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Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist Author(s): Dan Flory Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 64, No. 1, Special Issue: Thinking through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (Winter, 2006), pp. 67-79 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3700493 . Accessed: 10/01/2012 20:49
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DAN FLORY

Spike Lee and the SympatheticRacist

Knowthyself. on of Inscription theTemple ApolloatDelphi ' In his recent book White,RichardDyer argues that racial whiteness has operated in Western film and photographyas 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 maintainsthat 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.

Cited: in Jones, "The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans," p. 75. As she notes, her analysis is based on Joe R. Feagin, HernanVera, and Pinar Batur, White Racism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 117-151, especially pp. 141-142. (It should also be noted that the white professorof law quoted was sharplycriticalof his own here, David B. Oppenheimer, responsesto these images. His position is actuallyconsistent with the one I outline. See his "TheMovementfrom Sympathy to Empathy, Through Fear; The Beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny Provoke Differing Emotions but SimilarRacial Concerns,"TheRecorderJune9 (1992): 14.) 44. See AlexanderNehamas, TheArt of Living: Socratic Reflectionsfrom Plato to Foucault (Universityof California Press, 1998), especially pp. 40, 106, 185-188. 45. Noel Carroll, "InterpretingCitizen Kane," Persistence of Vision7 (1989): 51-61, reprintedin Interpretingthe Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 163. 46. For discussion of philosophy 's capacities and whether film can mimic them, see Stephen Mulhall, On Film (New York: Routledge, 2002), especially pp. 1-10; Julian Baggini, "Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall 's On Film," Film-Philosophy 7 (2003), available at ; Mulhall, "Ways of Thinking: A Response to Andersen and Baggini," Film-Philosophy 7 (2003), available at . www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n25 47. An early version of this work was presented at the "Narration, Imagination,and Emotionin the Moving Image Media" conference sponsored by the Center for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 24, 2004. I thank audience members there, especially Lester Hunt, Amy Coplan, and Katherine Thomson-Jones,for comments and encouragement.I also for thankSusan Kollin, MurraySmith,and Tom Wartenberg readingand commentingon earlierversions of this essay.