White Hegemony

 White Hegemony 

Dr Manisha Patil 

The Bluest Eye is the tragedy of a black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who is the victim of racism. However, this racism is not something which we find only in the external world but something which has also invaded one’s consciousness. There is no inherent objective truth about their ugliness (‘you looked closely and could not find the source.’) but only the fiction of white superiority (‘…it came from conviction, their conviction.’) and this fiction is perpetuated through culture (‘They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance.’). In Western civilization, dominant white culture (‘self’) is defined primarily against the black underdog (‘other’). By the logic of binary opposition or the ‘Manichean allegory’ (Abdul Jan Mohammad’s term), white is defined as good, black as bad; white as intelligent, black as dumb; white as civilized, black as barbaric; white as rich, black as poor. Even inborn physical features are assigned intrinsic beauty value: white physical features – white skin, blue eyes, blond hair – are termed as beautiful, while black physical features – black skin, high cheekbones, thick lips – are termed as ugly. In short, blackness does not have any other autonomous status apart from the distorted mirror image of whiteness. 

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist proposed the concept of hegemony which states that ‘a social class achieves a predominant influence and power, not by direct and overt means but by succeeding in making its ideological view of society so pervasive that the subordinate classes unwittingly accept and participate in their own oppression.’1 In The Bluest Eye, no white authority figure appears in person to impose his values on the black people. That job is performed by the mass culture of consumerism and capitalism. Mass culture propels all people towards a universalism which is the politics of propagating certain ideas as universal, trans-historical, as always and essentially non-contingent. However, mass culture deliberately ignores the fact that so-called universal features of humanity are the characteristics of those who occupy the positions of political dominance. Universalization helps this dominant class to pose itself as disembodied and representative class of citizens. The myth of universalism creates a tactic hierarchy between the universal/ dominant values and local/subordinate values. The universal is brought to the center while the local is pushed to the periphery. As a result, ‘Euro-American’ characteristics become universal and central and it becomes the duty of all others confined to locality and periphery to achieve those features. Mass culture also shows people the way to perform this duty: by internalizing universal (white) notions and by consuming products that reflect that universalism. Movies, advertisements, bill boards, fashion magazines and all other vehicles of consumerism constantly present us with the so-called universally ideal (or idealized) images of high-quality commodities whose consumption would result in equally ideal (white) selfhood. For example, Dick-and-Jane Primer starts with the description of a beautiful house: ‘Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty.’ It shelters an ideal family: ‘Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy.’ (1) The Primer text creates a one-to-one connection between the two and both together provide an individual with success and happiness. Similarly, white baby dolls, Shirley Temple cups and Mary Jane candies endlessly reproduce the images of universally ideal feminine beauty first disseminated through Hollywood movies – Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. Commodity culture turns even female bodies into the sexual commodities to be consumed equally by all – men, women, black and white. However, in accordance with mass culture’s projection of idealism, sexualized/idealized female bodies are exclusively white, turning black female bodies its opposite – demonic and repulsive. Yet again total absence of black female bodies from mass culture (result of erasure and replacement) lets black women hallucinate themselves as white beauties, making self-denial a pleasurable experience. Thus, mass culture’s deception of reality, lets subordinate classes cultivate the illusion that they are on par with the dominant class and can in fact become the most dominant class, while in reality foreclosing all the doors to equality and power. 

