The effects of the white gaze on black communities and individuals have been manifold. Shanette M. Harris highlights its contribution to ingrained internal racism in African American communities, where it has elicited “feelings of shame, hypervigilance, self-criticism, social anxiety, and in general, negative and uncomfortable feelings toward the self.”5 Scholars have drawn particular attention to its contradictory construction of blackness as a source of violence, anxiety, suspicion, sexual attraction, and fascination. George Yancy characterizes the white gaze as being “inextricably bound up with objectifying, exoticizing, and sexualizing the Black body, inscribing it with myths and codes that function to ontologize it, thus returning it as that which it is not.”6 Harris argues that it conceives of black bodies as “symbolic representation and fantasy” and constructs “stereotypical images and societal barriers” to deal with the resulting emotions of anxiety and desire.7 Today, it continues to reduce black men and women to a series of contradictory stereotypes: objects of both fear and fascination—alternately violent and lascivious, invisible yet impossible to ignore. Yancy characterizes these attitudes as all encompassing and destructive to positive black identity. He argues that successful efforts to transform perceptions of blacks must ultimately undermine the white gaze and challenge “whiteness as fanaticism.”8"

So when I was presented with the chance to write Blacktop, a book series about a group of teenage misfits who find each other through basketball, I felt excited and ready. I'd written about basketball before, and I've played since I could walk. One of my earliest memories is of my six-foot father blocking my shot into a patch of wet grass.

The trouble started on the first page. I sat down, ready to catch all the great ideas coming down the creative flume, and instead I got a bunch of questions: Who was this story for, this story about a black kid playing basketball? And isn't this kind of cliché? Or maybe the assumption here is that black kids will only read if there's a ball involved? And so am I, by extension, by writing this series, encouraging the idea that black people are only interesting or important or valuable in relationship to our athletic skills?

I was searching for remedies to writer's block on YouTube when I found a video of Toni Morrison talking about the white gaze — the assumption that the reader is white and the resulting self-consciousness in your thinking and writing. Stories you know to be true and interesting somehow become distorted and unfamiliar. I'd try to write a scene about two kids trying to dine-and-dash, something I'd done, and stop to wonder if I was playing into narratives about "black criminality." I'd try to write a scene about a kid getting into a fight, something else I'd done, and feel like I was fueling ideas about "black-on-black violence." But now this feeling had a name, which took away some of its menace, and suddenly writing seemed possible."

 

Morrison examines the claim that works in the American literary canon were not affected by the presence of Africans and African Americans. She upsets this claim, finding evidence that American writers developed a mythology of blackness, which she calls “Africanism,” and that they used Africanism to define themselves. 

 

Morrison locates her analysis in the shadows of American literature. The Africanist presence is not always in the spotlight but instead, she writes, reveals itself in a shadowy presence. A major occurrence in American literature is artists transferring their internal conflicts to a blank darkness. In America, a new country that sought to define itself in contrast to Europe, writers also sought to define themselves in contrast with darkness: They emphasized their freedom by contrasting it with the bondage of slaves. Often, the Africanist presence is used to define whites in literature such as in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

 

Morrison discusses America establishing itself as new, white, and male. She states that the action of evading race within literature is itself an act of racism. The African presence informs American literature, often as a shadow even when the piece in question is not even about race issues or African characters. Slave narratives experienced a 19th-century publication boom while the question of freedom rages on in society. African race is a vehicle by which America knows that it isn’t enslaved—through the works of writers like Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.