Racialization and Whiteness: White Noise and Concrete Reciprocity
摘要
Recent phenomenological work on race and racism makes frequent appeal to the concept of ‘racialization,’ which is meant to refer to the processes whereby one’s embodied existence qua ‘raced’ is formed and incorporated into one’s habits of comportment and body schema. However, the term is also consistently linked to processes of ‘othering’ and understood to apply only to nonwhite persons, such that one can refer to ‘racialized subjects’ and be understood as excluding white people. While there are important and compelling reasons for employing the term in this way, I will argue in this chapter that ignoring the ways in which subjects are racialized as white limits and even undermines anti-racist theorization and practice. Taking seriously the ways in which thinkers like Alia Al-Saji and Helen Ngo are quite right to point out specificities in the ways in which nonwhite racialization occurs, I will argue for the need to offer rigorous phenomenological investigation of whiteness as a particular form of racialization. Finally, I will draw on “white noise” as a metaphor for the larger social milieu that normalizes and empowers white racialization.