Richard Dyer Essay

In this essay, Richard Dyer takes a look into the ways race is handled by the media. For the most part, race is a term that’s only applied to non-white people. White people are not racially seen. The media tends to see whites as the human norm, which is far from the truth when you look at the numbers. This is a product of Western media, which penetrates its way into books, films, museums, television, etc. As Dyer writes, “At the level of racial representation… whites are not of a certain race; they’re just the human race.” Dyer proposes that we need to look at whiteness as a race. We need to make it strange. Once we remove the normality associated with it, we can start attacking racism and prejudice.
Racial Imagery is central to the organization of the modern world. Judgments are made on people’s worth and capacities, what they look like, where they are from- i.e. racial judgments are made. World is full of barriers of prejudices. Race in itself refers to some insignificant geographical or physical difference between people; it is really just the “imagery” of race that is in place. When studying race it seems that there is an absence in the study of images of white people, yet race is not only applicable to non-white people, nor is their imagery the only racial imagery. As long as race is something only applied to non-white people, as long as white
people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people. There is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity- raced people cannot do this-they can only speak for their race. The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them from the position of power, oppression, privileges and sufferings which are associated with them and to undercut the authority with which they speak/ act in and on the world. Reference to whites as non-raced is most obvious in habitual speech and writing of white people in the west- we never mention the whiteness of the white people we know. The assumption that white people are just people, which is not far off from saying that people with color are something else, is endemic to white culture. Bell Hooks has noted how angry white liberals become when attention is drawn to their whiteness, when they are seen by non-white people as white.
We should consider whiteness as well as blackness in order to make visible what is rendered invisible when viewed as the normative state of existence: the (white) point in space from which we tend to identify difference.
In western representation (books, films, advertising, press) whites are overwhelmingly and disproportionately predominant, have the central and elaborated roles, and above all are placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard. They are not represented to themselves as whites, but rather they are gendered, classed, and sexualized. “Whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human
race.”
White people are systematically privileged in western society, enjoying unearned advantage and conferred dominance. white people however don’t see their white privilege which acts like an invisible knapsack of assurances, tools, maps, passports, visas, clothes, blank checks, and so on. The invisibility of these assists is part of the sense that whiteness is nothing in particular, that white culture and identity have, as it were, no content. A white person is taught to believe that all that she and he does, good and ill, all that we achieve is to be accounted for in terms of our individuality… it is intolerable to realize that we may get a good job, or a helpful response in hospital because of our skin color, not because of the unique, achieving individual we must believe ourselves to be.

The equation of being white with being human secures a position of power. White people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others to fail. There are variations of power amongst white people, to do with class, gender and other factors. White people need to see learn to see themselves as white in order to see their particularity. Whiteness needs to be made strange “black” the term used by theorists and activists have two drawbacks: it excludes a huge range of people who are neither white nor black- Asians, native americans, chicanos, jews. Secondly it reinforces the dichotomy of black: white that underpins racial thought but which should be our aim to dislodge. The term “people of color” (preferred by the U.s) reiterates the notion that some people have color, while others, whites, do not. We need to recognize white as a color too, and just one among many, we cannot do that if we keep using a term that reserves color for anyone other than white people.
White people, unlike non-whites, are stereotyped according to their gender, class, sexuality and so on. Whiteness generally colonizes the stereotypical definition of all social categories other than those of race. White people in white culture are given the illusion of their own infinite variety. When we don’t get superheroes or obvious stereotypes of white people (for example in film) we feel as though we are getting the real.
For the past two centuries, north European whiteness has been hegemonic within a whiteness that has none the less been assumed to include eastern and southern European peoples. It is overarching hegemonic whiteness which concerns me, on to which northern Europeans most easily lay claim but which is not to be conflated with distinctive north European identities.