Possessive Investment in Whiteness

Harris argues, Whiteness is a form of property and if there is a “possessive investment in whiteness” (as sociologist George Lipsitz describes it), then visual technologies offer a site where we can examine how the value of Whiteness is underwritten through multiple forms of exposure by which racialized others are forcibly and fictitiously observed but not seen. That said, photography has also been a powerful tool to invest in Blackness. Take cultural studies scholar and media activist Yaba Blay’s work on the social, psychic, and public health harms associated with skin bleaching. In addition to scholarly analysis, she created a media campaign called Pretty.Period, which counters the faux compliment that dark-skinned women must routinely endure: “you’re pretty for a dark-skinned girl.” By exposing the gendered racism coded in the qualifier, Blay responds “No, we’re pretty PERIOD.”16 The campaign has produced an expansive archive with thousands of striking images of dark-skinned women of all ages across the African diaspora whose beauty is not up for debate. Period.

But divesting away from Whiteness in this way too often requires investing in ableist notions of gender, beauty, sexuality, and desire. In her talk “Moving toward the Ugly: A Politic beyond Desirability,” Mia Mingus recognizes “the brilliance in our instinct to move toward beauty and desirability,” but she also wrestles with the way in which “the generational effects of global capitalism, genocide, violence, oppression, and trauma settle into our bodies.” She calls for a shift from a politic of desirability and beauty to a politic of ugly and magnificence … The magnificence of a body that shakes, spills out, takes up space, needs help, moseys, slinks, limps, drools, rocks, curls over on itself … The magnificence of bodies that have been coded, not just undesirable and ugly, but un-human … Moving beyond a politic of desirability to loving the ugly. Respecting Ugly for how it has shaped us and been exiled. Seeing its power and magic, seeing the reasons it has been feared. Seeing it for what it is: some of our greatest strength. Because we all do it. We all run from ugly.

Mingus’ intervention exposes the interlocking effects of racism, ableism, capitalism, heterosexism, and more. A multiple exposure that, like the ghost images that appear on photographs, haunts our discussion of race and technology. Like Blay, Mingus is not only an observer. She reminds us that those who are multiply exposed also engage in liberatory forms of scopic resistance and recoding: dark- skinned :: beautiful and ugly :: magnificent.

Exposing Whiteness The most concrete technique through which Whiteness has fashioned photography is the Shirley Cards produced by Kodak from the 1950 to 1990s. The cards were an integral part of film exposure methods and used the image of a White woman to standardize the exposure process. Since the model’s skin was set as the norm, darker skinned people in photographs would be routinely underexposed. In short, skin tone biases were embedded in the “actual apparatuses of visual reproduction.”18 As one photographer recently put it, “It turns out, film stock’s failures to capture dark skin aren’t a technical issue, they’re a choice.”19 This also implies we can choose otherwise.