Look, A White!
Flipping the Script
- By George Yancy,
- Translated from english (USA) by Emma Bigé
- and Léna Dormeau
Pages 87 to 96
Cite this article
- YANCY, George,
- Translated from english (USA) by BIGÉ, Emma
- and DORMEAU, Léna,
- Yancy, George.,
- et al.
- Yancy, G.,
- Translated from english (USA) by Bigé, E.
- and Dormeau, L.
https://doi.org/10.3917/mult.101.0087
Cite this article
- Yancy, G.,
- Translated from english (USA) by Bigé, E.
- and Dormeau, L.
- Yancy, George.,
- et al.
- YANCY, George,
- Translated from english (USA) by BIGÉ, Emma
- and DORMEAU, Léna,
https://doi.org/10.3917/mult.101.0087
In this introduction to his 2012 critical race theory classic, Look, A White!, George Yancy proposes reversing Fanon’s racist interpellation “Look, a Negro!” into “Look, a white person!” as a strategy to render visible the normative invisibility of whiteness. This “script-flipping” functions as a gift to white people—an opportunity to see their whiteness through the eyes of racialized people and develop what he calls a “double consciousness.” Drawing on Baldwin, hooks, Ahmed and Du Bois, Yancy argues that the Black counter-gaze is necessary because whiteness remains invisible to those who inhabit it, who see whiteness and humanity as isomorphic. He encourages his white students to practice this daily naming of whiteness across all social spaces, not to essentialize or freeze white bodies, but to complicate white identity and reveal white complicity in systemic racism.