Day: February 9, 2018

In her essay “The Whiter the Bread,” Alison Reed asserts that the “…fetishization of blackness produces its own logics of disavowal, reinforcing hegemonic understandings of race by articulating embodiment in post-racial terms. Whiteness, then, goes unacknowledged and unexamined, while uncritically reproducing multiculturalist logics that mainstream visibility can smooth over ongoing injustices, precisely by exploiting the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” (Reed, 57).​ “Embodiment in post-racial terms” is the embodiment of racialized people in a society that considers itself beyond viewing race as more than a construct.  Post-identity politics is the idea that all identities are constructed (Reed, 51).  The idea of a post-racial society comes from the misguided idea that racism in the United States ended with the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. The “hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” is the result of queer political movements’ attempts to draw parallels between the struggles against oppression on the basis of race and of sexual orientation. White queers disavow their privilege in order to maintain a stance of injury, meant in either physical or emotional terms. This leads to white queers identifying with an othered group, and denying any privilege in order to avoid dealing collectively with privilege inherent in whiteness (Reed, 50). This use of single-issue identity politics is harmful, and the fetishization of racialized black bodies is thereby necessary to perpetuate an idealized cohesive queer community (Reed, 50).

 

Reference

Alison Reed “”The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead. Spectacular Absence and Post-Racialized Blackness in (White) Queer Theory.”

Allison Reed’s essay “The Whiter the Bread” is an impressively effective piece of writing in which the author substantiates her claims not only with examples from pop culture and everyday lived experiences but also with poignant critiques of other queer theorists who fail to connect race and racism or simply fail to acknowledge race at all.  Reed argues that “fetishization of blackness” is used for an extreme generalization of trauma, claimed by all queer people “articulating embodiment in post-racial terms” (57).  By ignoring the distinct identities of non-white queer people and gathering all trauma under a single “queer” umbrella, the particular issues of race racism become hidden and are left critically unacknowledged.  In this way, the trauma is dealt with in a way that acts as if race no longer exists, as if this is an actual reality of any country.  This “post-racial” mode of thought erases not only the history which underlies the current political climate but also the non-white voices to whom the trauma truly belongs.

Reed also argues that queer white people have a tendency to separate themselves from whiteness by identifying as queer – “other” and therefore claim the trauma of all queer people as their own.  While this sharing of trauma and collective thought is not problematic in itself, it is important that white queers do not whitewash this trauma and fail to recognize how for example the trauma a Latinx queer experiences after the Pulse Nightclub Massacre is different than the trauma a white queer experiences.  Reed argues that black bodies are often portrayed in a spectacular manner for the benefit of white queer politics citing “Orange is the New Black” as one example of how Hollywood displays black trauma and vulnerability as in the past and not ongoing (51).  This hypervisibility of black bodies serves to benefit what Reed describes as “a white queer politics of injury” (57).  In this schema, white queer politics gains traction through highlighting the trauma of black queers without addressing racism at all or recognizing the distinct experience of black queers as something other than simply an object upon which trauma falls.  Reed’s following statement succinctly and effectively describes the issue: “When queer theory sterilizes sites of injury by displacing material realities of trauma from their representation, lived experiences morph into post-racialize metaphors that preempt possibilities for justice” (59).

Citation:  Reed, Allison. “The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead”.   No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies. Patrick Johnson. 49-64. Print.