
The author teaches philosophy, a discipline that is dominated by whiteness at a university that is also overwhelmingly white. In his courses, he calls into question both the way in which good philosophy is allegedly the kind of philosophy that is done from a neutral, universalizable perspective as if we were simply thinking things without bodies and the ability of philosophy's whiteness to pass as both normative and hidden. Classrooms are too often sites in which people of color, Black persons specifically, remain trapped under the white gaze, which is both the lens and action through which whites view Black persons. It filters that view so that the default way of seeing Black persons is as ignorant or threatening. The stories below describe situations in which this gaze is projected back onto white subjectivity, rendering it into crisis.