Zanele Muholi Self-Portrait (2016) from the series
Somnyama Ngonyama ('Hail The Dark Lioness')
I.
Racism is often ugly and yet, interestingly, it is clearly related to the question of aesthetics and what constitutes the beautiful (and thus, by transcendental implication, the good and the true; a linkage that Nietzsche describes as philosophically shameful).
I suppose we can trace this back to the Age of Enlightement, when, as Sander Gilman notes, the relation of blackness to questions of representation and perception was at the heart of the debate concerning artistic value and aesthetic judgement [1].
For whilst black was certainly not seen as beautiful by Kant and company, it was impossible to conceive of the latter without also formulating ideas about the former and so blackness came to serve as the ideal counterpoint not only to beauty, but morality and reason.
In brief, race - and by extension racism - was at the heart of aesthetic theory in the modern period. Artists, philosophers, and scientists all wanted to know if there was an innate reason for the usually negative response to blackness, or whether this was acquired socially and culturally.
Which is why a curious case concerning a 13-year-old boy with impaired vision became central to this debate ...
II.
According to Gilman's account, after operating on the child and restoring his sight, Dr. William Cheselden was keen to observe and report on his young patient's response to colours (of which he previously had only a vague idea).
Whilst the boy found all the bright colours pleasing - particularly red, which he thought the most beautiful - black made him feel distinctly uneasy, although eventually this feeling passed. However, when, some months later, he encountered a black woman for the first time, the child was, according to Cheselden, struck with great horror at the sight: Mama, look! It's a negro! I'm frightened!
Commenting on this case, Simon Gikandi writes:
"The conclusion here was that since the boy had not seen a black woman before, and had certainly not acquired the ability to associate blackness with ugliness through his culture and instruction, his terror was immediate and intuitive. Located on the level of physiology, that is, the eyes' immediate association of blackness with values not acquired through social association, the Cheselden experiment would be used to counter Locke's view that the association between darkness and fear was acquired through association. In its overpowering negativity, blackness was accorded an immanent value." [2]
Of course, whether that's a legitimate conclusion to draw is, of course, debatable; though it's one that Edmund Burke was happy to reinforce. Referring directly to the Cheselden study in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke argued that terror was innately associated with darkness and that blackness instinctively triggered a feeling of horror independent of any learnt associations:
"Blackness terrifies us not simply because we have been taught to fear it, Burke claimed, but because the fear of darkness has a physiological source: it causes tension in the muscles of the eye and this, in turn, generates the terror; it is precisely because of its innate capacity to produce terror that blackness functions as the source of the sublime." [3]
Again, whilst I'm not sure how valid Burke's claim is - particularly the physiological explanation in terms of eye-strain - it's certainly an interesting proposition to say the least; one which rationalises (and thus legitimises) white racism as a natural response and which posits dark bodies as frightening yet, at the same time, awe-inspiring.
We continue to see this played out within Western culture even now; not least of all within the pornographic imagination wherein blackness is both fetishised as desirable, but also portrayed as something powerfully threatening to white masculinity and the socio-sexual order.
Notes
[1] Sander L. Gilman, 'The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory', Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, (1975), pp. 373–391. To access on JSTOR, go to www.jstor.org/stable/2737769
[2] Simon Gikandi, 'Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic', Michigan Quarterley Review, Vol. XL, Issue 2, (Spring, 2001). To read online click here.
Locke's views on the nature of darkness etc. can be found expressed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689-1691).
[3] Ibid.
