The Theme Of Imagery In Richard Dyer's White?

In White, Richard Dyer discusses whiteness and the imagery it plays that unfairly privileges and paves a path of success for its European possessors, while blinding them to this fact in order to avoid feelings of guilt, because “other people are raced, we are just people.” While recognizing his own privileges as a white man in society and the normalcy his successes are characterized as, he only begins to become conscious to this as he became aware to the oppressions he faces as a gay man. He recognizes his hesitance towards centralizing around whiteness with this book, as society already does, but does so to “dislodge it from centrality and authority.” Dyer also struggles with choosing terminology to reference these discussed whites and feels

A strong built body was also a display of class and was comparable to imperial enterprise because the body submits to the planning of the mind, in which “colonial worlds are likewise represented as inchoate terrain needing the skill, sense, and vision of the colonizer to be brought to order.” This is only maintained by the white man while the woman is responsible for its death. Women are typically echoed as saying “there’s nothing I can do,” only perpetuating their idealized helplessness and more concerned with drama and gossip such as in talk shows and soap operas, rather than face realities of their changing world. Finally, Dyer refers to whiteness as death, unlike typical ideas of Christianity he references the KKK as, the Holocaust, and AIDS as depicted in the film Aliens, as instances where white was used to invoke fear and fatality. He concludes by noting that “most white people” do not walk around glowing from a light within, however it coexists with “extreme whiteness,” which fixates on deeming white as

There becomes a desperate need to portray whiteness and all its idealistic, attached traits as something natural, such as the attempt to quantify skin color with science in Becoming Yellow and identifying Mongolian traits such as the “Mongolian spot” and “their heads are usually oval, with flat faces, narrow eyes drawn up towards the external corners, small noses…”. This is also explained in White when white actors are presented with a luminescence glow “from within” as displayed in film. This book also addresses issues in which whites are the representative for all beings, and Dyer ponders about whites joining the “race talk,” in which he is hesitant of the “green light problem” where they are permitted to remain focused on themselves, and thus may also participate in “me-too-ism,” where they can claim similar sufferings, like, but nowhere near similar to the oppressions their nonwhite counterparts face daily. To be white is to simply be the human race. I identified more with Dyer’s book because as a white person in society, I receive certain privileges that I am only conscious of because I have taken comparative ethnic studies classes, and many of Dyer’s arguments opened up my consciousness even more to the dangers of white hegemony as the norm. I receive these