Chapter 1 - The Racialized Reader

Summary

James Baldwin’s account of “looking away” in “Nobody Knows My Name,” points to the prevailing habit of ignoring the history and facts of blackness that continues to be replicated in American culture. “Looking away” is, however, only partial since it simultaneously demands and denies black existence, a paradoxical strategy designed to facilitate the work of whiteness and the cultural formation it engenders. One can be resistant to the facts of race while being preoccupied with the idea of race as advanced within a critique of modernity. This chapter argues that these complex and pervasive strategies inform a mental practice, a white epistemology that is the product of historical formation, from which the reader and reading are not immune. By contrast, the chapter’s review of early modern and current theories of reading indicates the continuing trend of racial avoidance. Building on Michel de Certeau’s class-inflected analysis that “the text has a meaning only through its readers,” this chapter argues, however, that whiteness exercises an elite racial function in reading that, following Charles W. Mills’ critique, produces distortion and misinterpretation.