To Unbuild White Sight

The General Crisis Continues in 2023

If you think about it, you know what white sight is already. It’s what happens when a police officer sees a person and decides whether or not to shoot. It determines whether a white dog walker in Central Park panics when seeing a Black bird watcher.

White sight is not how white people “naturally” see. It is a learned operating system, created collectively, of what it is to make whiteness. Once learned, white sight “de-notices” itself, to borrow Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s observation on the monuments that serve as part of its infrastructure.

Since 2020, there has been a general crisis of this “normal” operation of white sight, making it hard to de-notice, starting with its colonial, patriarchal and racist monuments. This newsletter will keep noticing it, in the terms developed in my book White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (available February 14, 2023). By refusing to go back to blank, I hope a conversation can develop about what it would take to advance the unbuilding of white sight.

Blanking

I should pause before launching in and acknowledge that, while race and racialization have always been part of my work, I myself haven’t escaped the de-noticing of white sight.

When visual culture was in vogue in the 1990s, perspective was one of the subjects most discussed. Like many others from John Berger in 1972 on, I used the illustrations of French engraver Abraham Bosse to discuss the European way of seeing.

Abraham Bosse: “Perspective” [detail] (1648).

But I didn’t say what seems so obvious to me now: that the soldiers placing these spaces under surveillance are white. Further, far from being neutral, let alone objective, this perspective is a founding figure of white sight in the era of Atlantic slavery. The spaces that the colonizing soldiers draw into their eyes is erased of all previously existing life, human or other-than-human. And so it becomes white reality, or terra nullius (nothing land) in colonial parlance. As the algebraic numbers indicate, it is real because it is calculable and can be financialized—real estate.

Rosa Barba, installation view of “White Museum” (2010), Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière, France. 70 mm. white film.

And I’ve seen it again and again. When Rosa Barba turned a museum into a projector for her white film, she was acting out white sight, even if the critics did not say so. I was reminded of her work, when I saw a distinguished film critic use the image above in a December 2022 lecture. Much was said about projection but nothing about whiteness. Just as I had done, the distinguished professor blanked.

So let’s call this failure (by people identified as white) to retain what has always already been noticed about white sight “blanking.” It’s more than a personal failing, though it might well be one. It’s systemic, a key part of the infrastructure that sustains white sight. Blanking takes every instance of white sight acting in support of white supremacy to be an exception, making sure that they are not remembered.

The General Strike of Sousrealism

Blanking also misses the possibilities here. White sight is violent surveillance, yes. At the same time, its narrow focused beam de-notices so much of what there is to see. Opacity, refusal and resistance are, then, built-in to its technology. Collectively, these tactics form what I call the strike against white sight, the refusal to live in its erased, patriarchal, racializing violent reality. It’s a feminist general strike for consent in the visible relations between people—to merge artist Claire Fontaine and the Argentinian activist Verónica Gago with Caribbean thinker Edouard Glissant and visual activism.

If white sight produces its reality from above—surveillance—the general strike against it creates another reality from below: sousrealism. I’m working with media scholar Simone Browne’s concept of “dark sousveillance” (sous/below as the counter to sur/above). Sousrealism is a way of seeing (in) the undercommons, the practice of freedom that surrealist writer Suzanne Césaire saw rising from the abyss or from where the artist Leonora Carrington called “down below.”

These, then, are the stakes, gentle reader, for this always free/open access newsletter. Much more on all these points is to come. There will be one post a week for the next year. As everyone knows, the combined resources of Meta and Musk frustrate the use of social media to share and build a community around this work, as I once did with Occupy 2012. This platform isn’t perfect but I hope it will serve.

I hope you’ll come along with me!