Race Consciousness, the Other’s Face,

and the Visible in Daily Life

Nathalie Nya

The question is not one of exposure tothe foreign, but the manner of that exposure.

- Jason M. Wirth's attempt to paraphrase one of Aime Cesaire’s passagein Discourse on Colonialism1

Abstract:In this paper, I argue that, at any given place

and time, a representation of a black face can

potentially confirm racist stereotypes as easily as it

can disrupt and break away from racist stereotypes.

What really matters about a representation of a black

face is who is addressed by this representation. An

issue we should focus on is interpretation. This may

be a route to getting beyond debates concerning good

and bad imagery. The representation of a black face is

about debates concerning contradictory

interpretations. I’m concerned with the following1 Jason M. Wirth, “Beyond Black Orpheus.” Race & Racism in continental philosophy, e d. Robert Bernasconi, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003), 274.

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issue: What happens when conscious black artists,

thinkers, and others choose to bracket black

identities into some medium of representation? While

for some, this concern might seem simplistic or too

obvious, we are constantly experiencing artists,

thinkers, and others, who actually believe they can

control the interpretation of the visual

representations they each present to the public.

However, I want to show that it only takes a negative

interpretation from just one person to disrupt the

premises of such representational assumptions. This

paper is framed around an account a student gives in

reaction to a representation of a black face. I do not

provide any visual images precisely because I am

concerned with how our imaginative interpretations

signify the visible. Instead, I provide an

interpretation of an experience. The imaginative part

of the experience is up to the reader’s

interpretation.

1. The Issue: an Interpretation

I am reading a book on the bus to campus. I notice the

student who is sitting next to me suddenly jumps at the

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sight of its cover. I can see her face turn red. Her

expression becomes tense. I notice that she is a white

female student who has just been put on edge by what she has

seen on my book cover. The book cover is a close-up of the

face of a black man with closed eyes. I can feel her fear, I

recognize the tension, and I see the terrified facial

expression she gives me.

I decide to talk to her. What I want to ask her is,

“How is it that you are afraid of the picture of a black

man’s face?” I hide my shock. Instead, I hear myself utter,

“It is a philosophy book.” I am also saying these words for

myself to understand the context of her fear, I guess. I

could never have imagined that the book I am now holding

could create such fear and tension. “Ahhhh!” she replies, as

if it made all the difference. The book, titled Look, A Negro,

is Robert Gooding-Williams’s attempt to address the

intersections of race, culture, and politics in light of a

continental (existential and empirical) philosophical

tradition. She looks relieved by the fact that I make the

first step to communicate with her.

The unstated message in my utterance does not leave her

off the hook, however. In one swipe, she proceeds to tell me

how she and I are related. “I took a seminar with Tricia

Rose on black feminist theory. I enjoyed her seminar and the

book she wrote. Longing to Tell… I am an American studies major.

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I am about to graduate. I will apply to an MFA writing

program in Oakland.”

What she means to tell me is “I’m not racist.” At least

that is how she wants me to interpret her previously red and

tense face, now more relaxed. She wants me, after hearing

this, to forget her previous facial and bodily tensions.

Looking sideways, she smiles to relieve me and put me at

ease in return. However, I am not relieved. This she cannot

tell. She cannot read my face. She refuses my face. She does

not look me straight in the eyes. I just notice her looking

at my black hands and then at her own. At least, that is the

part of my body she frames me as.

I wonder what she can interpret about me from my hands

or whether it is the color difference between us that

fascinates us. Her narrative renders me invisible. I felt

typified and that her narrative too was typical of a certain

sort. Once off the bus, I reconcile into an unsettling

monologue. What is happening to her as she encounters the

photograph of a black man with closed eyes? What can the

face of a black man with closed eyes possibly do to her? How

does this still picture relate to her subjectivity as a

white person, as college-educated American studies major,

and as a white female? What does the picture on my book

cover signify to her?

2. Introduction

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In Black Looks, Bell Hooks remarks that, “While it has

become ‘cool’ for white folks to hang out with black people

and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do

not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning

racism.”2 The white female student wants to relieve me from

the quizzical expressions on my face by telling me she is

not racist. She takes a seminar with Tricia Rose. Therefore,

not only does she enjoy being around a black professor, she

also finds the experience of learning about the lives of

African-Americans pleasurable. She then tells me that after

graduation, she will head to Oakland. She is looking forward

to moving to a town with a large black population.

