Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

In his recent book White, Richard Dyer argues that racial whiteness has operated in Western film and photography as an idealized standard against which other races have been judged. Making his case inductively using instruction manuals, historical theories of race, and traditional lighting and make-up practices, as well as the dominant ideals for human beauty utilized in developing film stocks and camera equipment over the last 150 years and more, Dyer maintains that Western visual culture has presented whites as the norm for what it is to be "just human" or "just people," whereas other human beings have been presented as raced, as different from the norm.2 This manner of depicting whiteness has invested the category itself with the power to represent the commonality of humanity. Furthermore, Dyer argues that this historical function of whiteness's normativity continues to be profoundly influential in current practices and instruction.3 Dyer's argument is in accord with what philosophers such as Charles W. Mills and Lewis R. Gordon have advanced in broader theoretical terms regarding the operation of whiteness as a norm against which nonwhites-and particularly blacks-have been negatively judged.4 Like Dyer, Mills and Gordon argue that presumptions of whiteness institutionalize racial beliefs at the level of background assumptions that most would not even think to examine. Based on this claim, these philosophers reason that whiteness functions not only as a social norm, but also at the epistemological level as a form of learned ignorance that may only with considerable effort be brought forward for explicit critical inspection.5 Similarly, many of Spike Lee's films place into question presumptions about the normativity of whiteness. A crucial aim in his ongoing ci ematic oeuvre has been to make the experience of racism understandable to white audien e members who "cross-over" and view his films. Because seeing matters of race from a non hite perspective is typically a standpoint unfamiliar to white viewers, Lee has sought to make more accessible such an outlook through the c nstruction and use of specific character types. One way he achieves this goal is by offering depictions of characters who function as what I will call "sympathetic racists": characters with whom mainstream audiences readily ally themselves but who embrace racist beliefs and commit racist acts. By self-consciously presenting white viewers with the fact that they may form positive allegiances with characters whose racist bigotry is revealed as the story unfolds, Lee provokes his viewers to consider a far more complex view of what it means to think of one's self as "white" and how that may affect one's overall sense of humanity. Lee thus probes white audiences' investment in what might be called their "racial allegiances," a dimension of film narrative pertaining to the manner in which audiences become morally allied to characters through categories and presumptions about race.6 Foregrounding racial allegiances allows him to depict the way in which ideas of race may affect characters' and audience members' behavior at much de per levels cognitively, emotionally, and morally than many of them realize. By offering a critical perspective on their investment in race, Lee issues his viewers a philosophical