Seeing Race In Modern America Analysis

Throughout Seeing Race in Modern America, scholar Matthew Pratt Guterl explores how cultural “sightlines” (Guterl 2) resist change over time in the way we see race as he argues that race is a “social construction of color” (Guterl 3), dependant on visual cues. Guterl uses a myriad of visual culture, such as advertisements, movies, and popular culture as evidence that making race visual is what causes its longevity. In his analysis of “sightlines that challenge the eye,” (Guterl 128) he turns to movies such as Tropic Thunder to investigate the ways in which visual culture establishes race and combats change through stable sightlines that make “public certainty and common sight possible” (Guterl 9).
Though Tropic Thunder is, at its surface,
I believe that it is movies such as Tropic Thunder that challenge how we see race and force us to question if our views of certain races is based on reality or solely on what visual media has construed race to be. In this modern age, there is most definitely a hyper-sensitivity to race, with many finding it hard to do anything right in an ad or film that may feature multiple races as there are always some who make an argument that was is being presented is obviously racist. I cannot help but wonder what Guterl would think about the movie Black Panther, with its primarily all-black cast and focus on black people as the saviors of the day. It is through Guterl’s argument that race is a social construction that I am able to better identify what makes race visible to me, not only in visual culture but in everyday life and causes me to think how we can create a post-racial world when these depictions of race continue to exist and are almost normalized in the minds of
Through the use of satire, the film forces American audiences to see race as a visual construction as the “bold masquerades...constitute a very distinctive way of seeing race” (Guterl 165). The audience is forced to recognize racial truths as one realizes how complex our view of what race is and what it actually is. As with Cruise’s donning of Jewface and Downey’s donning of both blackface and yellowface, they serve to remind us that these depictions “rely on the same practice of racial sight, the same sightline, so to speak” (Guterl 159). This returns us to Guterl’s argument that race is simply a visual construction as it is through the repetition of these racial sightlines that cause the longevity of racism and implores us to see race first and the person