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Seeing Race in Modern America

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In this fiercely urgent book, Matthew Pratt Guterl focuses on how and why we come to see race in very particular ways. What does it mean to see someone as a color? As racially mixed or ethnically ambiguous? What history makes such things possible? Drawing creatively from advertisements, YouTube videos, and everything in between, Guterl redirects our understanding of racial sight away from the dominant categories of color—away from brown and yellow and black and white—and instead insists that we confront the visual practices that make those same categories seem so irrefutably important.
Zooming out for the bigger picture, Guterl illuminates the long history of the practice of seeing—and believing in—race, and reveals that our troublesome faith in the details discerned by the discriminating glance is widespread and very popular. In so doing, he upends the possibility of a postracial society by revealing how deeply race is embedded in our culture, with implications that are often matters of life and death.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 4, 2013
      Brown University professor Guterl examines what he calls the "sightlines" of looking at raceâthe multitude of methods that have, over generations, created an unconscious prejudice. He begins with the practice of profiling, which suggests it's possible to identify possible criminals based on a person's appearance, suggesting that the controversial method has become a widely-accepted practice. He continues with African-American images in advertising, from a 1885 poster advertising fertilizer depicting a black man with a cotton ball head, to a soft-drink commercial from 2001 featuring urban basketball players shot in a gritty "street" style. He looks at media coverage of adopted, multi-racial families, emphasizing how the children are often described as a mini-U.N. under the benevolent leadership of white American parents; expanding the idea of family, while emphasizing racial differences. While academic in tone, this rigorous and insightful book provides a careful investigation an often overlooked topic. 10 color and 97 b&w illus.

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  • English

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