On Seeing and Not Seeing Racism

On Seeing and Not Seeing Racism | 1155

On Seeing and Not Seeing Racism Jennifer L. Pierce

The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality without Racism. By Nancy DiTomaso. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012. 431 pages. $42.50 (paper). Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind. By Osagie K. Obasogie. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. 268 pages. $85.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). How Racism Takes Place. By George Lipsitz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. 310 pages. $28.95 (paper). Seeing Race in Modern America. By Matthew Pratt Guterl. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 224 pages. $34.95 (cloth). What is especially insidious about racism in the contemporary United States is its stealth. In our post–civil rights era, the visibly racist Jim Crow formulation of “whites only” has come to be replaced by a new form of racism, one that the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has described as “color-blind.”1 In his argument, this modern form of racism enables whites to ignore group-based racial inequality by denying responsibility for the structural causes of racism and, ultimately, reproducing racial inequality. Indeed, as study after study finds, most white Americans espouse color blindness, yet race continues to determine where most Americans live, what schools their children attend, how much money they make, how much wealth they accumulate, whom they hire and promote at work, and whom they might marry.2 Why do so many white Americans insist that they are color-blind when in fact their choices about everything from the neighborhoods they choose to live in to the people they marry reflect racial preferences? The four books discussed here take up this question, some more explicitly than others, and provide new ways of thinking about the disjuncture between what white Americans say about racism and what they do. Though each book focuses on a different set of racial practices to make their arguments, they all

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1156 | American Quarterly

raise important questions in American studies about the meaning of race, whiteness, and color-blind racism. In doing so, they all shed light on how we see and do not see race. As scholars of race have long argued, “biological race” is often understood as visually obvious; racial categories such as black, white, or Asian are assumed to be something we can see. The critical race theorist Osagie Obasogie’s book, Blinded by Sight, brilliantly upends this notion by adopting a novel methodological strategy: he interviews people who have been blind from birth. His research demonstrates that, far from being unaware of race, “blind people are uniquely capable of discussing the social practices that give visual cues associated with race an obvious feel.” In his argument, “these are the same social forces that give visual understandings of race their coherency to the sighted, yet remain hidden due to sighted individuals’ overemphasis on visual fields. It is in this sense that sighted people are blinded by their sight” (81). Put another way, the blind can discern the social practices that produce their visual understandings of race more effectively that sighted individuals, who take these practices for granted. In Obasogie’s argument, family, friends, and social institutions all serve important socializing functions in teaching the blind about the visual aspects of race and its attendant social practices and meanings. For example, one of his respondents, Maurice, explained that he first became aware of race as a young boy when a neighbor used a racial slur to denigrate a domestic worker. He had never heard the word before, so he asked his mother what it meant. His mother was furious and told him never to repeat the word. Meanwhile, another neighbor, visiting at the time, whom Maurice described as having “an unusual voice,” said, “nobody ever told you that that’s the name some people call me?” (83). It was through this exchange Maurice discovered this neighbor was black. This incident introduced him not only to the notion of visual race (i.e., as black or white) but to the pejorative meanings and practices associated with blackness. As Obasogie points out, “Being able to identify society’s poor treatment of racial minorities and recognizing that this pejorative attitude is rooted in visual differences is a key means through which the distinctions that blind people can detect (voice, smell, etc.) are changed into a visual significance that they cannot directly perceive but recognize due to other people’s behavior” (83). If one doubts that the blind cannot learn to “see” race, Obasogie’s research will shatter such preconceptions. The interview material, especially in chapters 2 and 3, makes for a fascinating read and should be required reading for undergraduate