Obviously, she is into black people.

In the attempt to relieve me with her narrative, she

tries to mask the effect that the representation of a black

man’s face with his eyes closed has on her. She probably

thinks her narrative can blackout what I have just

experienced. Her tense and red face seems to read the threat

of blackness to civilization, to her bus ride up to our

university campus. Among other things, her reaction to the

black man’s face could be reflecting the historical rape

myth; “a sexual threat that black men, the putative [King]

Kong, pose to white women.”3

2 Bell Hooks, Black Looks (Massachusetts: South End Press, 1992), 17.

3 Robert Gooding-Williams, Look, A Negro (New York: Routledge, 2006), 59.

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In encountering a black man’s face on the book, is she

reaffirming the myth that “blackened masculinity endangers

white women”?4 What kind of exposure is this? Who is she

exposing? Why does she look at this face on the book as if

it carries traumatic historical retention?

Furthermore, she claims to know me. Particularly, she

hints at the thought that she might know my sexuality. She

tells me she read Longing to Tell, Tricia Rose’s latest book

about the sexual lives of black women. The dreadful myth

“about black women is that they are sexually loose. [. . .

] During slavery and decades of segregation, the myth of

sexual looseness first emerged as a twisted justification

for the rapes and sexual assaults of black women by white

men. While the archetypes have changed slightly, the

stereotypes of black women as oversexed, carefree, and

immoral remain.”5 The need for Tricia Rose to put this book

together is based on the assumption that the truth of the

sexual lives of black women contradicts the “dreadful myth

about black women.” But does it really contradict this myth?

Or does Longing to Tell provide another account whereby black

women can be represented in terms of their sexuality? What

kind of exposure is this? Who is the white female student in

the bus exposing? Why does she look at my body as if it were

a carrier of traumatic historical retention?4

? Ibid., 59.5

? Jones C. & Shoter-Goden K., The Double Lives of Black Women in America (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003), 30.

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Her looks seem to suggest that the representation she

knows about my body transcend my actions and present social

condition. She seeks to see about me whatever it is beyond

me and that I cannot conceal. She attempts to estrange me

from the unity of my identity. She has learned something

about black people and tries to understand me in light of

what she has read. Is that a good or bad thing?

Despite her racist facial expression- tensed and red -

I cannot say I know her. I do not know who she is. My

knowledge of the diversity of white people prevents me from

putting her in a generalized category. As far as her

narrative goes, what other experiences do I have to have

with her in order for me to truly believe that I know she

has unlearned her racist reaction of the representation of a

black man’s face? Why does she think that her visceral

response gives her more credibility with me than my

experience about her? Why would a non-racist verbal exchange

matter more than a visual and bodily racist experience?

There is a void between her narrative and her behavior. Does

she presume that her account has actually managed to explain

her behavior to me as non-racist? Is this even her goal? If

she renders me an invisible woman, if she attempts to reduce

my action and present social condition to meaninglessness,

then can her goal be purely an appeal to herself?

3. Cultural Contexts and The Visible: Representation

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Given the black face in relation to how it has been

historically represented, the current representation of any

given black face inevitably stands as a framework that

further essentializes blacks. To Stuart Hall, “This

resolution is only a repression, delayed into our political

unconscious, the primitive returns uncannily at the moment

of its apparent political eclipse.”6. I would claim,

however, that this resolution is delayed and exhibits our

pre-reflective consciousness in the Sartrian sense, instead

of its being a resolution that is delayed into our political

unconscious, in the Freudian sense.

To recognize that one is unknowingly representing the

Other in primitive light implies that the one is in bad faith,

rather than it being a matter of the unconscious expressing

itself. “Our political unconscious” is implicitly about the

political state of affairs that we prefer not to deal with.

This is my take on the Sartre/Freud dilemma. In the Sartrian

sense “our political unconscious” becomes about pre-

reflective activities whose acknowledgment and awareness is

not limited to the persons in question.