Commenting on this process of abstracting universal and ideal notions, Jennifer Gillan says, ‘When the abstract, disembodied citizen is figured as white and male, all others cannot embody such citizenship because they are hyper-embodied by the racial and/or gendered markings on their bodies.’2 In America, theoretically all are equal (but separate), and all have equal access to power but the underlining concept of ‘abstract, disembodied citizen’ skillfully curtails blacks’ and women’s actual acquisition of power. Furthermore, America’s image-building during the World War II, as ‘the crusader against racialized forms of nationalism abroad’ disguises ‘this systematic reinforcement of a racial and gendered criteria for full citizenship’ at home. America uses the policy of ‘focusing on the wrong front’ (called ‘Maginot Line Syndrome’ by the historian Sidney Lens) – whereby there are deliberate ‘historical displacements in which something of lesser significance comes to occupy a central position and thereby effaces the more disturbing issue’ – to defocus attention from its own unjust, exclusionary, racist and sexist practices. Jennifer Gillan further says, ‘[A]s Hitler’s crimes against humanity came into sharp focus, the United States’ own conflicts over race purity were displaced and receded into the background…The domestic support for racialized nationalism is overshadowed on the international front by the United States’ intervention in the war against racialized nationalism in Europe; the economic threat of black male labor to white male ascendancy is transformed by lynching rhetoric into a sexual threat black males to white womanhood; black exclusion from national family, especially the thwarting of the black male appropriation of the breadwinner role, is superceded by the inclusion of the ideal black female servant into the white family; black economic inequality is refigured as the retardation of black male progress by the presence of a matriarchal kinship network. In each case, the original exclusionary practice is rewritten through a counter narrative of reversal or justification.’3 

This whole process, then, erases the specificity of bodies, places and histories and condemns all to an abstract universal ideal. For example, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 Department of Labor Report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, ignores the sexual exploitation of black women by their white masters and instead reinforces the cultural myth of black rapist to uphold the false image of the Southern white gentleman as the chivalric protector of ideal womanhood. These images of chivalric gentleman and ideal woman (beautiful and virtuous: angel in the house) exclude black men and black women right from the beginning because basically they are built against the stereotypes of black men and women as ugly, barbaric and promiscuous. Similarly the white ideal of nuclear family with father as the sole breadwinner and master of the household is inapplicable to African American community because historically slavery destroyed the black families where blacks were not married but bred like horses and then sold in the slave markets. Many times the so-called chivalric white gentlemen themselves were the fathers of their mulatto slaves and they themselves sold their own sons and daughters to the highest bidders. In such a situation only matriarchal kinship structure could provide black people with the legitimate comfort, care and sense of belongingness. Even after Emancipation, the enslaving socio-economic-political conditions did not change much and the importance of matriarchal kinship networks that share household spaces, services and goods and that guarantee financial support and child care during emergencies remained intact. In fact, matriarchal kinship structure is the most important survival technique of the African American community. The Moynihan report, however, blames this system as the main cause of African American backwardness. It states that matriarchal kinship structure of black family is ‘so out of line with the rest of American society’ that it ‘seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.’ It proposes instead African Americans’ willing adoption of white nuclear family structure as both a means of their assimilation in the larger American society and of their achieving equality with the white Americans. 

In fact, this pressure to assimilate – to adopt exclusively white perspective and behavior regardless of its applicability – is very strong on the African American community. The African American community responds to this pressure by developing an interest in everything white and developing corresponding disinterest in everything black. For them even the white baby dolls become more precious than a living black girl like Pecola. They fuss over the dismembered dolls (‘Tears threatened to erase the aloofness of their authority. The emotion of years of unfulfilled longing preened in their voices.’ [14]) but look away in disgust when they face Pecola. (‘They tried never to glance at her’ [34]) In their topsy-turvy world view they fail to see the reality: white hegemony as the cause of black misery and instead start seeing what the whites want them to see: black misery as the result of black unworthiness. It causes further misery for the black people because now they themselves become disinterested in their own welfare and on the other hand, engage in the ‘disinterested violence’ towards other black people. Pecola’s scapegoating by the larger African American community is nothing but the extreme example of this disinterested violence: ‘disinterestedness is occasioned specifically by the inability to place people and events into contexts that would flesh out experience and thus make obvious the limitations of present actions or beliefs. It becomes steadily more difficult for characters in The Bluest Eye to do this because they are either separated from the supportive networks that would encourage it and (or as a result) because their placement in American culture does not sanction accurate representations of what that context would be. The result is a community of individuals who are, at times, painfully alienated from each other as each is divided within him/herself. Pecola’s split consciousness at the end of the novel is a literal representation of this doubleness(7); it affects other characters also as distortions or denials of self, but denials and distortions approved and fostered in popular iconographic representation.’4 On the whole, the result of this whole dehumanizing process is very tragic: wasting of black beauty at every step. 

Dr Manisha Patil