Mark William Westmoreland:“Fanonian Mediations on ‘We Can’t Breath”
Channel: GIRES-Global Research Institute
Date: 23/05/2022

Dr. Mark William Westmoreland is Lecturer of Philosophy at Ocean County College, which is co-founder of the Freedom School and serves on the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Task Force. He is co-editor, with Andrea J. Pitts, of Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson (SUNY Press, 2019). His most recent work includes “White Supremacy: The Present is Prologue” in Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, “The Racial Oracle Has a History” in Teaching Race in Perilous Times (SUNY Press, 2021), and “Bergson, Colonialism, and Race” in Interpreting Bergson: Critical Essays (Cambridge UP, 2019). His other works have appeared in Educational Philosophy and Theory, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Kritike, Palgrave MacMillan, Phaenex: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, and SUNY Press.

ABSTRACT
One of the tools used within white supremacist society to dehumanize Black folks is the white gaze, which is both the lens and action through which whites (or whiteness) view(s) Black persons. The white gaze filters that view so that the default way of seeing Black persons is as irrevocably other. Put differently, white folks act as “seer” or “knower” (i.e., bearer of epistemic privilege) while Black folks are objectified. The white gaze upon Black bodies attempts to hold Black persons under surveillance—one mechanism of which is racial profiling.
White supremacy attempts to subject Black folks to erasure, attempts to rob them of their individuality. Under the white gaze, Black folks are invisible, that is, they are stripped of their personhood. Their humanity is not seen. They have no wishes, wants, desires, or beliefs. They are not present as selves. They have no past, no future. Simultaneously, under the white gaze, Black bodies are looked upon as hypervisible. Epidermal Blackness becomes their only salient feature and all that is known about the Black body, all its content, is given in advance: Black is animal, Black is ugly, Black is menacing. Where the white gaze operates, Black personhood disappears and white projections of Black bodies as evil intensify.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION
"Black Lives Matter: Lessons from a Global Movement"
Organizer: GIRES-Global Institute for Research Education & Scholarship  
Date: 21-22 May 2022
Place: Amsterdam (Virtual)
More information: https://www.gires.org/activities/conferences/black-lives-matter-lessons-from-a-global-movement/