White sight, white strikes
Review of Nicholas Mirzoeff, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. Boston: M.I.T. Press, 2023, 352 pages.
“One is not born but rather becomes white” (1).
Nicholas Mirzoeff begins White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness by adapting philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s words from The Second Sex, substituting the original “woman” with “white.” His modification of de Beauvoir is appropriate and timely. It is appropriate, of course, because White Sight explores how “the invented collective ‘white people’” (1) has not only been created through the arts and social infrastructure, perpetuating arbitrary and harmful (mortally so) stereotypes but also how it reinstates imperialist surveillance tactics. Timely, furthermore, for its relevance to the contemporary U.S. socio-cultural climate. To paraphrase Mirzoeff, the concept of whiteness is as visible as can be, yet the problems that we face as a nation have long persisted. (x). In just a matter of eight years, the country has reached a critical impasse. “[W]hiteness had been powerfully re-thought by scholars” (x) on the one hand, but on the other, everyday U.S. life is plagued by covertly, and more often than not, overtly racist and discriminatory imagery.
Even though I live in a relatively liberal state and work in academic settings that have prioritized (and, I would add, championed) diversity, equity, and inclusion, I am awash in a sea of rhetoric perpetuated by hate groups across the country. As I drive along the highway, I pass vans emblazoned with the Gadsden flag, a symbol of right-wing militarism seen during the 2021 attack of the U.S. Capitol building. I grab a cup of coffee at my local café, and Blue Lives Matter imagery—its racist connotations serving as a counter-movement to Black Lives Matter—greets me outside. At a recent trip to an outdoor arts event, I even saw a person wearing neo-Nazi insignia. Outside! Shopping for fun and kitschy crafts! With children!
And yet, as Mirzoeff astutely offers in White Sight, such harmful imagery does not exist in a vacuum. We didn’t just close our eyes on two election days—November 8, 2016, and November 5, 2024—to an equal, unified nation and reemerge from our slumber the following morning to a burning pyre of orange-hued hatred. Western society and by proxy, whiteness, developed from the legacy of colonial-era visual culture, from “a set of assumptions, concepts, infrastructures, learned experiences, symbols, and techniques that form a screen by which a person makes white reality” (xiii). White Sight looks at how we got here. As Mirzoeff puts it, “My task was to learn how to use the new ideas about whiteness in this dramatically changed context” (x).
The book’s title provokes a question: what is “white sight?” Mirzoeff operationalizes this concept in his introductory chapter, “The Strike Against Whiteness.” According to Mirzoeff, white sight is “a key operating system of what it is to make whiteness” (1). Peeling back the layers, he shows how white sight is a system of visual politics, a way that dictates how people are meant to understand the world around them and their place within it. According to Mirzoeff, white sight seeks “to create a time and space such that people identifying as white can act as if their reality is all there is” (1). From this perspective, white sight is a learned collective behavior, endorsed by visual culture, which presupposes that white identity is superior—the ultimate and only way of understanding reality. “Any failure to conform to this reality is corrected with violence” (1).
