Studies @ MindSay

The Celluloid Fetish of Whiteness

Antonio Garcia

Indiana University

Entering the celluloid 3^rd world

Popular culture has provided entertainment and insight into the overt and covert practices and desires of society.  The cryptic celluloid captivates us and allows us to enter a third space, or world, of neither illusion nor reality but reality in the illusion (Žižek, The Perverts Guide to Cinema).  As we become trapped in the illusion of a celebrated “unreality” in the form of cinematic indulgence we are confronted with a delight in the pleasure of our own disavowing fetishes.  Movies like Crash (2005) resonate deeply and stir emotions while providing the needed, but easily forgettable, shock of the racial tensions that exists across all racial divides.  After becoming emotionally enchanted by the films cinematography and musical score, we depart from the captivity of the celluloid world with only a brief residue of how that cinematic universe is not an illusion masking reality, but a very true reality that we have masked as an illusion in our own subconscious.  One poignant example can be found in a scene from Hotel Rwanda (2005) that illustrates the disavowing fetish. The news cameraman (Joaquin Phoenix) returns with video footage of the machete butchering taking place on the streets of Kigali and replies to Raul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle)  who believes the footage will show the world of the terror: “people will see it say that’s horrible and then go back to their dinners.”  The advent of cinematography and the celluloid have allowed for a 3^rd world to become the illusion of reality while actually creating a reality out of our illusion.  Within these celluloid 3^rd worlds we can analyze the human, social, phenomenological, and psychological without harm to human subjects.  Thus, the celluloid becomes the pop culture sociologist’s fantasy of interplay between the real and the illusory real.

In grappling with the notion of whiteness, we can return to a similar disavowing fetish among whites.  Žižek (2008) provides an example of the disavowing fetish as “I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know…I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don’t know” (p.52).  Whiteness operates among whites in a similar way.  Whether it is acknowledged or not whites participate in a world that they know, but do not have to acknowledge it because they are provided the hegemonic luxury of assuming an ignorant state of unknowing.  In short,  whites know that there is racial tension, but they don’t want to know so they pretend to not know and therefore it exist as some type of fantasy or illusion rather than a reality masked as fantasy.  Perhaps this is why the issue of whiteness has been so difficult to captivate.  Whiteness is seen as a fantasy to those who have the choice to make it a fantasy, but for those that are non-white whiteness is far any assumed illusory fantasy.  In order to significantly stake a claim as to whether whiteness is or is not we must first understand that it is something by its very proposal of existence.  As a subject and object, it is a discourse and discursive practice that crosses multiple disciplines and interests.  I find that there is often an autoerotic language game that takes place in the conversations on whiteness in which people are more concerned with fantasizing about the correct semantic styling rather than pursuing an engagement of activism and reconstruction of whiteness as anti-racist.  What becomes problematic is how to situate whiteness so that we do not try to trap it and confine to an operational discourse but rather allow a discourse to be just as adaptable and revolutionary in being able to reconstruct itself and its beliefs, theoretical presuppositions, and assumptions in order to maintain a critical perspective of the evolutionary and elusive nature of whiteness?

Whiteness is often talked about as an invisible social phenomenon, yet the term phenomenon alludes to the idea that whiteness can be observed.  I propose one step further in my own theoretical discourse in implicating whiteness as a social phenomenological enigma.  By proposing whiteness as a phenomenological enigma we can capture in a broad sense its observability while contemplating its mystery.   If we maintain that whiteness is not static but always in the process of transformation based on social, historical, and cultural dimensions then we can formulate our lens in accordance with such contextualization.  Whiteness as a phenomenological project implies a certain measure of consistency.  But again how do we measure a social construct that is oxymoronically absently present? 

Though the idea of whiteness being an observable mystery makes it difficult and complicated, we must understand that making whiteness evident as a visible social construct that is not easily identified by an objective marker, i.e. skin color or physical characteristic, is just as possible as describing the wind.  We cannot see the wind or the air we breathe, yet we feel and see its affect on the trees as they sway to and fro.  Whiteness is a clever phenomenological enigma that has created a reality masked in illusion by the hegemonic proprietors who created it for the purpose of their own social superiority and systemic privilege.

In order to examine whiteness in context we must provide a prospective lens through which to view it or make it theoretically evident.  For the purpose of this paper, I have chosen to focus on the critical pedagogy of whiteness as it penetrates the celluloid enigmatically through religious allocation in the movie Saved (2004).  This concept, the critical pedagogy of whiteness, is described by Kincheloe (1999) as follows:

In the multicultural context a critical pedagogy of whiteness theoretically grounds a form of teaching that engages students in an examination of the social, political, and psychological dimensions of membership in a racial group. The critical imperative demands that such an examination be considered in relation to power and the ideological dynamics of white supremacy. A critical pedagogy of whiteness is possible only if we understand in great specificity the multiple meanings of whiteness and their effects on the way white consciousness is historically structured and socially inscribed. Without such appreciations and the meta-consciousness they ground, awareness of the privilege and dominance of white Northern European vantage points are buried in the cemetery of power evasion. Neither our understanding that race is not biological but social or that racial classifications have inflicted pain and suffering on non-Whites should move us to reject the necessity of new forms of racial analysis.

Whiteness is not a biological organism, but a socially constructed enigma.  It is not the same as the racial category of “white” although the two share a historical kinship.  Whiteness is the subjectively interpreted, covert, elusive, invisible, non-questioned, and pervasive phenomenological enigma. The racial category “white” is an objective visible marker; however, this racial category often goes unquestioned as a constitutive culture, being questioned as a group, or falling into tokenism due to the act of an individual.  This phantasm of society that has become a significant hegemonic marker has been difficult to capture within a full operational and definitive ideal.  It moves and transforms according to its social, historical, and cultural context.  Regardless of how we attempt to examine it, many critical pedagogues approach the issue of whiteness as they would any other social phenomenon by intimately engaging and exploring “issues of power and power differences between white and non-white people” (Kincheloe, 1999, p. 162).  Power itself must be contextualized further within issues of ideology, epistemology, and hegemonic reproduction (Apple, Foucault, Gramsci).