Seeing Race in Modern America

I. Close-Ups The Devil in the Details

15 PART I Close-Ups The Devil in the Details I have blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. My brother however is the exact opposite. Basically what I’m asking is if someone who has blond hair and blue eyes and fair skin, if they were to tan and get dark and dye there hair black would they look Mexican[?] “WHAT MAKES A MEXICAN LOOK LIKE A MEXICAN?,” YAHOO ANSWERS W hen an anonymous young woman posted her question on Yahoo—“What makes a Mexican look like a Mexican?”—she asked for “serious and kind answers only.” “You know,” she explained, “when you look at a person, and automatically know that they are most likely Mexican, not by the way they dress or language there [sic] talking, but there [sic] characteristics like dark hair, dark skin, etc?”1 Her request for thoughtful responses didn’t stop one respondent from suggesting that she look for “a really big Sombrero.” She also got a long answer describing the mix of peoples and races that went into the Olmec civilizations, a response with three links to a flickr account corresponding to the three racial types supposedly found in Mexico, and still another from someone who began by noting that “many Mexicans do have black or dark brown hair, brown eyes and dark skin” before continuing on to say that “I had a neighbor who was Mexican as well, with blonde hair and green eyes. Her skin was lighter than mine. I didn’t believe her until she held her arm next to mine—and I’m not dark-skinned at all.” Still, despite the 16 CLOSE-UPS anecdotal diversity, the author of the post was satisfied enough with their collective confirmation that the right answer was written on the body somewhere to mark the question as “resolved.” Here, I want to explore the workings of three sightlines—those related to racial profiling, to silhouetting, and to racial commodification . I do so without, by and large, a straightforward chronological orientation because I am interested in a specific way of seeing. All three of these examples, I argue, depend on very close readings of the familiar racialized body alone, typically without ensemble and accompaniment, emphasizing the sorts of minutiae critically engaged by racial sight. All three are thus illustrative of the sorts of close readings done regularly, in these and other parallel sightlines , and in any focused consideration of the single body, where microscopic detail is mined from the singular, racialized physique for proof of origins. These close readings present themselves as unconscious, or instinctual , and not as manifestations of a specific, practiced technique . On an episode of Identity, a now defunct game show on NBC hosted by comedian Penn Jillette in 2006 and 2007, a contestant surveyed the body of “person No. 8.” The premise of the show was that contestants would look over the body of a different person each week and rely on their instincts to make snap judgments about the character , personality, and identity of the numbered person before them. On this particular episode, “No. 8” was wearing very little—only a black bikini top, denim shorts, and a jeweled halter collar. She stood alone on the stage, waiting for her identification. With heightened gravitas, Jillette asked the female contestant, “Is she Haitian?” For a minute, against the stressful background of dramatic music, the woman nervously surveyed the body and face of No. 8. At one point, she complained that No. 8 didn’t look like “the textbooks [she’d] read.” Finally, she guessed: “Yes, I think she is.” “Well, I live in LA,” No. 8 replied blithely, “but I was born in Haiti.” The crowd cheered. Like the young woman seeking to know what it means to look “Mexican,” Identity capitalized on the craze for subconscious, unprocessed visual interpretation—epitomized by the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink in 2005. But in this episode, and in others, Identity also depended on a kind of encyclopedic, collective memory about race, and encouraged the supposedly careful scrutiny of the face and the body to find and interpret a curl of hair, or shade CLOSE-UPS 17 of skin color, or shape of a chin to mark one as “Haitian” and not, say, “Jamaican.” Or to see Haiti as an imprecise synonym for “black.” This dependence and its particular manifestation here—seeing “Haiti” in No. 8—suggests, in the end...