by
We average Americans’, observed Eric Holder in February 2009, ‘simply do not talk enough with each other about race.’ The Attorney General’s diagnosis of this deficit was a national failure of nerve: ‘We always have been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.’ Seeking to overcome such cowardice in his new book Black Bodies, White
Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race, George Yancy’s tools are as varied as his subject: phenomenology and existentialism, literature and current events, calm analysis and charged classroom illustrations. The result is a blueprint of racism’s mechanisms that
Cornel West has pronounced ‘the most philosophically sophisticated treatment we have of the most visceral issue in America and modernity.’ Bringing together the insights of numerous thinkers – Douglass and DuBois, Husserl and Sartre, Toni Morrison and Frantz Fanon
– Yancy attempts to unpack, in turn, the white gaze and how it denigrates the black body; how this denigration threatens to violate its victims’ subjectivities, and how such violations can be resisted; and, finally, how whites evade responsibility for the wreckage their
gaze still wreaks, but can yet recognize, and resist, its ‘ambushes’.
This is part of a review which was published in "Radical Philosophy" vol 156 (July/August 2009): pages 56-59. pdf files can be found at
https://www.scribd.com/doc/93514995/Timothy-Chambers-The-Elevator-Effect-Review-of-Black-Bodies-White-Gazes-The-Continuing-Significance-of-Race-by-George-Yancy
and
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/156-reviews
