[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.I have suggested that in his experiment, Griffin internalizes somethingakin to Du Boisian double-consciousness.Yet whereas Du Bois describesa condition of twoness, of internalized self-contradiction and self-striving that he attributes to a dominant social order that projects its35own pathologies onto the raced subject, Griffin, in an attempt to con-tain the anxiety about his self that is given expression in his contempt forthe Negroid face, relates a more literalized splitting of the self in two.This internalization of an observer figure in turn facilitates the rest ofthe narrative, which consists primarily of Griffin s self-observation, en-abling Griffin simultaneously to occupy positions of detachment fromand engagement with his own experience.By racially coding the functions of observer and observed, Griffinalso internalizes the larger southern economy of spectatorship under thedominant social order.His experiment in passing proves instructive inthese invisible laws of looking, under which spectatorship is a func-tion of economic and social power and hence mediated through cate-gories of identity.For example, he discovers that a black male passengeron a Jim Crow bus can signify his defiance of white male hegemony bymeeting the gaze of the white driver, an act that recuperates the legiti-macy of black masculinity.He learns that although black men are pro-hibited from meeting the gaze of white women, with whom eye contact 172 Crossing the Lineis tantamount to physical contact and hence rape, white men and blackmen are socially sanctioned in their objectification of black women.Helearns the role of spectatorship in policing, how observation is related tosupervision, and how supervision is dependent on hierarchy.Using the eyes of others as a yardstick, Griffin s observing self alsonotes howhis Negroself is madeintoaspectacle.Inthejournal entryof November 7, for example, as Griffin awaits a bus to take him fromNew Orleans to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he describes the hate stare of a white man whose hostility bears a strong resemblance to Griffin sownprevious self-contempt: [Thehatestare] camefromamiddle-age,heavy-set, well-dressed white man.He sat a few yards away, fixing hiseyes on me.Nothing can describe the withering horror of this.You feellost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much becauseit threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light.You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity ofit (rather than its threat) terrifies you.It was so new I could not take myeyes from the man s face.I felt like saying: What in God s name are youdoing to yourself? (4).While the man fixes his eyes on Griffin, Griffin in turn feels him-self fixed to the spot, paralyzed and transfixed by the Medusa-like hor-ror of the spectacle of a stranger s malevolence.Instead of respondingto the hate stare with anger, Griffin directs his outrage and disgust at thefact of the man s unmasked hatred, at the sheer visibility of such mal-ice.As opposed to the previous mirror scene, in which Griffin expressesno conscious compunction at his own visceral response to the mark ofblackness, here the nakedness of the stranger s reaction (itself a kind ofmirror image) reflects clearly on Griffin himself.Whereas the previousmirror scene located shame in the identity of the bald Negro, herethe focus of Griffin s concern is the potential of unmasked hatred toshame and dishonor the white subject.The depth of Griffin s simultaneous identification with and revulsionfrom the white stranger is reflected in the ambiguity of the pronoun you. Whereas the stranger s hate stare is intended to provoke feelingsof shame in the black (observed) Griffin, in the white (observing) Griffinthe expression kindles both shame (at the obvious brutality of the act)and guilt (at his own complicity with the act).The narrator s use of theword you, in phrases such as You see a kind of insanity, reiteratesthis doubleness, at once depersonalizing and universalizing his response; White Identity in Black Like Me 173in such cases, you both includes and excludes the speaker s I. Outof this sense of doubleness, Griffin is able to experience the witheringeffects of racism on black self-realization as well as the shattering effectsof the realization of racism on his own self-esteem.Griffin s encounter with the stranger in New Orleans portends hiseven more traumatic arrival in Hattiesburg on November 14.Just beforedeparting New Orleans, Griffin had learned of a federal grand jury sfailure to hand down any indictments in the April 25 lynching of MackParker, a twenty-three-year-old truck driver.At the time a mob attackedhim, Parker was being held in a Poplarville, Mississippi, jail on trumped-up charges of rape.Though FBI agents, called in to assist with the inves-tigation, had managed to obtain several admissions of guilt and had in-cluded these in a 378-page report on the lynching, the jury composedof twenty white people and one black man found no basis for prose-36cution.When Griffin arrives in Hattiesburg, not far from the site ofthe lynching, the black population is reeling from rage and despair at theverdict.It is under these circumstances (and perhaps out of an uncon-scious desire to probe the limits of his own response to the lynching andjury verdict) that Griffin, now in a dilapidated Hattiesburg hotel room,decides to a letter tohis wife:writeThe observing self saw the Negro surrounded by the sounds andsmells of the ghetto, write Darling to a white woman.The chainsof my blackness would not allow me to go on.Though I understoodand could analyze what was happening, I could not break through.Never look at a white woman look downor the other way
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]