Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture

Chapter 17: Toni Morrison and “Race Matters” Rhetoric: Reading Race and Whiteness in Visual Culture

Chapter 17 Toni Morrison and “Race Matters” Rhetoric READING RACE AND WHITENESS IN VISUAL CULTURE Joyce Irene Middleton 86% of white suburban Americans live in neighborhoods that are less than 1% black. —Cornel West, 1993 [The] immense fear of “the black” next door is one reason that the United States is so densely segregated. Only two percent of white people have a black neighbor, even though black people constitute approximately thirteen percent of the population. —Patricia Williams, 1997 [Some African Americans] reinforce wishful beliefs that society has reformed, in spite of the the marginalization of masses of African Americans who live lives largely separate and remote from the majority of white Americans. —Kimberly Crenshaw, 1997 . . . just make sure you move to a blue state [a reference to the 2000 election map delineated by red and blue states]. —Political Science Colleague, 2001 243 244 Joyce Irene Middleton In Seeing a Colour-Blind Future: the Paradox of Race, a series of lectures given for the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC, legal scholar Patricia J. Williams carefully examines the narratives of contradiction associated with arguments about race and white identity. Williams admits that, like the desire of many people she encounters, it would be nice to live in the “milk and honey” land of colour blindness (51). But we’re not “there” yet, as she argues by examining the “quieter forms of racism” (61), or what she also describes as “the small aggressions of unconscious racism, rather than the big-booted oppressions of bigotry” (61). Although Williams’s primary audience for her lectures was British, her American readers may certainly recognize the problems with audience that she must have faced as a black woman talking about race. The liberal goals of color-blind rhetoric combined with the claim that we now live in a postracial society (so we don’t need to talk about race) are increasingly persuasive to more and more Americans, especially in the visual rhetoric that appeals so strongly to American youth. But the epigraphs that open this essay help to graphically illustrate a critical paradox for those who believe in color-blind rhetoric. Race doesn’t matter, on the one hand, but on the other, race is an essential fact for naming one’s American identity. The geographic spaces described in the introductory epigraphs illustrate a racialized divide that is a material reality and not simply a debate instigated and sustained by political discourse in American society . In fact, analyzing race and religion in the geographical realignment among American voters from 1986 to 2000, political analysts David O. Sears and Nicholas A. Valentino demonstrate that “partisanship has undergone a profound sectional realignment, with Republicans coming to dominate the South, and Democrats, the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and the Pacific Coast” (Sears). The authors find that “this realignment is intimately associated with the longstanding and continuingly unresolved racial conflicts in American society” (Sears). Talking about race in the academy—that is, as an intellectual proposition —is situated in a “paradox” that on one hand persistently affirms the ideology of whiteness (and the racist oppression that results from this) while, on the other, resists, denies, and silences a truly in-depth investigation of that ideology and its link to race and racism (in addition to Williams’s description of a “paradox” for talking about race, see Morrison, Race-ing ix; Middleton, Innovations, 2004). In response to this academic problem, I have been formulating what I describe as a “race matters” rhetoric which I define in relation to work primarily by Toni Morrison but also by Cornel West and Patricia Williams. After I describe some of 245 Toni Morrison and “Race Matters” Rhetoric the elements of this rhetoric, I will use it to analyze a diverse range of illustrations and issues in visual culture, especially in Hollywood films, and to interrogate the elusive problems of racial metaphors in popular culture. This essay is part of a larger project on visual rhetoric. Rhetorically speaking, the simple phrase “race matters” has generated a huge national conversation about historical and contemporary constructions of race and white identity (see Lubiano). Much of this rhetorical force may be attributed to Cornel West’s publication Race Matters with its strong, continuing commercial success and with both academic and broad popular appeal. But while the origins of this rhetoric would seem to derive from West’s publication, its intellectual beginnings may also...