Chapter 5 - The Primacy of the Lived Experience as the Route to Change

Summary

This chapter examines the predicament outlined in the previous chapter, of the non-white body showing up in white spaces. Whilst a staunch objective of postwar black cultural politics, and of this book itself, is to portray the heterogeneity of the cultural identity of non-white ethnic minorities, in reality what happens in the lived experience is that the individual is interpreted through their racial characteristics, chiefly skin colour, which skews a holistic understanding of the person. The ‘historico-racial schema’ devised by Fanon that defines the restrictions faced by the non-white body in space, is explored in more widely and is theorised in Sara Ahmed’s insights in her study of the phenomenology of whiteness where she conveys the precarious situation of non-white bodies inhabiting white spaces. When they fit in, they are rendered invisible, and when they don’t and ‘stand out’ and ‘stand apart’, they are ‘hypervisible’ (2007, 159). Either way, visibility is not permitted in their own terms. In the interviews that followed the psychiatrists did not enjoy white privilege and there were times when they were made to feel different, a theme that was explored within the context of acculturation and other factors.