Race and/as spectacle

The question of why so much scopophilia and epistemophilia surround racialized images has still been nipping away at me. I would like to expand on a point that came to me at the end of last class: that contrast is pleasing to the light eye — not in the sense of color values, but in the sense of moral values. The Emmett Till documentary and "The Show" both contain explicit voyeurism. As repeated throughout the documentary, the black male body has become a code for mankind's primal darkness and animalistic drives. The white female body, on the other hand, symbolizes delicacy, daintiness, refinement, and vulnerability. When the black male body, a symbol of guilt, is mutilated for the protection of the white female body, a symbol of innocence, order appears to be restored; the scene of white conquering dark became a concrete, delineated symbol of justice in what Hale calls “a fragmented and an increasingly abstract society” (6).

Emmett Till’s body had the opposite effect: of symbolizing injustice. While I believe Emmett's mother's explanation for putting her son's body on display, I could not help but feel as if I were watching a voyeuristic horror film. The way multiple witnesses gave accounts of the appearance of his body was perversely entertaining in its shock value. Perhaps this is because it served as a privileged form of knowledge, visible proof of what happened to the black man at the hands of whites. The pleasure of looking at it, however, could be an extreme form of the pleasure of lynching spectators: assurance of the distance between blacks and whites, and creation of an us.-vs.-them dynamic.

The idea of contrast is interesting in light of Hale’s discussion of popular culture displays of race, such as minstrel shows, and “systemized spatial relations,” such as train segregation (130). By exaggerating physical differences between blacks and whites, minstrel shows naturalized the segregation that was already in place and justified “whites’ often unconscious real-life performances” (17). Train segregation similarly provided an excuse not to question the concept of race. When it was difficult to tell who was what by looking at them, one could simply observe where someone was sitting. The fact that the need to divide blacks and whites transcended skin color shows that such divisions not only utilized but also created racial difference. This suggests that, as the Toni Morrison quote from the first class posits, the concept racial difference has a utility far beyond describing; it also prescribes in order to maintain a symbolic system of morality. -Suzy