Pre-reflective activities are based on particular

social practices. And if pre-reflective activities are about

political issues, they hint at certain kinds of

6 Stuart Hall, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” The Black Studies Reader, Jacqueline Bobo, Ed. Hudley & Michel, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 257.

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socializations we prefer not to deliberate about and to be

engaged with. To see “being black” in a visual

representation of a black face is an attempt to address a

question of value that presupposes a Eurocentric

hierarchically based aesthetic. What characteristics does

this face exude that would classify him as blackness? Based

on this setting, “the important point is the ordering of

different aesthetic morals, social aesthetics, the orderings

of culture to the play of power.”7

To further this point, how can the becoming of a

racialized socialization be internalized (repressed) as the

unconscious? In the construction of the unconscious however,

it is implied that the capabilities of our consciousness are

readily available to us.

In other words, we can conceive of the unconscious

precisely because we might assume that the process of

becoming aware hints at the transparency of our

consciousness. As far as I am concerned, principles

concerning the transparency of the self can be easily

undermined due to the reality that an awareness and an

acknowledgement of one’s self cannot be successfully made

sense of from the first person. Insofar as a knowledge of

myself is not mutually exclusive from the relations I have

with others and my environment, it cannot be the case that

my consciousness (the awareness and the acknowledgment of my

7 Ibid., 258.

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socialization) is transparent to me. Rather, the process of

socialization through which I become aware reveals the

opacity about my being conscious.

The notion of bad faith hints only at the best example

with which Sartre explains his concept of pre-reflective

consciousness. Sartre wrote a novel called, No Exist. The

novel attempts to explain what he means by pre-reflective

consciousness. If anything, the notion of bad faith is

Sartre’s attempt to place a value on the consequences of

dissociating oneself from the opaque traces that linger and

punctuate social lives.

In the article What is this ‘Black’ in black popular culture?

Stuart Hall argues that, “Black popular culture, like all

popular cultures in the modern world, is bound to be

contradictory, and this is not because we haven’t fought the

cultural battle well enough.” 8 By virtue of being a

culture, black popular culture, thus other forms of black

sub-cultures that made black popular culture possible, is a

contradictory space. Any political action for the sake of

this culture (and thus for other black sub-cultures) must

address particular aspects of such space accordingly. Given

that any political action is situational, one’s relation to

the representation of a black face alludes to practices of

reflexivity.

8 Hall, “What is This Black,” 259.

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How one relates to the representation of a black face

says more about the person looking at the representation

than what the author of the representation of the black face

intends the representation to stand for. But it does not

follow that we therefore should interpret such a

representation for what it says about the interpretation.

The representation of a black face, given the emphasis on

race, is a politically charged dialectical medium between a

black face and the one looking at the face, that serves the

purpose of confirming and of negating either racist

discourse, anti-racist discourses, or both. It is a site of

“strategic contestation.”9 If the encounter of a black face

calls for strategic contestation, then we wonder how we can

allow for spaces of integration to not be reactive against a

black face. In simpler terms, we need to be critical about

the way we encounter black faces.

We need to be strategic about how we visualize black

faces. The practices of visibility, how the picture is

interpreted so as to draw out socially signified features,

“are indeed revealing of significant facts about our

cultural ideology, but that is what the visible reveals is

not the ultimate truth; rather, it often reveals self-

projection, identity anxieties, and the material inscription

9 Hall, “What is This Black,” 259.

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of social violence.” 10 The practices of visibility are

reflexive.

For some time, now, “the critical challenge for black

folks has been to expand the discussion of race and

representation beyond debates about good and bad imagery.

Often what is thought to be good is merely a reaction

against representations created by white people that were

blatantly stereotypical.”11. Look, A Negro is a book authored

by a black man, an African- American man. Robert Gooding-

Williams does not necessarily intend for the cover picture

of a black man with eyes closed on the cover of his book to

be characterized in a negative light.12 It can

conservatively be assumed that the book’s author and

publisher did intend the cover to be solely reduced to

negative interpretation. However, it can be reasonably

understood that the publishers (excluding the author),

intended for the picture on the cover of his book to produce

exactly such negative reaction.13 The white female student’s10 Linda Alcoff, Visible Identities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8.11

? Hooks, Black Looks, 4.

