Seeing versus Knowing

Photo by Cottonbro Studios on Pexels

Hey there everyone –

Sorry this post is late. My house is in full-on construction mode and I’m surrounded by boxes and my cat, trying to record this in the gaps between sawing and hammer noises!

Have you heard of the Bechdel test?

Named after Alison Bechdel, the graphic illustrator and creator of the comic Dykes to Watch Out For, the test is the result of a 1985 strip in which two lesbians consider going to a movie. One of the characters says she’ll only see a movie if it meets a simple criteria:

1. It has to have two women in it.

2. They have to speak to each other.

3. They have to talk about something other than a man.

In the original comic, the two go to the theater and can’t find a single movie that passes the test. They decide to go home and make popcorn there, instead. 

I think part of the power of the test is that it’s absurdly pathetic in its requirements. Bechdel says that the idea was actually that of her friend Liz Wallace. The test is used to this day in Hollywood to determine if a movie is “feminist” (cough). 

The test has been adapted to account for the ways people of color are represented in film. The race Bechdel test calls attention to the fact that non-white people often serve as props—voiceless or unnamed characters that populate a scene in which the white main actors are centered. Because the white characters are granted psychological depth and complexity, they drive the story’s plot. The race Bechdel test, like the original Bechdel test, is powerful precisely because it demands so little of the filmmakers:

1. There are two or more named people of color.

2. They talk to one another.

3. They talk about something other than White people.

For a great example of why the race Bechdel test is as needed today as the original test, you might want to check out this video which compiles every line spoken by a person of color in all the Harry Potter movies, combined. Though the entire video is 6:18 long, the actual video content stops at 6:13. That’s it—six minutes and thirteen seconds, total, of speech by characters of color in eight movies featuring white people.

In both versions of the Bechdel test, the lead—that is, the character with whom the viewer is expected to identify—is presumed to be a straight white man. Of course, straight white men have a simple point of identification in these plots. But what’s interesting about this is less about the content of the story and more about what it asks of the viewer. People who are not white and not male have so much practice identifying with the main character of a story in which they aren’t represented that they have a built-in skillset: they can “cross-identify” with the viewpoint and emotional needs of a white male. 

There can be friction, of course, and anger about the lack of story that matches the lived experience of the viewer. And we are starting to get more movies that push against this master plot. But the fact is that the reason whiteness is said to be “universal,” and maleness is said to be “universal,” is because the psyche, the emotional topography, the priorities, the goals, the drives of white men are represented back to all of us as universal, and we are so used to taking on this cross-identification, often seamlessly, that the needs and priorities of white men often feel like they are “ours” too. (Yes, this makes me think about all the white women who voted for Trump. Though their motivation is likely more about access to patriarchal power and white privilege, I think this perpetual practice of cross-identification, of taking on the needs and prioritizes of the “universal subject” rather than the self could be said to be in there, too.)

It makes sense to me that the cultural rage that is being expressed by some white men right now—looking at you Dilbert creator Scott Adams—is at least in part a consequence of their complete lack of practice empathizing with, let alone understanding and seeing through the eyes of people who doesn’t share their identity. When you believe your understanding of the world is shared by everyone around you, and that you are the most interesting, most capable, most rational, most reasonable, and most suited for power person in the room, then you are going to be stunned and outraged when you are thrown into a world in which your personhood is seen as particular, your worldview as partial and biased, and your skills unsuited for the problems at hand. You’re going to “fight back” and do whatever it takes to maintain the fiction that you can live in a world that is “all white.”

Scott Adams is obviously an extreme case, but he’s worth looking at because for men like him, even increasing representation is radical. If you want to live in an all-white world, then even seeing evidence of difference is going to set you off. Though what he says is crude, the fact that he has enough power and wealth to say it publicly, and that he presumes his viewpoint is worth proclaiming because it is shared, shows that the dominant culture of the U.S. is still stuck, still arguing over the question of representation, a question that has been hard fought since the 1980s and still seems not to have budged.

If a Hollywood movie can pass a Bechdel test, and a race Bechdel test, merely by allowing a character of color who is a woman to have a name and enough of a self to have an interest beyond that of being a man’s object of desire . . . then it would make sense that corporate America thinks it’s doing a great job on its DEI goals if it focuses on representation. If it hires “more” white women and “more” people of color, and “more” insert your identity category here, and if it lards its advertisements with images of said folks, then it’s doing great, in terms of addressing its problems with “diversity.”

The problem with the idea of “inclusion” is that it’s kind of a mirror of the politics of representation. To “include” is to allow in, to absorb, to welcome, even, people who are different. But increasing the number of people in a company will not automatically transform the power relations, or the culture, or the values, or the priorities of that company. Worse, the politics of representation are vulnerable to cooptation, because they are too reductive, too simplistic to actually catalyze transformation at the level of power and culture.

To increase the number of those who are said to be “marginalized” in relation to the white dominant culture, but to ignore their interiority—their lived experience, their way of being in the world, their knowledge and that of their ancestors, their history, their lenses through which they see and interpret the world—is to continue to prioritize the power structure and cultural values of whiteness at the expense of the being of those who are “invited in.”

I know this is a very simple point. It feels almost reductive to me to be writing this post right now, because people have been making this argument since the 1980s. And yet. If the dominant culture is still confused, still pretending that increasing representation is the solution to the problems of white supremacy and patriarchy, then it’s worth noticing what happens when what is increased, what is said to be valuable and necessary, is not only representation but also interiority.

When I as a white viewer get to watch movies and television shows that highlight the interiority of people who are non-white, and that invite me in to the experience of being—and not just the experience of discrimination, which again centers white people, white power, white supremacy as the nominal subjects of the story—my inculcation in white supremacy is at least momentarily disrupted. I’m invited to cross-identify with people who do not share my identity, and to be vicariously immersed in a world I do not get to inhabit. When I watch a television show that does not have a single white character, a world in which white people do not appear and are not missed, I am invited to release the fiction that the dominant culture perpetuates, which is that I am the center around which the culture turns. 

In today’s advertising, I am often shown pictures of Black people in positions of affluence and wealth—at the bank, or buying stocks with their financial advisor, or passing their expensive watch down to their offspring—images that yes, don’t traffic in horrifying stereotypes about Black poverty, but that also seduce me as a viewer into thinking that everything is already taken care of, that racism is just fading away, that there is no need for reparations, no need to transform the power structures, that everything is on the way to already being ok. I am being persuaded that I can have everything in my world stay the same, and that Black people are happy to be “in” this world that is set up for me, that privileges white people, and that keeps white people in power. 

The more white viewers and receivers of culture are granted the practice of cross-identifying with the interiority and complexity of people who are non-white, the harder it will be for them to unproblematically absorb and recirculate stereotypes and other two-dimensional representations of others. The more the history of a group of people is allowed to thicken and challenge and disrupt the dominant white culture, the harder it will be to maintain the fiction of white supremacy. In the name of the conservation of power, the dominant culture will celebrate representation, if it allows it to stave off the complexity of anything other than straight white interiority, and the depth of anything other than an all-white history.

Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing this post. Part of what I’m after here is to ask how the reporting of news, and especially of violence, would be different if the mainstream media increased its publication of stories that highlight the interiority and history of people who are not often represented in its pages and on its screens. I’ll be writing more about that question in the near future.

Please take good care of yourself out there, and if you’re in a snowy region of the earth, watch out for that ice!

xo

Rebecca