You see, I am right. Discerning race is something you must do to maintain the colonial gaze. It is really quite simple.
Page 111:
For the Black Man to be seen and for him to be identified as such, a veil must have already been placed over his face, making it a face “bereft of all humanity.”32 Without this veil there is no Black Man. The Black Man is a shadow at the heart of a commerce of the gaze. Such commerce has a gloomy dimension, almost funereal, for in order to function it demands elision and blindness. To see is not the same as to look. You can look without seeing. And it is not clear that what one sees is in fact what is. But looking and seeing have in common the fact that they solicit judgment, enclosing what is seen or the person who is not seen in inextricable networks of meaning—the beams of history. In the colonial distribution of seeing, the desire for either objectification or erasure, or an incestuous desire, a desire for possession or rape, is always there.33 But the colonial gaze also serves as the very veil that hides this truth. Power in the colony therefore consists fundamentally in the power to see or not to see, to remain indifferent, to render invisible what one wishes not to see. And if it is true that “the world is that which we see,” then we can say that in the colony those who decide what is visible and what must remain invisible are sovereign.34
Race, then, exists only by way of “what we do not see.” Beyond “what we do not see,” there is no race. The pou(voir), or seeing power, of race is expressed first in the fact that the persons we choose not to see or hear cannot exist or speak for themselves. When necessary, they must be silenced. But their speech is always indecipherable, or at least inarticulate. Someone else must speak in their name and in their place so that what they say makes complete sense in our language. As Fanon, and before him W. E. B. Du Bois, has shown, the person dispossessed of the faculty to speak is constrained always to think of himself, if not as an “intruder,” then at least as someone who can only ever appear in the social world as a “problem.”
Earlier, on p. 88:
Mbembe: Foucault, dealing with racism and its inscription in the mechanisms of the state and power, noted in this regard that “the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point, within certain limits and subject to certain conditions.” 1/
Race or racism, “in a normalizing society,” he noted, “is the precondition that makes killing acceptable.” He concludes, “Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous functions of the State.” 2/
Again, this is on p. 88 of Mbembe’s chapter “The Subject of Race,” in his Critique of Black Reason. He is citing Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 254–56. 3/x
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 