courses on race. It is important that Obasogie deploys his empirical evidence to advance what he terms a “constitutive theory of race,” that is, the notion that “social interactions construct the visual significance given to race” (37). In addition to its empirical and theoretical contributions, Obasogie develops an important and new critique of color blindness and the Equal Protection Law. As he points out in chapter 4, the metaphor of color blindness depends on the claim that race is something that the blind cannot see, but as his research demonstrates, this is not the case. Beginning with Plessy v. Ferguson, his careful analysis of the history of color blindness in the law reveals the salience of this metaphor and its problematic assumptions in jurisprudence. Indeed, the notion that justice is blind or impartial permeates legal thinking and representation. Recall, for instance, the representation of Lady Justice, blindfolded and holding scales. Here Obasogie demonstrates his considerable ease in moving across disciplines from legal studies to recent research on the cognitive resonance of metaphors in shaping public policy. Further, as his legal analysis in chapter 5 demonstrates, the Equal Protection Law also “relies upon a visual understanding of race” as well as “intent to prove discrimination” (144–45). In Obasogie’s argument, we need to change the evidentiary basis of these laws from one based on a visual understanding to one focused on “social practices such as embedded forms of privilege and subordination that make certain human traits salient in the first place” (159). While changing the Equal Protection Law may be easier said than done, it is a provocative and important point. Further, as Obasogie suggests, such a reorientation for judicial scrutiny opens up other important possibilities including how discrimination works for other social groups such as lesbians, gay men, and the poor. In sum, Blinded by Sight is an important, carefully researched, and interdisciplinary book, breaking new ground in theories of race, legal studies, and disability studies. While Obasogie focuses on how those who do not see apprehend race, in Seeing Race in Modern America the historian Matthew Guterl returns to sight as a metaphor, insisting that we confront the visual practices that make racial categories seem natural and inevitable. Further, by exploring “racial sight” from the early nineteenth century to the recent present, he illuminates the long history of the practice of seeing—and believing in—race and its dire consequences for people of color. In doing so, he challenges the possibility of a postracial society by demonstrating how deeply race is embedded in American culture. “The story of race,” he argues, is the story of everyday assessment, or scan, of the body as text, and the culturally informed interpretation of signs and symbols seen in profile, the posture, and the comportment of a


person’s carriage. It is too the story of visual habits, sightlines that allow the national popular to prescribe common sight. And a story of the persistence and consistency, of less change over time than we might expect or hope for, of taxonomies that endure beyond their expected lifespan, and of representations that repeat, that recirculate, and that don’t die off. (3)

Drawing from the theoretical work of Walter Benjamin, John Berger, and Marita Sturken, among others, Guterl deploys such varied sources as advertisements, political cartoons, YouTube videos, and Hollywood films to make an argument about how Americans are disciplined to see race. For example, Guterl references a political cartoon that depicts Arizona’s “Traffic Stop Policing Tools”: a standard breathalyzer and an “illegal alienyzer” that is actually a skin tone color tone chart ranging from white to dark brown. For Guterl, such parodies reveal how the racial profile of a body marked as “brown” becomes the instrument of an exclusionary state agenda. At the same time, it underscores “the challenge of making surefooted racial identifications in an age of dramatic demographic transformations and in the wake of a national yearning to be ‘postracial’” (23). Indeed, as Seeing Race in America demonstrates, our “visual landscape is arranged to make diversity hypervisible,” which in turn renders natural the suspicion that emerges from racial looking (3). The book’s most interesting parts juxtapose recent ad campaigns with visual representations from the past linking taxonomies of race over time. For example, in chapter 3, Guterl demonstrates that seeing the black body today as a commodity is “a sightline rooted in the history of the chattel slave market” (62). Here he begins by analyzing ads that commodify the black body, first under slavery, and then during Reconstruction. A fertilizer company’s 1885 ad features a lush specimen of a cotton plant. At the very top of the central plant is a head crowned with cotton with “the smiling visage of ‘the Negro,’ reduced once again twenty-five years after the Civil War, to the status of a commodity” (63). Analyzing more contemporary PepsiCo ads that link the black body with the soft drink Code Red, he highlights the continuing connection between blackness and commodification. Guterl also introduces critiques of this process by contemporary visual artists. For instance, the artist Hank Willis Thomas plays with commodification in a series of digitally altered photographs called “Branded.” In one of the most striking pair of photographs, we see a blackand-white photo of an African American man’s bald head branded with the Nike swoosh into its side, and in the other, the chest and rib cage of a black man with a series of swooshes branded into his flesh. For Willis, the practice of branding under slavery and product branding are synonymous. This chapter alone would be effective in undergraduate courses on race, though I would