12 In a conversation via e-mail with Robert Gooding-Williams on July 23, 2006, he says, “About the choice of the cover, I will say this: the publisher suggested it, and I consented, but not reluctantly. I like the cover very much because the face with closed eyes seems to me to suggest the presence of a subjectivity that *exceeds* the essentializing and (for Fanon) materially violent gaze of the white child, or white person generally, who shouts, or thinks, "Look, A Negro!"”

13 Sanford Schram’s Praxis for the Poor discusses this exact dynamic among publishersand authors relating to the problem of representation of race on the covers of books. Schram explains that publishers gave one of his previous books on welfare policy a cover depicting a black woman cleaning a bus. He objected to

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reaction to the book cover exposes her negative

interpretation of the representation on the cover of the

book image. Until her reaction to the book cover, the

picture of the black man’s face simply signified to me the

face of a particular black man’s face. Maybe and only for a

few seconds, I thought that the picture might be that of

Frantz Fanon; this I imagine only as a form of daring

political stand. But the sentence “Look, a Negro” appears in

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.14 Fanon aims to describe

the living experience of blacks in a place that is phobic

about blacks. Fanon suggests that “Look, a Negro!” is a

typical example of “the racializing identifications that

punctuate day-to-day life in such societies.”15 Given

Fanon’s account of “Look, a Negro!,” the sentence itself is

supposed to reflect the visual image of a black person the

reader already has imagined. It is unlikely that the student

on the bus could have seen the title of this book. This book

is a copy from my campus’s library. The title, located on

top of the front, is covered on the left by the library’s

call number and to the right, it is covered with a bar-coded

sticker.

this cover because it put a black face on welfare, in addition to many other problematic implications. How readers might interpret the image, how they might“judge a book by its cover” suddenly became a major issue in the book’s publication (New York: New York University Press, 2002).14

? Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952/1967).15

? Gooding-Williams, Look, A Negro, 8.

13

But, based on Fanon’s context, the child is frightened

by this Negro face during a train ride in Paris. How does a

French child become intuitively frightened of a “Negro” on a

Paris train? This is what gives Fanon’s experience its

quasi-random character. A child does not imitate others, but

rather the conduct and action of others.16 Therefore, based

on Fanon’s context, the child is frightened by the Negro

face because the child is trying to carry out one of his

parents’ or guardians’ racist actions toward a black face

during a train ride in Paris.

4. The Dissonance between Interpretation and Representation

By default, and given the relevance of institutional racism,

historically racist discourses, and racist individuals,

knowing or unknowing, the ways a representation of a black

face is read could be at least twofold. I argue that, at any

place and time, the representation of a black face can

confirm racist stereotypes or potentially disrupt and break

from racist stereotypes. What really matters about the

representation of a black face is who the representation

addresses. An issue we should focus on is interpretation.

While some may find this argument too simplistic or obvious,

we are constantly experiencing artists, thinkers, and 16

? Lou Turner, “Fanon Reading (W)right, the (W)right Reading of Fanon: Race, Modernity, and the Fate of Humanism,” in Race & Racism in Continental Philosophy. Editedby Robert Bernasconi, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003), 154.

14

others, who actually believe they can control the

interpretation of visual representations they individually

present to the public.

However, it only takes a negative interpretation from

one person to disrupt the premises of such representational

assumptions. Accordingly, the representation of a black face

is subject to contradictory interpretations. What happens

when some among us choose to bracket black identities into

some medium of visual representation?

To Bell Hooks, “We are bombarded by black folks

creating and marketing similar stereotypical images. It is

not an issue of “us and them.” The issue is really one of

standpoint. From what political perspective do we dream,

look, create, and take action?17 In Longing to Tell, Sorita, a

woman who Tricia Rose interviews, talks about how she

interprets racial images. Racial images, she says, “are such

powerful things. I realize that every image you see is

created for a specific purpose. Every single image, down to

the shadow on someone’s face, is constructed by people who

have motives, and that is mind-blowing to me. Seeing black

women treated so disrespectfully in black film and music

videos in particular really bothers me. It really affects

the way girls see themselves and carry themselves in the

world; and it dictates what femininity is for black women

and to a lot of young girls. I see them acting out these

17 Hooks, Black Looks, 4.

15

patterns, especially among the hip-hop community, and it

really makes me sick.”18 Sorita, in giving an account of

herself, claims that black men and black women, along with

the hip-hop community have become responsive to the racial

images of black women’s faces. Sorita sees the staged images

of black women in film and music videos as visual

impressions that negate the public image of everyday black

women. Yet despite her resignation toward the representation

of black women in black film and music videos, she may not

want to publicly voice this particular view of hers. For one

thing, she might be accused of not supporting black popular

culture. And it would explain in part why her racialized

story on black women’s images is included in Tricia Rose’s

Longing to Tell.

