the minnesota review n.s. 47 (1997)David RoedigerWhite Looks: Hairy Apes, True Stories and Limbaugh's LaughsThe chauvinism and churlishness which begin this otherwise modest and even-tempered essay both derive from my having grown up along that part of the Mississippi River which divides Missouri from Illinois. It is easy to be chauvinistic about that stretch of the river, the lone portion of the Mississippi to divide slavery from freedom. Along the river and its banks, from Hannibal to East St. Louis and St. Louis to Cairo and the Missouri Bootheel, great artists and great art have long been made. To an unrivaled extent, that art has challenged the lie of white supremacy both implicitly through its celebration of Black beauty and creativity and explicitly in its probing of the relationship between race and freedom. Geniuses such as Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Scott Joplin, Katherine Dunham, Redd Foxx, Tina Turner, Quincy Troupe, Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou, Ntozake Shange and Mark Twain have drawn on experiences along the river to chart, move, explode and ignore the color line. Along the river in the Missouri Bootheel a half century ago, adventures with Black and white sharecroppers afforded C. L. R. James seminal insights not only into American life and religion but also, as he remembered, into Hegel's Phenomenology (see Grimshaw and Hart 10; and Roediger, Visit). Even T. S. Eliot, the writer ultimately most eager to lose the region's accents, carried much of the racelore and popular culture of the river with him (see North). As a setting for works of genius, the river separating Missouri from Illinois is equally impressive. Huck Finn learns the differences between slavery and freedom drifting down the river and discovers that it is not worth it to be white. Twain sets Pudd'nhead Wilson, with its fierce ridiculing of biological racism, in a town between St. Louis and Cairo. Sterling Brown's "Tornado Blues," with its wonderful meditations on race and tragedy, joins others of the finest of Brown's verse in being set in St. Louis (see Brown 70-72). Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, on one level a remarkable exploration of whiteness as a performance, unfolds on a steamboat bound from St. Louis south (see Karcher 256-57). The churlishness follows from the chauvinism. These days I seldom make it through a month without hearing or reading-often the source is someone on the left-that "whatever his politics" Rush Limbaugh is a "genius." His "genius" sometimes is said to lie in comedy, sometimes in understanding media, sometimes in knowing how to speak to the American people and often in all three. I (who can always manage to smile cordially while such nonsense is trumpeted about William F. Buckley's "seriousness" and "intellect") rage when the adulation is heaped upon Limbaugh. The reason, I had long known, lies largely in Limbaugh's hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and in his roots in the local elite of that southern Missouri river city. He is my age and, as I grew up in cities north and south of the Cape, his type was all too familiar to me. It was simply this longstanding distaste for his class and his kind which made me bristle when Limbaugh was praised-until I began watching his television show. I then realized how thoroughly his "genius" rests on an utterly unreflective and banal performance of whiteness. This essay pairs the analysis of one piece of cultural work on race partly done by Twain with one done by Limbaugh. The juxtaposition underlines not only the difference between genius and banality but also the hard reality that banality can acheive much more social power than genius where white consciousness is concerned. More broadly, the essay uses the material from Twain and Limbaugh, as well as from Eugene O'Neill, to formulate a concept of racial formation which takes what I will call the "white look," as well as the imperialist gaze, into account. The concluding pages of the piece examine questions of method which emerge from the pairing of Twain's "white look" with Limbaugh's and O'Neill's, suggesting how we might examine historically why certain white looks work, and others do not.
"Looking It" at Them Since Yank was the focus of her gaze and her terror, he was most susceptible to the fear of being seen as "a queerer kind of baboon than ever you'd find in darkest Africy" (44). Lost in anxious reflection, Yank became both nonwhite and inhuman. Declaring himself the enemy of the "white-faced skinny tarts and de boobs that marry 'em" (84), Yank spiraled downward wildly. He came to agree that he was a "hairy ape" and ended his life invading the cage of the gorilla at a New York City zoo. He wanted to join the "gang" of the gorilla, who savaged him. And yet, the most important line of the play reveals that Douglas probably never called Yank an ape. Responding to Yank's panicked questioning about exactly what she said, the Irish character Paddy tellingly remarks: "She looked it at you if she didn't say the word itself" (42). The idea that whiteness and nonwhiteness can be "looked at" as others sits uneasily in a play saturated with references to the concrete realities of class, work and power. To see these structural matters as counterposed to the subjectivity of a look is precisely wrong, however. As the best of the substantial recent scholarship on the "imperialist gaze" has demonstrated, looks both frame and capture relations of power (see Robertson; Nochlin; Bhabha; and Lutz and Collins). They at once express racism and privilege, valorizing tropes which grow out of, and profoundly alter, how classes within the imperialist powers see both the colonized and each other. Not merely the symptom of imperial exploitation, the imperialist gaze is a shared social activity constitutive of the domination and of the consciousness that sustains it. In the work of Mary Louise Pratt, for example, the gaze can therefore be a perfect site for the study of the relation of domination. In many ways, recent writing on the imperialist gaze and imperialist culture illuminates the process by which O'Neill makes plausible the transition from native-born American worker to ape. Douglas displays the desire to categorize and classify so characteristic of imperialist gazers, to "investigate everything" (21) in London's slums as she has in New York. The commanding position of surveying from above, which characterizes imperialist gazes, appears in Douglas' obsession with going below and, negatively, in her collapse when she looks on the workers from their level. Douglas' search for ersatz reciprocity with those surveilled also typifies ways in which imperialism "looked." Most importantly, coal handlers who insisted that Yank (and they) were looked at like zoo animals