White Posture

Abstract

It began for most of us as vision, voiced-over in a commodity form, selling news. We were positioned as consumers. The tape recorded the aftermath of an interdiction: a black body stopped for speeding on a public highway by three sets of policing forces charged with overlapping, but differing functions of protection. The highway was the taken-for-granted national “frame”—a piece of public sphere, constructed as part of the federally subsidized post-World War II differentiation of metropolitan space into zones of wealth and want, transparency and color, caviar and criminality; serving initially as link between commercial “downtown” and suburban “bedroom,” but increasingly in recent years shuttling resources, power, and appropriately inscribed bodies between the various epicenters of the new suburban hubs of American prosperity and identity. This particular body had been circulating not in South Central, but in the (suburban) neighborhood of Lake View Terrace, in a time (post-December 1987) and place (near the posh neighborhood of Westwood) when memory was still fresh of a young white woman who had been caught in the cross fire of a drive-by-shooting (Dumm, 184). The body had gotten out of the car, dared dance, and swiftly met the end of its mobility at the end of a baton.

Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen.

—W. E. B. Du Bois (Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, Vol. 2, 25–26).