"Returning to memories of growing up in the social circumstances created by racial apartheid, to all black spaces on the edges of town, I reinhabit a location where black folks associated whiteness with the terrible, the terrifying, the terrorizing. White people were regarded as terrorists, especially those who dared to enter that segregated space of blackness. As a child, I did not know any white people. They were strangers, rarely seen in our neighborhoods. The "official" white men who came across the tracks were there to sell products, Bibles and insurance. They terrorized by economic exploitation. What did I see in the gazes of those white men who crossed our thresholds that made me afraid, that made black children unable to speak? Did they understand at all how strange their whiteness appeared in our living rooms, how threatening? Did they journey across the tracks with the same "adventurous" spirit that other white men carried to Africa, Asia, to those mysterious places they would one day call the "third world"? Did they come to our houses to meet the Other face-to-face and reenact the colonizer role, dominating us on our own turf?
Their presence terrified me. Whatever their mission, they looked too much like the unofficial white men who came to enact rituals of terror and torture. .. . .
In the absence of the reality of whiteness, I learned as a child that to be "safe," it was important to recognize the power of whiteness, even to fear it, and to avoid encounter. There was nothing terrifying about the sharing of this knowledge as survival strategy. . .
Even though I live and move in spaces where I am surrounded by whiteness, there is no comfort that makes the terrorism disappear. All black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness."
--bell hooks, "Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination" in White Privilege: essential readings on the other side of racism. 2nd ed. Ed. by Paula S. Rothenberg, 2005, Worth, New York, pp 22-23.
2 comments:
I totally related to this post, except in a reverse way. I grew up in 'black' africa. It was the black government official, policeman, ANY man of importance that we feared. We were totally at their mercy.
A few years ago my husband was transfered to Mozambique and I felt the same fear I had experienced as a child, the same knowledge that I was being taken advantage of and could do nothing about.
Racism....in whatever form experienced....is horrible.
This reminds me a lot of The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison's narrator has a similar post-colonial outlook.
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