In the chapter “The Strike Against Whiteness,” Mirzoeff conceptualizes white sight as a byproduct of “racial capitalism, enabled by slavery and colonialism” (2). In effect, he shakes the very foundation of white sight, de-normalizing it, for lack of better terms, and revealing it as a mechanism derived from the earlier social and political tendency to establish power dynamics—a metaphorical “screen,” borrowing a term from Mirzoeff—between the hypothetical Us (white, patriarchal imperialist powers) and Them (non-white subjects). White sight does not derive from a natural, sensorial process; we are not born (one would hope) with the need to exert physical and psychological power over others. White sight is a racializing tool, establishing arbitrary, internalized and institutionalized categories in order to maintain ownership and therefore power over people. White sight, furthermore, makes standard a specific way of looking or a perspective that has further maintained the ownership of some specifically over non-white Others. Mirzoeff rightfully claims that perspective in specific “was a powerful place from which to survey and conduct surveillance—the key practices of white sight” (7). He continues,
“White sight is always measurable, quantifiable, and therefore real, creating one of the first forms of an ongoing ‘data colonialism.’ It makes a white reality in which ‘“what there is” depends on the way “one sees it.” And the way one sees is shaped today by the coloniality of knowledge and of being (sensing, seeing, feeling, hearing)’.” (7)
Later on in “The Strike Against Whiteness,” Mirzoeff specifies that “white sight is always supported by a material infrastructure. In this way, it can ‘see’ even when no human is watching” (10). For example, from this material infrastructure we get statues and other landmarks, which establish a way to further build a collective fantasy of society (10) that sustains white supremacy. In contrast, any anti-colonial strike makes visible and actively reacts against infrastructures that “connect, distribute, enable, and store the set of desires and fantasies that comprise what it is to make whiteness” (11). The strike against whiteness, in Mirzoeff’s words,
“unbuilds the static field of white sight, constituted by the screen, statue, state, and its statutes. […] It works at the conscious level, countering the impulses of the received cultural unconscious. It always allows for the ‘right to opacity,’ to not be visible and transparent to all” (14).
One of the most successful aspects of White Sight, for me, comes from the section called “Acknowledged”—not “Acknowledgements,” as so often termed elsewhere. Mirzoeff plainly states:
“To begin at the beginning, I acknowledge being a person clearly identified as white in the United States. In the United Kingdom where I grew up, I was identified as not-Black but not fully English. My last name and being visibly Jewish disqualified me at once” (vii).
In my view, this statement of, and reflection on, Mirzoeff’s own declaration of identity is imperative, as it shows the scholar’s clear understanding of his own privilege and the ways that he, implicitly perhaps, has benefitted from the very institutions that he is writing about. Rather than trying to half-heartedly apologize for the sins of his fathers, so to speak, by mentioning his own identity, he instead importantly situates himself within the larger web of oppression woven by society at large. Racial identity is a learned, normalized, taken-for-granted aspect of our daily lives. To plainly confirm one’s own, sometimes uneasy relation with racial identity is an important first step in breaking the guise of white sight.
“Whiteness cannot be understood without thinking at those intersections and with this learning.
My work here situates my own ambivalent placing within that whiteness as a person in Jewish diaspora whose very body is the product of empire, primarily in relation to the Indigenous and Black radical traditions in the Atlantic world. I acknowledge that this framing is ‘all incomplete,’ while also bearing the knowledge that no one person or book can be adequate to the task.” (viii)
Such observations on Mirzoeff ‘s part inspire me to share my own relation to White Sight’ssubject matter. I identify as white; I am Italian-American and admittedly a recovering Catholic. Reflecting briefly on my upbringing, I can safely say that I grew up in a shockingly racist environment, unfortunately in line with many other Italian-American households of a certain generation. Some of my family members—mostly older, some long dead—held attitudes toward people of color that were cruel, bizarre, and openly articulated. Especially around the dinner table, Italian slurs for black people were wielded openly and carelessly. Since then, my privilege, like Mirzoeff’s, has given me advantages professionally, but from that myopic upbringing, I also keenly understand how white supremacy has thrived and been normalized in day-to-day life across generations. Yet other moments outside the home and in places that were not blatantly racist even more emphatically reiterate the insidious, taken-for-granted white supremacist messages that have surrounded me, extending now into my adulthood. After all, I grew up and currently live in a state that holds an annual festival for Christopher Columbus, heralded as an icon of Italian culture, where the mass slaughtering of indigenous peoples is conveniently repressed. Columbus has not one but two statues built in his honor in my home state, showing how commonplace white sight is in everyday life. As Mirzoeff notes earlier in “Acknowledged,” in 2017 “it became clear that whiteness was deeply connected to everything that visual culture might be” (x).