recommend the entire book. Guterl’s evidence throughout is compelling, his writing and analysis is crisp and clear, and his visual examples are powerful—if not stunning. While the first part of Seeing Race in Modern America examines representations of the individual body in visual culture, the second part considers “racial sightlines that rely on the public presentation of diversity in the array.” (These include black-and-white pairings, adoptive families, competing visions of multiculturalism, and multiethnic platoons in war films). Here ad agencies and filmmakers design images to celebrate and appeal to multicultural consumers. An ad titled “The United Colors of Benetton,” for example, displays young women and men from a range of racial backgrounds wearing the same pants in different colors. This sartorial “group portrait” encourages the viewer to see diversity and humanity in one look by juxtaposing distinct racial types. Guterl emphasizes that these kinds of ads have to be distinctive if they are “to teach the eye to see, to cultivate want and desire by emphasizing the differences that are already understood to exist—as true things—in the real world” (83). The book’s final section focuses on more elusive markers of race in multiracial bodies, passing, and masquerade. For Guterl, what is compelling in many of these examples is the scantness of difference. We are trained to search for the smallest detail as evidence of race: the shape of the lips, the style and texture of the hair, the color of the eyes. But this racial looking is far from neutral, as Guterl argues; rather, it constitutes our “acknowledgement of difference in the everyday, our own sometimes unwitting work in the making a world that saw Trayvon Martin—a boy not yet a man—as a social peril worth shooting dead” (210). This last example suggests that Guterl’s concern lies largely with racial stereotypes constructed and circulated in visual culture, and the attendant policing practice of racial profiling. Certainly, this is part of his interest, but Seeing Race in Modern America more broadly illuminates the underlying logic of racial sight: what we learn to see and not see. “Racial identifications,” as he reminds us, “are not truths” (44). In this respect, like Obasogie, Guterl underscores that visuality in a practice embedded in structures of power and disciplinary knowledge. In contrast to these two works, the historian George Lipsitz’s excellent new book How Racism Takes Place asserts the significance of place in perpetuating racial inequality. For Lipsitz, the phrase “racism takes place” has a double meaning: it describes “things that happen in history”; but in drawing conceptually from cultural geographers, it also elucidates “how social relations take place on


their full force and meaning when they are enacted in actual places” (5). For example, not only has African Americans’ struggle for civil rights taken place historically, but racism has also taken place(s), compelling blacks and other people of color to inhabit certain places while proscribing their presence in others. As Lipsitz reminds us, integration efforts at lunch counters, in public transportation, and in education all “emerged from centuries of struggle over spaces, from fights to secure freedom of movement in public and to enter, inhabit, use, control and own physical places” (52). Building on Lipsitz’s earlier work and racism and whiteness, How Racism Takes Place explores what he terms “the white racial imaginary [to] explain how and why a racially propelled logic of hostile privatism and defensive localism has come to dominate private investment and public policy” (13). Lipsitz effortlessly weaves together connections between past and present and reveals how “seemingly race neutral urban sites are deeply embedded with racial assumptions and imperatives” (13). Chapter 1 draws our attention to whites’ violent reactions to integration in the 1940s and 1950s in northern cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis. Here Lipsitz not only debunks the notion that that violence against African Americans took place only in the South but also underscores whites’ assumptions that blacks moving freely in white neighborhoods is a “criminal transgression” that “still looms large in the white spatial imaginary” (27). That assumption animates the current practices of gated communities like the one patrolled by Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. Such policing of racialized space has a long and multifaceted history. African Americans have been shut out of the housing market by both “private and public discrimination” and left with access to inadequate public housing that deprived them of the assets that whites secured from home ownership (27). In the immediate postwar era, whites benefited from government-supported mortgages through veterans’ benefits that blacks did not. Moreover, instead of acknowledging themselves as recipients of these government subsidies, white Americans came to see themselves as individuals whose wealth grew out of their hard work and success in purchasing their own homes and black inner-city residents as the undeserving poor. Through an exhaustive review of housing policy, social science, and urban history, the chapter reveals how these imaginary and unfair policies have long advantaged white Americans, and deprived African Americans, in terms of housing, wealth, education, and access to health care. Though these findings may not be new to scholars of urban studies, Lipsitz’s framework for thinking about racism as spatial constitutes an important theoretical contribution to American studies.


In his second chapter, Lipsitz contrasts the first imaginary to a second one that he calls the black spatial imaginary. The central argument here is that historically blacks have transformed segregated spaces into “new forms of congregation” and struggles for social justice (54). In contrast to the white spatial imaginary, this one is based on fundamentally different assumptions, those of “mutual exchange and reciprocity” (55). Here he reminds us of the “surprising functions” of beauty parlors, street parades, and churches in black neighborhoods as spaces for congregation, mutual exchange, democratic deliberation, and politics (58–59). In his argument, this imaginary moves beyond the “defensive localism” of the white spatial imaginary by envisioning common interests across broader affiliations. Race-based mobilization has enabled dispersed groups to find common ground and make demands not only for African Americans but on behalf of others who live in deprived places through a politics that goes beyond defending private property. Here again, Lipsitz’s synthesis of research across many disciplines provides a comprehensive and fascinating account of black politics and struggles for social justice. At times, however, his analysis risks romanticizing the life and politics of segregated social worlds. However resilient, creative, and supportive these communities, we do well to remember that they also suffer from great poverty, underfunded public schools, limited access to food, and inadequate social services. He remains attentive to this critique, emphasizing throughout that African Americans “have been forced to negotiate spaces of containment and confinement” (53). In the chapters that follow, Lipsitz turns his attention to a wide array of examples of the white spatial imaginary and cultural expressions of resistance to it. For instance, chapter 3 focuses on the taxpayer-subsidized building of the football stadium in St. Louis, the simultaneous defunding of the city’s public schools, and the consequences for its communities of color. Chapter 4 focuses on segregation in Baltimore and the HBO series The Wire, which he alternately praises for the complexity it brings to black characters in a wide range of roles and critiques for its superficial analysis and its racial and class voyeurism. As Lipsitz argues, racial segregation in Baltimore has led to many serious social problems, but the series fails to show how spatial practices have created racial inequality. This has particular relevance given Baltimore’s recent housing crisis and the show’s inattention to black community organizers and activists who fought for fair housing and ultimately brought suit against Wells Fargo Bank for deceptive loan practices. In other chapters, Lipsitz explores the music of the jazz musician Horace Tapscott and the musicians he organized for the World Stage in Los Angeles; the visual art of John Biggers and the collective


