Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

670 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
Once while sitting in a café in Toronto with a black female friend, a young white woman interrupted
our conversation to tell me that I looked identical to a black female friend of hers whom she had just
dropped off at the airport. I stared blankly at this woman and said nothing (what does one say?) When
she left my friend said in an exasperated tone, “right and ‘we’ all look alike ...”
Visual dissonance. As the above anecdotes indicate, the practice of misidentification is
not confined to a particular setting; these interactions are inherent to the society in which we
live. Moreover, the recurrence of these situations suggests that they are neither aberrant, nor
are they simply the actions of “strange” individuals. These encounters do not take place in a
social vacuum; they are linked to broader belief systems and structures about “difference.” In
this context they reveal the taken for grantedness of whites consciousness of blackness. That is,
these incidents are illustrative of the contradictory ways in which we are simultaneously seen and
not seen. While the population distribution of each region undoubtedly informs and shapes the
public’s expectations regarding the existence of different racial groups, these anecdotes support
white stereotypes of blackness which perceive black women (and other “women of color”) as an
undifferentiated category. These examples offer insight into established patterns of interaction
between whites and black “others.” The system of white racial power is operationalized through
the act of misrecognition because the white gaze, which produces this consciousness, remains
hidden from view.
III: Travel Tales
West Coast, U.S.A. Post-911 America: From domestic to terrorist in three short steps. The following
incident took place in 2003. I was teaching at a University in the Pacific Northwest for one quarter
and on one occasion I returned home to Vancouver, British Columbia for the weekend. I had driven
directly to the airport following the completion of my second class of the day. At the first security
check an elderly white gentleman looked at my passport and then back at me and asked, “are you
sure you don’t want to stay in town this weekend and wash my windows?” I declined his offer and I
had managed to take three steps forward before I was confronted with the second wave of security.
At this point a white woman in her thirties proceeded to go through my carry on luggage and then she
searched me thoroughly. I asked why I was the only person being subjected to that kind of scrutiny
(I had watched white women and men proceed unchallenged). Her response was that “she needed to
look busy.”
The Power to ‘See ...’. What does it mean for this white female security officer to “look
busy with a black female body”? (In this instance being Canadian made no difference, I was
simply racialized as a homogeneous black body). There were certainly other bodies available
but they were white. Given that black bodies have historically been marked as a threat, if
not threatening, this woman’s interrogation of me makes it appear (to both the public and her
colleagues) as though she is doing her job, rather than simply trying to “pass the time away,” as she
suggests.
Vancouver, British Columbia en route to Los Angeles, California. It was August 2003 the height
of summer holiday travel. I was the only black amongst a sea of white American tourists returning
“home” from their cruise to Alaska. A customs agent (an elderly white woman) singled me out. Did
I have a return ticket? Yes, I reply, but it is an electronic ticket. Yes, I have a copy of the receipt on
my computer. I am then asked to show this receipt. I boot up my computer, which of course takes a
minute. I begin the process and before it is complete, she says to me skeptically, “Oh, it won’t start
up? “No” I said, “it just takes a minute.” Once I showed her the receipt she granted me entry and I
was able to travel another day.
Given that this is not the first time I have experienced this kind of attention (I had been a target
of immigration and security agents well before September 2001), it is difficult to not see this as
an occasion to exercise racism without the practice being named as such. We are all not equally