Impressively White Sight contains a large amount of research. It is expansive; it is a compendium of Western creative traditions that have placed whiteness as a racial ideal, which then becomes an excuse to control non-white people through surveillance and overall methods of subordination. In “Introduction: The Strike Against Whiteness,” Mirzoeff describes the book’s goal:
“[White Sight] is a tactical mapping of the contemporary forms of white sight and white reality—and the strike against them—that constitute our present and are still present. […] I first set out the key features of white sight, white infrastructure, and the cultural unconscious of whiteness that sustain white reality. I then turn to the constitution of the strike against whiteness that makes another world visible. I conclude with a summary of how the book maps the historic layers and circuits of whiteness in the contemporary Atlantic world across its eight chapters.” (3-4)
Mirzoeff accomplishes this so-called “tactical mapping” in two brilliant ways. On the one hand, Mirzoeff compiles information and breaks it down in an astute, analytical, yet accessible manner, covering periods of time spanning from the Italian Renaissance to the present. In doing so, He constructs “a transnational historical narrative from slavery to imperialism and the decolonial present” (23). His working chronologically with such an exhaustive reach helps further visualize how and by what means oppression has been maintained.
Furthermore White Sight doesn’t study just one visual medium, for instance, focus solely on sculpture or photography. Rather, Mirzoeff surveys many creative practices and their representational strategies—sculpture, photography, painting, illustration, literature, performance art, protests. Borrowing from anti-colonial theories as well as theories of the gaze and looking relations, Mirzoeff closely examines specific works including The Rape of Europa (Titian, 1560), Monumento dei quattro mori a Ferdinando II (Tacca, 1626), dioramas from the American Museum of Natural History, statues of public figures like the Duc d’Orleans in Algiers (1962), and many others to explore the exact ways that whiteness has been produced and reinforced.
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| The Rape of Europa (Titian, 1560);); diorama of wading birds at the American Museum of Natural history, 1909; Monumento dei quattro mori a Ferdinando II (Tacca, 1626); statue of the Duc d’Orléans, anonymous photographer, Algiers (July 2, 1962). Screen-grabbed from White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. Mirzoeff remarks that in works such as these, white sight is “arranged in a hierarchy, necessarily unequal and unstable. In this case, whiteness is its product, always rendered visible” (4). | |
As Mirzoeff asserts, “what white sight sees is made, not found” (4), and he pulls from a broad trajectory of visual culture to illustrate that fact. Furthermore, he conceptualizes race alongside gender, religion, geography, politics, and even the natural world. In effect, these cultural dimensions mirror his concept of “monohumanism,” defined elsewhere as acting “as if it were the being of being human. As a concept, monohumanism means that there is only one way to be fully human, which becomes known as whiteness” (1). Whiteness, by this logic, swallows whole all that surrounds it, providing the illusion of one true, “correct” way to be, to exist in modern society. In studying all aspects of visual culture, Mizroeff shows how monohumanism has been materialized not only spatially and temporally, but also artistically.
Finally, White Sight explores strikes against whiteness, whether they materialize as literal strikes, as in protests, or figurative strikes, fighting against white supremacist imagery and oppressive looking relations. The latter section of White Sight, “The Crisis of Whiteness,” which I will discuss later, details a current “decolonial wave” and “removal of colonial symbols” (26) in both the United Sates and abroad. In the chapters leading up to “The Crisis of Whiteness,” Mirzoeff details the long, complex history of colonization through visual culture. In this section, the author shows how such long-standing traditions are being radically transgressed. Exploring various modern-day strikes against whiteness, such as toppling colonial-era statues, adds additional depth to an analysis of the trajectory of white sight. White sight and tactics to maintain white sight (through things like statues) didn’t end in an historical past. Nor have the responses against white sight ended. “The Crisis of Whiteness” sheds light on the never-ending struggle that people face in eras of white supremacy and the radical and powerful ways they fight back. Borrowing from Mirzoeff, symbols of white sight are no longer tolerable (26), and in chronicling local and global fights against such symbols, White Sight offers some new, maybe optimistic, ways out.