aesthetic and economic work he did restoring row houses in Houston’s Third Ward; the influential writing and politics of Lorraine Hansberry and Paule Marshall; and art and activism in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. As in his previous scholarship, he turns to the cultural expression and meaning making of these musicians, artists, and writers to understand how “people have learned to transform spaces of deprivation into places of possibility” (124). Lipsitz is always a pleasure to read. He is a beautiful and elegant writer as well as an incisive social critic. While his book enables us to see racism in a new way, it also moves us beyond the despair of the Great Recession and its attendant neoliberal economic policies by highlighting collective resistance and the many possibilities for social change. The community activists, artists, writers, and musicians he describes have all produced compelling challenges to the status quo. Unlike the other books reviewed here, Nancy DiTomaso’s American NonDilemma is located squarely within a social science paradigm and is the least interdisciplinary in its scope. For these reasons, American studies scholars may be less likely to read it, but it deserves attention for an important reason: it focuses on the very white Americans who claim to be color-blind. Based on interviews with whites from varied class backgrounds and regions in the United States, DiTomaso finds that despite their support of civil rights, whites continue to pursue strategies in the labor market that benefit themselves. However, in marked contrast to Bonilla-Silva’s classic formulation about color-blind racism, she argues that whites are not racist, but rather participate in what sociologists call “opportunity hoarding.” In other words, white Americans garner resources through social networks of people just like themselves, but they do not recognize the extent to which others have helped them. Nor do they see how these practices reproduce racial inequality. In her argument then, white Americans participate in racial inequality, but they are not racist. DiTomaso’s book is methodologically rigorous (i.e., she conducted in-depth interviews with almost 250 people) and her empirical findings (that informal white job networks reproduce racial inequality) are compelling. Her analysis, however, is limited. First, she argues that “opportunity hoarding” is about inclusion, not exclusion. In doing so, she aims to distinguish this term from “social closure.” Whereas the former is about “reserving opportunities for members of one’s own social group,” the latter is about “keeping others out” (54). In this light, the white Americans she interviewed are not actively discriminating against people of color, but rather protecting resources for people like themselves. For instance, the majority of people she interviewed recall finding jobs


through networks of friends or family members. However, the very practice of drawing boundaries of inclusion for group membership automatically excludes those beyond them. Whether this exclusion is intentional or not, the outcome is the same. What is not convincing, then, in DiTomaso’s explanation is why “opportunity hoarding” is considered solely inclusionary. A more accurate analysis would describe it as both inclusionary and exclusionary. My second critique is methodological. Though DiTomaso relies on indepth interviews for evidence, she treats them as transparent reflections of reality. Respondents who say that they are not racist are taken at their word. For scholars studying race using in-depth interviews as a source, this is a rather surprising assertion. An immense literature explores the difficulties of conducting interviews on racism where methodologists have argued that more nuanced interpretations and strategies are required to account for what the sociologist Monica McDermott has described as “the often subtle, subterranean ways in which anti-black prejudice [exists].”3 For example, as I have found in conducting interviews with white professional men about race, discrimination, and affirmative action, they were often uncomfortable, embarrassed, and sometimes even defensive and angry when asked about their views.4 Emergence of these kinds of feelings in interviews often suggests that something more complex underlies what people are saying, and a careful methodologist attends to them for potential meaning. By contrast, DiTomaso is critical of research that suggests respondents may be lying or pretending not to be racist because in her argument whites simply “misunderstand” or “misrepresent” the extent to which they are privileged. As she argues, “One of the privileges of being white in the United States is not having to be racist in order to enjoy racial advantages” (6). Significantly, historians and sociologists have made similar arguments. Critical whiteness studies has long been concerned with the seemingly invisible operations of racial inequality. As Lipsitz argued in his 1998 The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, liberal individualism plays an important role in justifying and reproducing racial inequality. As he writes, “Collective exercise of power relentlessly channels rewards, resources, and opportunities from one group to another will not appear ‘racist’ from this perspective because they rarely announce their intention to discriminate against others.”5 Sociologists working in this tradition have also focused on how white Americans at once disavow and practice racial exclusion.6 For example, as I found in my research on racial dynamics in legal workplace, liberal individualism not only contributes to white male lawyers’ understanding of success and failure in their professional worlds but


