The Everydayness of Whiteness
Making Whiteness Visible through Art
“Whiteness is the everyday, invisible, subtle, cultural, and social practices, ideas, and codes that discursively secure the power and privilege of white people, but that strategically remain unmarked, unnamed, and unmapped in contemporary society” — Raka Shome
White privilege is socially maintained and constructed everyday. Whiteness as being the “norm” functions to make whiteness invisible. It is so common to speak about the “other” (non-whites) that whiteness becomes the “norm” and therefore leaves whiteness as a “background to experience.” In her work, “A phenomenology of whiteness”, published in Feminist Theory, Sara Ahmed argues that it is useful to approach whiteness through phenomenology because by doing so we can see how “whiteness is ‘real’, material and lived.” She explores how whiteness becomes “worldly” because people notice the arrival of some bodies more than others. Sara questions whether speaking about whiteness similarly to how we speak about non-whites allow it to become visible and noticeable. If making whiteness gain noticeability will make it lose currency.
I recently came across a series of photographs that were featured on the May 2017 O, Oprah Magazine. The photographer commissioned by the magazine for a feature titled “Let’s Talk About Race,” Chris Buck took photographs reversing the roles typically held by women of color with white women-and vise versa.
One of the images shows Asian women and White women at a nail salon but in the image the Asian women are getting pedicures done by the white women while they are having a good time laughing.
In another photo, a young white girl is looking up toward shelves full of black dolls.
Lastly, on the third photo a young woman of color is in a luxurious apartment sitting down on a chair while talking on the phone and holding a small dog. In this image the maid is a young white woman and she is serving the other woman tea.
Although there could be a number of interpretations to these photos, what is clear is that we see white women doing what is normally not done by white women. In “A phenomenology of whiteness”, Sara claims that phenomenology can help us show how whiteness as an effect of racialization shapes what it is that bodies “can do.” These images bring to light the roles that we normally don’t see white bodies doing. We get so used to seeing certain bodies in certain roles in our daily lives that seeing such change can really impact the way we begin to see whiteness. I think in the case of these images what we notice first are the women of color playing the roles that are not commonly seen. When we think of nail salons we automatically assume that Asian women will be working there because that is what we are used to seeing. Growing up, girls are used to seeing white dolls with blonde hair and blue eyes. On TV we are used to seeing Latina women playing the role of the maid attending to the white women’s needs.
While people will respond to these images are being “inaccurate” by arguing that there is more representation, the point here was to make whiteness visible by putting it in a position that we are not used to seeing it in. If more artists continued to make whiteness visible in the media then whiteness might begin to lose its currency.
