I'm returning to Chauncey DeVega and his commentary on the South Carolina "white thug cop Michael Slager" cop who shot a black man, Walter Scott, in the back and killed him. In his post,
Colorblind White Racism and the Right-Wing Media's Response to the Killing of Walter Scott WARN 04/10/2015, he discusses some of the ways in which white racism in America is propagated with the pretense of color-blindness.
... white supremacy in the post civil rights era often works via a superficial condemnation of obvious racism and racially motivated violence against people of color as a means of advancing a type of White Racial Logic which deems racism and white supremacy as things of the past, outliers and aberrations in contemporary America.
He discusses this example from FOX News:
On The Five, panelist Greg Gutfeld suggested that when viewing the video recorded murder of Walter Scott by Michael Slager, he "doesn't see race" but rather one person being killed unjustly by another.
Gutfeld is delusional.
Unless he has a problem with his vision, Gutfeld most definitely sees a white cop shooting an unarmed black person in the back.
Here, the White Gaze and White Racial logic refuse to "see" or acknowledge race. In doing so, white supremacy is advanced and sustained because the social and political context of white on black violence and inequality is removed.
Fox News' Greg Gutfeld is also demonstrating a second component of colorblind racism: the theft and misappropriation of anti-racist language. [my emphasis]
This fits in with some of the things I've observed in a book from 1990 that I'll comment on in a couple of following posts in this series.
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