ABSTRACT
Power in contemporary society habitually passes itself off as embodied in the normal as opposed to the superior. This is common to all forms of power, but it works in a peculiarly seductive way with whiteness, because of the way it seems rooted in common-sense thought, in things other than ethnic difference… Socialized to believe the fantasy that whiteness represents goodness and all that is benign and nonthreatening, many white people assume this is the way black people conceptualize whiteness. They do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures, is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness. (Dyer 1988:45)
In the Western scholarly imaginary, white skin is designated a discursive construct: Unmarked, unseen, and protected from public scrutiny, whiteness is said to be deeply implicated in the politics of domination. Viewed as a location, a space, a set of positions from which power emanates and operates, white political practice appears to be thoroughly disconnected from the body: Corporality has been removed from the politics of whiteness. Dissociated from physicality, and “the essentially embodied nature of our social existence” (Connerton 1989:74), whiteness is perceived as a normalizing strategy which produces racial categories. Seen not as a marker of actual skin color, whiteness is no more than a discursive axiom for racial differentiation: It is merely a “politically constructed category parasitic on blackness” (West 1993:212). Although some scholars concede that “whiteness is embodied insofar as it is lived experience” (Ware 1996),1 the metaphysical dimensions of whiteness are generally accepted without challenge. Such assertions are troublesome as well as deeply problematic.
