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"Looking at One's Self Through the Eyes of Others": W. E. B. Du Bois's Photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition
African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Shown Michelle Smith
Photographs of lynchings circulated widely, reinforcing the association of whiteness with terror in African American minds. [21] These images served, perhaps, as the "substitute" for slavery that white supremacists, like the Harper's correspondent cited earlier, hoped would ensure the "discipline" of African Americans in post-slavery America. As Elizabeth Alexander argues, "There are countless stories of violence made spectacular in order to let black people know who was in control" (105-06). Explaining further the psychological effects of these spectacles of white violence upon the black body, Alexander states: "Black men are contained when these images are made public, at the very same time that black viewers are taking in evidence that provides grounds for collective identification with trauma" (106). This collective identification, felt and known in the body, can then become, according to Alexander, a "catalyst for action" (105). Witnessing the scenes of violence depicted in photographs can enable a first step toward African American resistance. According to Christian Walker, reclaiming "a collective historical identity" is "the first line of defense against a legacy of cultural annihilation" (69).
How do such photographs function for white viewers? Whiteness is also consolidated around these images of violence, but for whites such images enable a very different kind of racial identification. On the surface these images encourage white viewers to reject the trauma of experienced physical violence and to identify with the perpetrators of that violence. On another level, the images make absolutely apparent the fact that, as Eric Lott suggests, whiteness is a split identity formulated on the violent repression of the other (36-37). If whiteness and blackness are so violently distinguished in turn-of-the-century lynching photographs, how can we under stand the possibility that white American viewers may have recognized themselves in the white-looking "other" of Du Bois's "American Negro" albums? The European or Euro-American viewer who assumes herself to be white would experience a psychological rift in such an identification, perhaps becoming momentarily conscious of the violent split that establishes whit e identity. In order to sustain a unified image of the visual signs that constitute superficial whiteness, the white viewer could not help but see self in other. But in this identification is also the unraveling of whiteness as a boundary between self and other, for the image of this white-looking girl is in an archive of "Negroes." Indeed, Du Bois's albums make whiteness just one point in an archive of blackness, and, specifically, they show whiteness to be the repressed point in an archive of blackness. In what one might call the larger archive of "race," whiteness is the position repressed so thoroughly that it has reproduced itself everywhere. [22] As Richard Dyer suggests, because of its very pervasiveness, whiteness becomes an invisible racial sign (44-47); it is the (repressed) norm of unseen seeing. If the blackness produced "through the eyes of [white] others" is itself an image of whiteness, revealing more about those who produce the category than about those purportedly represented by that sign, th en the self-identified white viewer must see in the violence and dismembering of the African American body the structures of white identity. For some at least, this recognition would produce a psychological rift, a split subjectivity imploding with the violent impact of sameness.
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