also enables them to overlook how their everyday practices of racial exclusion maintain and reproduce whiteness as a structure of inequality.7 What is puzzling is that DiTomaso fails to engage these scholars in The American Non-Dilemma, and by this omission can make erroneous claims about the novelty of her argument about the production of racial inequality without explicit racist intent. At the same time, the failure to engage much of the recent scholarly literatures allows her to sidestep the opportunity to explain more fully how her research might contribute more broadly to critical whiteness studies. Part of the reason DiTomaso avoids such intellectual engagement may stem from her own political investment, one reflected in the book’s title The American Non-Dilemma. DiTomaso understands it as a play on Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 classic The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, where he argued that Americans faced a moral dilemma between the ideals of the American creed (e.g., liberty and equality) and the reality of racism. Because contemporary white Americans no longer express racism and they do not feel morally responsible for it, she suggests we no longer have Myrdal’s dilemma. But the problem with contemporary racism is precisely the fact that whites do not see racism. By calling it a “non-dilemma,” DiTomaso privileges white understandings of racism rather than critique the broader social and political practices and institutions through which whiteness as a structure of inequality is produced. Further, by insisting that we accept respondents’ statements of color blindness at face value and view “opportunity hoarding” as solely inclusionary, she fails to theorize important connections between micro-level practices and broader structural dimensions of racial inequality. Finally, in recuperating Myrdal’s legacy, DiTomaso resurrects a liberal social science tradition that rejected biological explanations of race in favor of culture. Myrdal, for instance, argued that “American Negro culture . . . is a distorted development, or a pathological condition of the general American culture.”8 Indeed, the subtitle of his book signals that it is blacks and not whites who are the problem. As the sociologist Rod Ferguson argues in Aberrations in Black, sociologists in this liberal humanistic tradition have long pathologized African American culture in their research and ultimately through social policy it influenced.9 (The Moynihan Report is but one example.) In research about racism, this is hardly an intellectual tradition that requires resuscitation. In this light, my own political investments are more in line with Lipsitz and other scholars in critical whiteness studies.10 As Lipsitz, riffing here on Malcolm X, reminds us: “Racism is like a Cadillac because they make a new model every year. The names change . . . but the game’s the same. The achieve-


ment of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s changed many of the names. . . . Yet changing the names did not change the game. Race still exists because racism persists” (21). As all the books reviewed here demonstrate, whether white Americans see racism or not, the problem remains.

Notes 1. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 2. Doug Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Deirdre Royster, Race and the Invisible Hand: How Social Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Devah Pager, Bruce Western, and Bart Bonikowski, “Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment,” American Sociological Review 74.3 (2003): 777–99; Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (1996; rpt. New York: Routledge, 2013); Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Costs of Being African American (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean, The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in Twenty-First Century America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010). 3. Monica McDermott, Working Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 149. McDermott provides an excellent review of the methodological literature on this topic. See also Marjorie Devault, “Ethnicity and Expertise: Racial-Ethnic Knowledge in Sociological Research,” in Liberating Method (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Susan Chase, Ambiguous Empowerment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett, Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Beth Roy, Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment across Divides of Race and Time (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999). 4. Jennifer L. Pierce, Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash against Affirmative Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 5. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 20–21. 6. Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists; Ashley Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds., White Out: The Continuing Significance of Race (New York: Routledge, 2003); Michael Brown, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Joe Feagin and Eileen O’Brien, White Men on Race (Boston: Beacon, 2004); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Pamela Perry, Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identity in High School (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, “The Future of Whiteness: A Map of the Third Wave,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31.1 (2008): 4–24; Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 7. Jennifer L. Pierce, “Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Corporate Culture, and the Backlash against Affirmative Action,” Qualitative Sociology 26.3 (2003): 53–71. 8. Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944; rpt. New York: Transaction, 1995), 928. 9. Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 10. See, e.g., David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1991); and Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also n. 6.