In Racetalk, Kristen Myers remarks, “People avoid talking

about race, even in classroom settings geared towards

addressing racism. While this collective silence has

multiple explanations, part of people’s reluctance to talk

may be a fear of misspeaking. They may want to steer clear

of situations where they might accidentally make racist

remarks. While it would seem easy for people to avoid making

racist remarks just by being sensitive and thoughtful,

racist stereotypes are embedded in all of our imaginations—

18 Tricia Rose, Longing to Tell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 44.

16

like it or not—due to the prevalence of racism in

society.”19

Their behavior is not clouded by a self-prescribed

narrative where they, for whatever reason, fail to formulate

the necessary narrative that represents their selves—the

selves they want to be. Their behavior is clouded by a

rhetoric that they can only deny by not speaking.

5. Race consciousness

Before this paper is pigeonholed into the black-white20

binary, consider that the racist stereotypes embedded in all

of our imaginations are not all about blacks. They are also

about Latino immigrants, Asian-Americans, Native-Americans,

white ethnics, and other minorities. As Mary Frances Berry

claims about the United States, “In reality, we are not two

separate nations, one black and one white. Instead, we are

three nations one black, one white, and one in which people

strive to something other than black to avoid the sting of

white supremacy [and the stigma of blackness]. Racism

against African-Americans remains the prototype for racism

in America. We are the ‘negative other’ against which all

immigrant groups have tried to confirm their whiteness—be

19 Kristen Myers, Racetalk (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2005), 4.

20 White here refers to whites from the dominant white culture, starting with the middle class.

17

they the Irish in the 1860s, the Italians in the 1890s, the

Jews in the early 1900s, or many Asians and Latinos of the

1990s.”21 Although she dismisses the social situation of

Native Americans, Berry’s point is quite clear.22

Although racism extends beyond the black-white binary,

it still develops within this binary. Immigrants are

socially and politically led to mark their identities

through either the assessment of the privileged white

identities or through the assessment of black identities,

the established “negative other.” While immigrants who

choose to benefit from white privilege create additional

discomfort to African-Americans, an issue is still about the

white system of institutional and discursive forms of

oppression.

In Being White, Karyn McKinney claims that “one of the

privileges of whiteness is to be able to remain racially

invisible, unnamed. As in a child’s ‘peek-a-boo’ game, as

white people we are able to cover our eyes to consciousness

of ‘race’ and, in doing so, fool ourselves into thinking

that, because we do not ‘see’ race, we will not be seen as

racialized beings. In this state of pseudo-invisibility,

21 Mary Frances Berry, “Pie in the Sky? Clinton’s Race Initiative Offers Promiseand the Potential for Peril,” Emerge (September 1997), 68.

22 Race relations in the United States tend to be pigeonholed into the black-white binary in most parts because of the failed relationships between native Americans and whites and due to the mass killing (genocide) of native Americans.

18

whites have more often consumed the stories of racialized

others, while their own lives remain unexplored.”23

On the bus ride to campus, the white female student

does not choose to relate to me by giving an account of

herself as a racialized person. Instead, she engages me with

racialized stories that, to her interpretation, mirror my

experience as a black woman.

As a result, she gives me a physical account of how her

consumption of the rape myth imprinted her body, her face,

and her gaze. Politicization of the black rapist image

combined with sensitivity among historians “to contemplate a

male slave as an aggressor, an assailant of a white person,

would seem to require an ideological inversion of major

proportions.”24 Really, the rape myth concerns how the black

rapist image threatens the sexual purity (whiteness) of white

women. The rape myth is about the historical traces of white

race-consciousness. The rape myth marks a white stereotype. It

is a form of overt racism that is embedded in our

imaginations. As soon as she outed the blackness of the black

man’s face on the book cover, I saw it, too. Beyond me, she

forced me into that interpretative orientation. His blackness

was beyond my imagination prior to that moment. Even when I

23

? Karyn McKinney, Being White (New York: Routledge, 2005), 3.

