White on WhiteBlack on Black by George Yancy

Author:George Yancy [Yancy, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy, Political
ISBN: 9780742568730
Google: LZiaAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2005-03-31T00:15:26.765547+00:00

Notes

This chapter owes its form and the best of its ideas to discussions with George Yancy, to whom I am enduringly grateful. “Roulez! Il n’y a rien à voir.” “Drive on! There is nothing to see!”—a familiar expression of French police at the scene of shocking, urban immigration roundups, often conducted by stopping police vans at the intersections of large avenues and demanding identification from all drivers passing through. Here, “nothing to see” lies at the core of the problematic of seeing “white”—a problem rooted firstly in historical sedimentation.

1 In a well-documented history of the development of racism, literary and “scientific,” from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, Gustav Jahoda discusses these three “sciences” extensively. Popular with an array of audiences, and dating at least to eighteenth-century materialist thought, physiognomy established the degree of species development using, notably, Camper’s famous 1760s “facial angle” that measured the angle formed by forehead, or ear position, in relation to the jaw. Among other things, it argued that the wider the angle the more “ape-like” the specimen. See Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), cf. “Towards scientific racism,” 63–74.

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