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chapter 3 The Limits of Color Blindness: Interracial Sexuality, Denzel Washington, and Hollywood Film All concepts of race are always concepts of the body and also of heterosexuality. Race is a means of categorizing different types of human body which reproduce themselves. . . . Heterosexuality is the means of ensuring, but also the site of endangering, the reproduction of these differences. —Richard Dyer, White As of the second decade of twenty-‹rst century, Denzel Washington is arguably the most successful black actor in Hollywood history. Popular with black and white audiences alike, his movies routinely succeed at the box of‹ce as well as with critics, and he has been nominated for ‹ve Academy Awards, two of which he has won. Washington is one of the very few actors capable of successfully navigating the space of racial simultaneity: both black and “race-neutral,” Washington receives a breadth of opportunities to play roles in which his blackness is meant to signify within the plot as well as those in which it is not. According to Elizabeth Alexander, “He has found a way to assemble a quite remarkable gallery of black male characters for our age that are neither stereotypical nor excessively upright. . . . He alone among mainstream black ‹lm actors has given us this range with which to think about, and imagine, black men.”1 However, for most of his career, Washington’s racially unprecedented success has been predicated on the careful regulation of his sexuality, primarily by avoiding ‹lms that prominently feature heterosexualized romantic narratives. This has proved especially true when Washington plays opposite a white female costar. Standard tropes of romance (or at least sexual attraction) are routinely sublimated when Washington performs in big-budget Hollywood ‹lms. This heterosexual manipulation reinforces the bio-logic of race that 72 names color blindness as the emphatic privatization rather than disappearance of the racial dimensions of personhood. Occluding Washington’s sexuality grants him entry into the public realm on terms that attempt to make the production —and therefore, reproduction—of his racial identity impossible. In the mid-1990s, Denzel Washington appeared in two ‹lms—both adapted from successful novels—that attempted to exploit a politics of color blindness that would prevent each from being marked (and therefore marketed) as a “black ‹lm” with implicitly limited appeal to a wider audience. The Pelican Brief features Washington starring opposite Julia Roberts in a role originally envisioned as a white man. In Devil in a Blue Dress, Washington stars as a black detective in racially polarized 1940s Los Angeles. Each novel places its protagonist in a romantic or sexual relationship with a white woman, yet each ‹lm eliminates this romantic plot line, re›ecting the equation, on some deep level, of blackness and masculinity with the problematic pursuit of white women. The foreclosure of Gray Grantham’s lust and the erasure of consensual sex between Easy Rawlins and the socially white Daphne Monet af‹rms the permanence of heterosexualized genealogies of race and the impossibility of colorblind spectatorship. Washington’s performing body cannot function or be read outside of the long ‹lmic tradition dictating codes of interracial heterosexual propriety, whether he or his audiences are trying to get over (on) race. As products of 1990s culture, these ‹lms re›ect that decade’s efforts to publicize black masculinity, most often through representations of infamous black men who functioned metonymically to narrate pressing social problems. The “outing” of black masculinity paradoxically helped to reinforce by negative example the undesirability of allowing race and raced individuals into the public sphere. During her tenure as an associate curator for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Thelma Golden mounted a controversial 1994 exhibition called “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” As both a part and a critique of this tumultuous decade, the show attracted guarded acclaim for the subject matter as“a rich, timely and complex vein for a museum interested in contemporary art,”2 as well as vehement scorn for its poststructuralist “nonsense” that “distract[ed]” from the consideration of visual beauty, emblematic of “the repulsive burden that contemporary art places upon” critics.3 Resentful critics notwithstanding, Golden asserted the necessity of this examination, arguing in her catalog essay, “With the help of print and television media, black men [had] become symbolic icons for this nation’s ills. They personif[ied] rampant criminality (Willie Horton), perverse promiscuity (Wilt Chamberlain), sexual harassment (Clarence Thomas), date rape (Mike The Limits of Color Blindness / 73 [3.143.4.181] Project MUSE...

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