Seeing Race in Modern America

1. Profiles

19 C H A P T E R O N E Profiles T here are 16 million eyes in the city,” the poster reads, “[and] we’re counting on all of them.” An array of twelve sets of eyes, each marked with racial and ethnic distinctions, stares outward at the reader. A part of the “See Something, Say Something” sloganeering effort of the Metropolitan Transportation Agency in New York City, the poster was framed by stainless steel and encased in one of the official protective frames found on most of the city’s subway trains. The MTA’s use of this imperative axiom was a by-product of the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the image on the poster conveyed what was a standard response of the cosmopolitan metropolis to the threat posed by global terrorism. The array of different faces and eyes communicated a common cause, with the larger, polyglot group self-interestedly guarding a generally shared and collected interests. The thing to be seen was, of course, the “terrorist,” inevitably construed as brown, as Arab, and as Muslim. The entire city, MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz remarked, would be “the eyes and ears of our system.”1 Establishing a commonplace practice of racial profiling by a multicultural community, the image offered up a militarized world city, populated by myriad and discrete racial types, searching for those who were easily identifiable, and who would destroy the uniform fabric of twenty-first-century America. By the spring of 2010, “See Something, Say Something” had become a national campaign. Dan Fanelli, an insurgent Republican candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives, asked television viewers in central Florida to trust their eyes. In the commercial, he stood between an elderly man presented as “white,” with light skin, white hair, glasses, and a tie, and a younger, muscled man with dark hair, wearing a black t-shirt, with a scowl and a menacing, hunchedover posture. Fanelli gestured to the bespectacled white face and, with heavy sarcasm, asked his potential constituents, “Does this “ 20 CLOSE-UPS look like a terrorist?” Laughingly, he then turned to “this guy”—the man we are meant to see as dark, as foreign, as Islamic—and asked the same question. Railing against “political correctness” and speaking over the theme music from the classic 1971 “tough cop” film Dirty Harry, the would-be congressman suggested that racial profiling was a necessarily logical antiterrorism strategy, and that, by forsaking it, the nation-state was making a critical mistake that would cost lives. People from the Middle East could be more closely watched, he told the Washington Post, because “you can’t be light and from those countries .” Linking race to place, and skin color to climate and geopolitical location, Fanelli’s “common sense” split apart those who “look like” Americans from those who “look like” they could be terrorists, a division that made sense only if one agreed that “an Arab” was a singular thing, identifiable with a brief look.2 Later that week, comedian Jon Stewart, poking fun at the presumption of the look on his The public eye, as conceived by the “See Something, Say Something” campaign, here broadcast on a subway. David Goehring/Flickr/Creative Commons. Profiles 21 Comedy Central “news” show, reversed the valance, and wondered if the older, lighter man was “Dr. Kevorkian,” the much-maligned proponent of assisted suicide, and if the younger, darker man was a comparatively harmless, well-suntanned “Guido” cast member from the reality television show The Jersey Shore. Fanelli’s campaign, likewise, assumed that viewers would see things through a common logic, without explanation or interpretation . The MTA poster—and the campaign it reflected—suggested that common cause, especially in the service of the nation-state, could produce common sight, that shared vision could conjure up a single enemy, and that the single enemy could be identified, by those dozen uncommon eyes, as a verifiable racial and religious type. Both confirmed the practice of establishing a common sight around the relation of race and crime (commonly called racial profiling, but now a feature of antiterrorism campaigns) that has long been one of the most prominent sightlines in contemporary American political culture . “See Something, Say Something” was not merely a slogan but also a call to articulate the specifics of race as a part of shared public policing of bodies marked as brown, or Arab, or Muslim. Before...