Cultural racism

"Cultural racism surfaces when some of us are forced to go on court in order to be allowed to wear cornrows to work. It surfaces when Americans of African descent feel impelled to discard one identifying term after another as each is appropriated by white society as an expression of contempt.(1) It surfaces when colored working-class popular culture remains an object of contempt even while the creativity and influence of white popular culture on high art are celebrated. It surfaces when colored cab drivers are asked to turn off their favorite radio stations by white customers who climb into their cabs. It surfaces when the traditional art of third-world cultures is relegated to the status of ‘folk art’ or ‘crafts’ while white art that deploys the same motifs is honored as ‘primitivism’, ‘pattern painting’, and ‘functional art’. It surfaces when stereotypical assumptions are made – and voiced – about a colored person’s actions, motivations, and goals in advance of any evidence as to whether those assumptions are valid. It surfaces when colored individuals are required – or motivated – to deny or suppress their original cultural heritage as a condition of entry into mainstream white society. It surfaces when coloreds and whites who work together observe, of necessity, the unspoken rule of socializing, seeking entertainment and companionship, and relaxing separately. And it surfaces when coloreds and whites sense that they cannot confide in one another at deep levels – not because their experiences have been different, but because stereotypical assumptions will make those experiences incomprehensible and threatening to the other. The varieties of cultural racism are all ways of averting one’s gaze from the immanent spectre of the Other."

Adrian Piper, "Ways of Averting One’s Gaze". 1988

(1) The terms black, Negro, and colored have all met this fate. Having resurrected black in the 1960s and dropped it in the 1970s for the short-lived Afro-American, we are now on the syntactically awkward but genteel persons of color, after the French gens de couleur libre of Louisiana. Luckily there is a plethora of linguistically foreign terms to which we may have recourse when this one gets besmirched by cultural racism in its turn. I choose colored, for its simplicity, accuracy, and conceptual and metaphorical possibilities. I intend to stick to it.