Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

The Social Optics of Race 125
cant, he manipulates the image by orally instructing the computer to “pan
right, magnify, stop,” and so on. Both characters are engaging with the computer
by means other than through a hardware interface: Deckard uses voice
recognition, a technique that hails the computer as an interlocutor, and
Anderton and the Zion gate operator use gesture, a performative and proprioceptive
means of command and control. And in addition, both are engaging
in digital image processing and enhancement as a way to “see” or detect the
truth about a crime. Both Blade Runner and Minority Report begin with extreme
close-up shots of eyes, and as Kaja Silverman writes of Blade Runner:
“However, if the opening shots work in an anticipatory way to break down
the dichotomy between replicants and humans by focusing on an eye which
could represent either, it is because that organ represents precisely the site
at which difference is ostensibly discernible within the world of Blade Runner.”
53 Minority Report’s ubiquitous shots of eyes being scanned in shopping
malls, subways, housing projects, and workplaces expands this notion of
retinal surveillance to the public sphere in its entirety. The eye becomes the
sole signifier of identity in this panoptic future. Hence the positioning of
Anderton’s eye as an Asian one allows the notion of hybrid forms of subjectivity
to come into play. Far from the celebratory mestiza subject of Gloria
Anzaldúa’s writings, however, this one comes from a lack of empathy rather
than a plurality of it—Anderton only needs to take the position of the
raced, hunted, marginalized person of color into account, he only needs to
really see it, at the moment that he begins his new life as a fugitive from justice.
Hence cyberculture enables a privileged view of image and race as
code and takes it away: the same computers that allow Anderton to “scrub”
the image make him permanently vulnerable to their surveillance. This unprecedented
vulnerability to techno-surveillance is, however, part of what it
means to be a person of color in the “integrated circuit,” to use Haraway’s
eloquent formulation. Donna Haraway and Paul Gilroy both strongly insist
on the revisioning of race as code, genome, and restlessly interrogate this system:
the visuality of race has retreated from pencil tests, paper bag tests, and
other naked-eye optical assessments and now resides in acronyms like ART,
DNA, IVF, and HGP. 54 The primacy of vision reigns unchallenged but only
on a level so microscopic that only machines can “see” it. Advances in
biotechnology extend a process of visualizing the body as information that
began in the mid-twentieth century. In Sarah Chinn’s fascinating history of
the Red Cross and its policies regarding cross-racial blood donation during
World War II and before, she remarks that blood replaced skin as the ruling