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).
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