Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introductory
1. A point of entry In this paper, Ahmed is attempting to make a contribution to the project of
anti-racism by thinking about a specific experience that racism has produced. Namely, she wants
to analyze what it means to inhabit a white world as a non-white body.
2. Her method Ahmeds method is phenomenology. She wants to examine how the experience
of a non-white body is inflected, determined, and constrained by moving in white spaces, i.e.
spaces where bodies that are coded as white have certain privileges that non-white bodies dont
have. (Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates
bodies in specific directions, affecting how they take up space (150). Her ultimate hope is to
interrogate what whiteness is, what a white space is, and how whiteness functions.
3. As she points out, however, its very difficult to develop a phenomenology of whiteness
(phenomenology: a description of phenomena, or appearances) given the fact that whiteness is
a category of experience that disappears as a category through experience (150). In other
words, the chief characteristic of whiteness in general and white spaces in particular is that they
arent marked as such.
Orientations
Whiteness as Orientation
5. Ahmeds basic point is that when you are a non-white body in a white world, its impossible to
be as seamlessly enmeshed with and familiar with that world: your experience of that world is
inflected by an awareness of how you are being viewed.
a. Fanons smokes. He feels a desire to smoke, that desire generates a corporeal schema
(an outline or a plan) that orients him to his environment (if Im going to smoke I know
that the matches are in the drawer, and Ill have to lean back slightly, etc., etc.). The
point is that a certain self-consciousness about the possibility of moving attends him.
6. Whiteness is an orientation that puts certain things within reach. By objects we would include
not just physical objects, but also styles, capacities, aspirations, techniques, habits (154).
Habits Worlds
7. In this section, Ahmed wants to explore how public spaces take on the very qualities of the
bodies that inhabit them: how public spaces become racialized.
a. The key quote is on page 156, in which Merleau-Ponty describes how when he is leaning
on his desk with his hands, the hands become the sole objects of his attention and the
rest of the body trails behind them like the tail of a commet, becoming unnoticed.
b. Much in the same way, that the habitual body, or the body that goes unnoticed, trails
behind an action, Ahmed wants to say that whiteness functions in a similar fashion.
i. White bodies are habitual insofar as the trail behind actions: they do not get
stressed in their encounters with objects or others, as their whiteness goes
unnoticed. Whiteness would be what lags behind; white bodies do not have to
face their whiteness; they are not orientated towards it, and this not is what
allows whiteness to cohere, as that which bodies are orientated around. When
bodies lag behind, then they extend their reach (156).
ii. So the thought here seems to be that white bodies are those bodies that have
the privilege to move and extend themselves without self-consciousness.