SL week 4

Allison Reed’s comments about the fetishization of blackness deal with an overarching issue of white queer politics to appropriate or present blackness in a way that furthers white political injury. From my understanding of the reading, when Reed says “embodiment in post-racial terms” she means the way in which blackness is represented in so called ‘colorblind’ politics.  These colorblind politics often depict race in a manner that downplays its importance in our culture, both presently and historically. It glosses over all of the challenges faced by people of color both in the past and currently in favor of focusing on another issue, in this case LGBTQ+ politics. It exploits the visibility of blackness to promote the narrative of injury put forth by white queers. In doing so, whiteness is ignored as black people and other people of color are used to further a goal that affects people of all races, while ignoring and smoothing over many of the issues faced specifically by people of color. This dynamic promotes the idea of white supremacy, as in this dynamic white queers politics are taking advantage of queer people of color in order to help their own cause, while not giving anything in return to those they take advantage of; it still promotes the idea of white dominance. The ‘hypervisibility’ of black bodies for a ‘white queer politics of injury’ can be understood as utilizing the struggles and stigmatization faced by black queers to further the image of white queers being victims as well by appropriating their struggles as their own. By co-opting the idea of colorblindness, the struggles they face become one under the umbrella of ‘queer’, ignoring the fact that race is a very real factor in oppression. It erases all of the suffering caused to black bodies via systems upheld and promoted by white bodies and claims those hardships for white bodies themselves under the banner of queerness, despite the fact that those people would never and have never faced those issues because of their whiteness.