In Alison Reed’s essay, “The Whiter the Bread,” Reed says, “…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” (57). When Reed discusses the “embodiment in post-racial terms,” (57) Reed highlights the point that many think that racism and the race problem have been over since the civil rights movement. Reed discusses colorblind politics and how treating everyone the same, as in we all have the same experiences regardless of race, is a disadvantage. Systematic racism must be taken into account to have an inclusive and intersectional view of queer theory rather than just the white queer theory that has become so popular.
Reed also discusses “the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” (57). Reed is referring to the tokenization of black individuals in the queer movement. This tokenization leads to many thinking that the queer movement is inclusive of these individuals when in fact their concerns are often not addressed within queer politics. Further, the inclusion of black bodies adds in the illusion of white queer people not having racial privilege because they are in an injured state or have a sense of otherness. We can clearly see in countless examples how black bodies are tokenized. Black individuals, although seemingly present in the queer movement, are often not given a chance to voice their concerns and the injustices they may face. Rather than being colorblind to these injustices, it would add the queer movement to become more inclusive and unpack the layers of privilege that may be present.
Alison Reed “The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead. Spectacular Absence and Post-Racialized Blackness in (White) Queer Theory, in No Tea, No Shade. New Writings in Black Queer Studies , ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 287-301.