Across White Sight, Mirzoeff teases out the construction, enactment, normalization, and upheaval of white sight across temporal, spatial, and geographic boundaries. Divided into three sections, White Sight is “cued from present-day experience to indicate how each segment of past time remains contemporary” (23). In section one, “White Sight in the World of Atlantic Slavery,” Mirzoeff explores the creation of white sight across the “Atlantic world” (23) during, for instance, the Italian Renaissance, Enlightenment period, and slave trade. Chapter 1, “The City, Ship, and Plantation,”
“examines how and why these connections between perspective, political and economic power, and making race first cohered in the early modern Atlantic world in such a way that they are still in effect hundreds of years later” (29).
To do this, Mirzoeff pulls from art historical and geo-political histories of the early colonial city state, inspired in large part by Renaissance-era paintings of “ideal” cities.
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| The Ideal City, 1470–1518 (Fra Carnevale) and Veduta architettonica ideale, 1490–1500 (Francesco di Giorgio Martini). Screen-grabbed from White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. Mirzoeff states plainly that “Whenever they were painted, whether as early as 1470 or as late as 1518, all the panels were part of the colonizing moment […] Although the Italian states were not directly colonizers at the time the panels were made, the circulation of Italian capital enabled the colonial expansion of Europe” (35-36). | |
Such paintings “gave material form to racializing hierarchy and white seeing” (38), granting colonizers the leeway to take possession of nature and human beings as well as devising surveillance measures (infrastructure including statues) that kept power balances in check. What inspired me the most about “The City, Ship, and Plantation,” however, comes from Mirzoeff’s merging of past and present depictions. For example, Mirzoeff keenly prefaces his discussion of colonial-era surveillance methods with a consideration of contemporary artist Isaac Julien’s works like Baltimore (2003).
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| Images from Isaac Julien’s Baltimore (2003), sourced from images of the original video installation via the Baltimore Museum of Art. Describing Julien’s piece, Mirzoeff emphasizes “oscillation and an insistent formal play with linear perspective.” They continue by stating that Baltimore made them “understand linear perspective as white seeing in white space. Perspective was one of a set of artificial machines, extending from the city, to the ship, plantation, and colonizing state that produced colonial white reality. That trajectory connects the Renaissance city-state to plantation slavery and ultimately the drone” (31). | |
Mirzoeff does so to better understand “how and why these connections between perspective, political and economic power, and making race first cohered in the early modern Atlantic world in such a way that they are still in effect hundreds of years later” (29). On Baltimore, Mirzoeff writes:
“The whole film, to quote Julien’s website, is ‘characterized by oscillation and an insistent formal play with linear perspective.’ Baltimore made me understand linear perspective as white seeing in white space. Perspective was one of a set of artificial machines, extending from the city, to the ship, plantation, and colonizing state that produced colonial white reality. That trajectory connects the Renaissance city-state to plantation slavery and ultimately the drone.” (31)
Mirzoeff’s thoughts about how film could lead to challenging mechanisms of white sight led to my thinking about how this has happened to me. In my case, it happened through watching works by transgressive Black filmmakers such as Wendell B. Harris Jr. in 1989’s Chameleon Street, Julie Dash in her magnum opus Daughters of the Dust (1991), and Marlon Riggs in his final film Black Is…Black Ain’t (1994).
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| Stills from Chameleon Street (Harris, 1989), Daughters of the Dust (Dash, 1991), Black Is…Black Ain’t (Riggs, 1994), each exemplary of direct challenges to white sight akin to Isaac Julien’s Baltimore, referenced in Chapter 1. | |
In these examples and more, I’m reminded of bell hook’s “The Oppositional Gaze,” where she posits that Black (and Black feminist, and perhaps Black queer) filmmaking emerges as a site of resistance against white supremacist ideals, affording the potential to “contest, resist, revise, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels” (hooks 691). It seems to me that Baltimore, for Mirzoeff, functions in this same way as a direct challenge to the dominant forms of white sight chronicled elsewhere in the monograph. Mirzoeff understand the important way in which such challenges are replicated in protests and performances. For me, Chapter 1 is a distillation of the success of White Sight because it makes such critical connections between past and present, between the visual, plastic, literary, and performance arts, bringing the book’s discussion of white sight into a conceptual full circle.
