Flashback Friday.
A Google image search for the phrase “evolution” returns many versions of the iconic image of human development over time. The whiteness of these images — the fact that, unless they are silhouettes or sketches, the individuals pictured have light skin associated with white people — often goes unnoticed. For our purposes, I would like us to notice:
The whiteness in these images is just one example of a long history of discourse relating whiteness and humanity, an association that has its roots in racial science and ethical justifications of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. It matters in this context, above and beyond the the general vast overrepresentation of whites in the media and as allegedly race-neutral “humans,” because the context here is one explicitly about defining what is human, what separates humans from animals, and about evolution as a civilizing process.
By presenting whites as the quintessential humans who possess the bodies and behaviors taken to be deeply meaningful human traits, whites justified, and continue to justify, white supremacy. This is what white privilege looks lik: being constantly told by experts that you and people like you represent the height of evolution and everything that it means to be that incredible piece of work that is man (irony fully intended).
Originally posted in 2010.
Benjamin Eleanor Adam is a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he studies the American history of gender and sexuality.
Comments 56
Sanguinity — August 25, 2010
...and when you do see images of non-white people in collections like these, it is frequently images of them being tribal! and primitive! and ancestral!
My evolution textbook had a stylized icon that it used to denote the human species (in, say, diagrams of evolutionary history). The illustrators chose to use an east Asian face to represent humans. It was a refreshing (and sensible!) change.
Ames — August 25, 2010
Not to mention the unbearable maleness of being human. Just two of these images depict women and only because they act as 1) counterpoints to the main - male - subject of the shot and 2) as a cute - and absurdly posed - illustration for a clever point.
Anonymous — August 25, 2010
Dang, that is some insidious stuff. Default: white male. Who cares if it isn't even remotely true!
Ricardo Greene — August 25, 2010
Look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjHrmmFIErY. It's a beautiful Disney's animation about the story of the music. Sadly, it presents an evolutionist point of view, where progress is portrayed not just as technologic advances but also by the lightening of the skin.
Ricardo Greene — August 25, 2010
Take a look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjHrmmFIErY. It's a beautiful Disney's animation about the story of the music. Sadly, it presents an evolutionist point of view, where progress is portrayed not just as technologic advances but also by the lightening of the skin.
Jason — August 25, 2010
At least four of those images (possibly five, I can't determine if that one of the white guy in the orange-ish shirt manipulating the tubes is a scientist or not; potentially even six, due to the feet with the tracking balls on them are part of the same set as the second section of images) really cannot be construed as racist, due to the fact that it is evolutionary scientists at work and whose work is being reported on. If you're showing the people doing the work, how is that racist? Perhaps it is racist to not be tracking the work of black biologists working on human evolution, but it is not prima facia racist to show images of the scientists doing the work on human evolution.
The rest, though, is fairly questionable, at best.
pduggie — August 25, 2010
B.e.a: Your article never identifies the problem as "racism", but white privilege. So that is an important difference. Racism is a deliberate sin. WP is more of a symbolic external devil prowling around seeking whom he may devour
JDP — August 25, 2010
It should probably be pointed out that the portrayal of human evolution proceeding along a single path is not only prone to racism, but it's also flat-out scientifically wrong. At this point, it's been demonstrated that there were multiple cases of interbreeding between non-African H. sapiens and 'archaic' humans, most notably H. neanderthalensis.
There are, of course, other problems with using the term 'archaic' in these sorts of evolutionary cases because they imply directionality that simply doesn't exist.
Additionally, I think some of this may be overcompensating for past indiscretions. If you've seen any of the older paleoanthropology work from, say, the 60s or earlier, portrayals of nonwhites were really horrid and a lot of scientists and science journalists are first and foremost concerned about avoiding these sorts of portrayals. So I think some of this is about getting away from portraying nonwhites as "primitive" but still falling into the same problem of catering to white gaze.
John Yum — August 25, 2010
Wow. Talk about a generalization. Are you saying that this "history of discourse relating to whiteness and humanity" is also at the forefront of visual depictions of human evolution in China, Korea, or Japan? (Short answer: No.)
This particular sweeping generalization is an example of "discourse that tries to relate everything to a US point-of-view."
md — August 25, 2010
The mismeasure of man by Stephen J Gould gives a good overview of the history of scientific racism in anthropology.
Why do Americans think the Japanese draw themselves as white? (@Sociological Images) « Deciphering Culture – Possible Worlds — August 30, 2010
[...] GUEST POST: THE UNBEARABLE WHITENESS OF BEING HUMAN [...]
Faraq — July 3, 2023
Thnx for the article