White gaze

The white gaze is the assumption that the default reader or observer is coming from a perspective of someone who identifies themselves as white, or that people of color sometimes feel need to take into account the white reader or observer's reaction. Various authors of color describe it as a voice in their heads that reminds them that their writing, characters, and plot choices are going to be judged by white readers, and that the reader or viewer, by default, is white.

Description

W. E. B. Du Bois coined the concept of double consciousness in his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which preludes the idea of the white gaze. Double consciousness is theorized as the dual perception African Americans have of themselves. According to Du Bois, Black people navigating Western spaces carry the burden of looking at themselves both through an inner lens, and through the external lens of a white supremacist society: "always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

Toni Morrison wrote and spoke influentially about rejecting the white gaze. In an analysis of whiteness in American literature, Morrison said, "What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one's race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be 'universal' or race-free?" In the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, she calls it “The little white man that sits on your shoulder and checks out everything you do or say. You sort of knock him off and you’re free."

Penguin Blacktop children's writer L. J. Alonge described it in terms of writing "a scene about two kids trying to dine-and-dash, something I'd done, and stop to wonder if I was playing into narratives about 'black criminality.' I'd try to write a scene about a kid getting into a fight, something else I'd done, and feel like I was fuelling ideas about 'black-on-black violence.'"

Representations

The Pulitzer prize-winning play Fairview, by Jackie Sibblies Drury, focuses on the white gaze; the play's title is a play on the phrase. Hannah Miao, reviewing it, describes the White gaze as "being watched from a lens of otherness that is sometimes violently obvious, and sometimes so subtle that you find yourself wondering whether you made it up entirely. It is fetishization and repulsion, appropriation and persecution, misrepresentation and erasure, all at once."

A 2018 exhibit at California Institute of Integral Studies called White Gaze investigated "the role of photography, and specifically the images of National Geographic, in reinforcing racist hierarchies in the cultural imaginary of the West".

Frantz Fanon described how the white gaze positions black people in a perception of being inferior in Black Skin, White Masks.