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.”