24 Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape & Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: TheUniversity of North Carolina Press, 2004), 2.

19

thought of the picture as being that of Fanon, I did not

interpret the face as symbolizing blackness.

This is an issue because, in the visual representation

of a black face, “The myth of the essential black subject

still haunts it.”25 As I understand “the myth of the

essential black subject” is the attempt to represent

precisely what is visually unrepresentable about being a

black person – that is, being black. The myth of the

essential black subject attempts to do away with skeptical

sensibility about being black. It attempts to do away with

personal ambiguity. Particularly, in-so-far-as African-

Americans live in America, the quest for what is essentially

black about being a black person obscures “the hybrid,

complex, and multidimensional characters of African-American

life and experience.”26 In the introduction of Color Conscious,

David B. Wilkins claims, “To be sure, what I am now calling

‘black culture’ has not developed independently of what I

referred to a moment ago as ‘American culture.’ [. . . ]

African-American identity is centrally shaped by American

society and institutions: it cannot be seen as constructed

solely within African-American communities”27 and vice

versa.

25 Gooding-Williams, Look, A Negro, 109.26

? Ibid., 99.

27 Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 23.

20

The quest for what is essentially black about being a

black person reduces the black subject to a conception of a

non-relational self. It presupposes that if a black person

has a self, it cannot be a self that is constituted in terms

of self and others relations.

It presupposes that somewhere the “black self” is at one

with itself. If there is a “black self,” it is intrinsic and it

waits to be discovered as it lurks inside “black people.”

The quest for what is essentially black about being a black

person is about what makes blacks different from whites. But

the question that makes a difference is not why are blacks

different from whites. Rather, it’s why do we pigeonholed

want to prove that blacks are what make the difference? What

kind of difference is being marked here? Racial? Sexual? Self-

less? Inferior?

6. Conclusion

Black and other ethnic identities are not transparent but

rather opaque and complex. There is no way that a single

picture depicting a black face can attempt to capture black

identities. The issue, then, is not to critique the author

and/or the publisher for the book cover. Rather, the issue

is to critique interpretations of the picture that attempt

to read the picture in terms of universal prejudices.

21

Accordingly, I oppose the sanctioning of black artists

such as Kara Walker, oppose the sanctioning of black

thinkers such as Robert William-Goodings, and oppose the

sanctioning of both black artist and thinkers such as Adrian

Piper, simply because they choose to frame a book cover with

a black face, to depict a woman who is black, to depict

images of slaves touching masters, or to portray other

identity-associated cultural processes to which a black

person might relate. The exposure of a black face undeniably

exposes our collective race consciousness. It is that part

of our imagination that it reveals. It must not be negated

as signifying a representation of the other. We must learn

to interpret a black face not in terms of what it might say

about blackness, but for what it might say about our

collective race consciousness. This may be a route to

getting beyond debates concerning good and bad imagery.

Works Cited

Alcoff, Linda. Visible Identities. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Appiah, Anthony and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Berry, Mary Frances. “Pie in the Sky? Clinton’s Race Initiative Offers Promise and the q Potential for Peril,” in Emerge (September 1997): p. 68.

C. Jones and & Shoter-Goden K., The Double Lives of Black Women in America. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003.

22

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1952/1967.

Gooding-Williams, Robert. Look, A Negro. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Hall, Stuart. “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” In The Black Studies Reader. Edited by Jacqueline Bobo. New York: Routledge, 2004: 257-259.

Hooks, Bell. Black Looks. Massachusetts: South End Press, 1992.

McKinney, Karyn. Being White. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Myers, Kristen. Racetalk. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2005.

Rose, Tricia. Longing to Tell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Schram, Sanford. Praxis for the Poor. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

Sommerville, Diane Miller. Rape & Race in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Turner, Lou. “Fanon Reading (W)right, the (W)right Reading of Fanon: Race, Modernity, and the Fate of Humanism.” Race & Racism in Continental Philosophy. Edited by Robert Bernasconi. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003:151-175.

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