Day: February 11, 2018

The “embodiment in post-racial terms” refers to white people claiming a “counterwhiteness” that seeks to disalign itself from white supremacy and label itself as progressive, which may include practices such as having conversations about race without discussing racism (Reed, 57) . As white queers disavow the privilege they have due to their race, they create a parallel between themselves and a “racialized otherness” that they perceive queer people of color to display, which white queers then fetishize (57).

To me, it seems like “the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” is most discernible in Green’s example of the 2003 Gay Shame Conference,  at which only one queer conference speaker of color was present (57). While race was absorbed into the conference’s understanding of what is shameful about being gay or lesbian, little to no conversation on race occurred. Because the white queer politics of injury have located identity in the universal nonwhiteness of queerness, those who identify as people of color, especially those who have black and brown bodies, may exist in spaces such as the Gay Shame Conference, but their role is reduced to simply being a visible sign of a questionable diversity, rather than being actively welcomed to speak about their experiences.

 

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

Queer rights movements have made a lot of progress in society and politics to create equal rights; however, racial issues have been ignored. In her essay “The Whiter the Bread,” Alison Reed writes, “…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).​ Breaking down this quote, one can surmise that Reed claims that by using colorblind politics, we have ignored that white supremacy exists apart from white queer theory. The “embodiment in post-racial terms” is how race is embodied in a society that considers its “race problem” over.  She asserts that, “according to colorblind liberals, the ‘race problem’ was put to rest after civil rights legislation” in the 1960s (Reed, 51). This theoretical idea that the United States is rid of racial discrimination and prejudice is false, yet satisfies many citizens and ends opportunities for justice by negating the presence of white supremacy or racism. In reality, white people portray themselves as the “heroes of civil rights” and continue to create the growing problem of systemic racism (Reed, 51). Furthermore, Reed states that often in queer theory scholarly works, there is a trend to leave out racism in conversations about race, which perpetuates colorblindness and white supremacy (Reed, 56).

The second section of the quote: “the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” means that black bodies in queer movements are used to create the illusion of a cohesive queer movement. In this way, white queer people will not be seen as having a privilege because of their race and their status as an injured person will not be negated. White queers then “align themselves with a racialized ‘otherness’” (Reed, 50). Their successes draw on being victimized or in an “injured state” and the movement continues to be stronger because of the supposed alliance with people of color and queer people.

-CB

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