were precisely right. The zoos, world's fairs and natural history museums gathered the world's, but especially Africa's and Asia's, animals, and sometimes humans, classifying and displaying them, creating hierarchies and spectacles. As Donna Haraway has observed, the display of monkeys and apes offered particular opportunities to teach lessons of race and hierarchy. Indeed, Anne McClintock has posited "simian imperialism" as an important link between scientific and popular racism (see Haraway; McClintock, "Soft-Soaping Empire" 139; and Gould 113-45). The idea that an American-born white worker could be looked into nonwhiteness becomes far more plausible in light of the particular history of New York City's Bronx Zoo, which had housed a human with its monkeys and apes in the early twentieth century in the hugely publicized exhibition of the African, Ota Benga. When he was released after protests and his own rebellion, his controllers attempted to transform Benga into a factory worker. Indeed, Cornelia Sears' penetrating recent work on the display of "man-like apes" and "ape-like men" in proximity demonstrates that the animality of humans received emphasis alongside the humanity of the primates. The Bronx Zoo's director, William Temple Hornaday, constructed in his writings a hierarchy of animals from large-brained to small, paralleling imperialist taxonomies. Hornaday supposed that both Ota Benga and other big-brained mammals were "workers" in his zoo. His remarkable "The Wild Animal's Bill of Rights" held that "superior" animals had "no more inherent right to live a life of lazy and luxurious ease...than a man or woman has to live without work...." Indeed, real life almost outdistanced O'Neill's art in the case of the Bronx Zoo. In 1924, a blue-eyed young Scottish-American proposed that Hornaday confine him in the ape house, to be displayed with the "Orang-outang and the Chimpanzee" (Bradford and Blume 176, 227-28 and passim; see Sears; and Rydell). But the imperialist gaze and imperialist culture take us only so far in understanding Mildred Douglas' ability to "look" Yank out of the ranks of white humanity. Rooted in the heritage of slavery as much as the expansion of empire and in U.S. peculiarities as much as global realities, Douglas' ability to do Yank in rested as much on a "white look" as on an imperialist gaze (see hooks 165-78; Dyer 44-65). Though the ship was at sea, Yank was every inch an American, so much so that at one point he could scarcely recall his own name having for so long and totally identified with his nickname. The play unfolds amidst the early 20s race-baiting of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, which would culminate in the race-based immigration restriction legislation of 1924. References to Italian "ginees" (guineas) and "wops" dot the text, alongside slurs against Irish-American workers ("paddies" and "micks") who had earlier faced questions as to their whiteness. The references to workers as "slaves," though not peculiar to the United States, carried particular resonances in Yank's nation, the only one to achieve industrial take-off alongside the presence of a huge slave labor force. Most broadly, the drama in "The Hairy Ape" turns critically on a vicious parody of the blackface tradition of theatrical performance-a tradition which in the U.S. literally focussed on black-white issues rather than on imperialism (see Lott; Saxton). Minstrelsy and vaudeville blackface made comedy out of the ability of white performers and their audiences to find fraternity based on the ease with which blackening could be put on and taken off. O'Neill fashioned tragedy out of a proletarian blackface in which "rivulets of sooty sweat" (30-31) could hardly be scrubbed out, and ultimately helped to kill Yank. The audience was disinvited to participate in those happy white looks, at the stage and at each other, which made minstrelsy such a powerful glue in white consciousness. Instead, Mildred Douglas' white look was divisive, deadly and very much open to critique. Mark Twain's take on the white look is even more withering than O'Neill's; Rush Limbaugh's performance of the white look banally reprises minstrel tradition. Taken together, these gazes go far to defining the problems and possibilities of understanding the white look.
Another Look "True Story" begins with a paragraph of stage-setting from Twain. The narrator, with other whites, gazes down from a farmhouse porch onto Aunt Rachel, a "mighty" sixty-year-old Black servant who sits on the steps "respectfully below our level" (Twain 94-95). Drawn from Twain's stay in New York state, the tale features "peal after peal" (95) of laughter from Aunt Rachel, rather than dialogue, at its outset. Unlike James Fenimore Cooper, who earlier in the century reacted to Blacks laughing in New York "in a way that seemed to set their very hearts rattling in their ribs," with a combination of fascination and unease (Cooper 70, 69-86), Twain's persona is utterly at ease. Her work done, Rachel is "under fire" from the white family. The narrator sees her "being chafed without mercy and...enjoying it" ( Twain 95). Her pleasure is natural, it being "no more trouble for her to laugh than it is for a bird to sing" (95). Her performance can be just what the narrator wants it to be. His language echoes fantasies in which men of his race look down on Black women as sexual objects-Rachel would "sit with her face in her hands and shake with throes of enjoyment which she could no longer get breath enough to express" (95)-but his gaze is, apparently, innocent. "Aunt Rachel," he asks, "how is it that you've lived sixty years and never had any trouble" (95)? Then the story gets true. Rachel "stops quaking," is silent and finally asks the narrator, "Misto C-, is you in 'arnest" (95)? The narrator, "sobered," trusts in his white looks: "Why, you can't have had any trouble. I've never heard you sigh, and never seen your eye when there wasn't a laugh in it" (95). Facing the narrator directly, she tells of a life full of trouble, of slavery from the viewpoint of someone who has "ben one of 'em my own se'f" (95). Rising as she speaks, she soon "towers above" (96) the white listeners. She describes slave sales which tore her from her husband and seven children, detailing how she was beaten for her tears during the sales and how she attempted to resist losing her "little Henry," the last child sold, by using her chains to beat those taking him. She spins out a wonderfully impossible tale of how, years later during the Civil War, fate and faith reunite her with Henry. Her closing words are withering examples of the "vigorous eloquence" (Fishkin 8) with which Twain credited Mary Ann Cord, the former slave said to have related the story: "Oh, no, Misto C-, I hain't had no trouble. An' no joy" (98). White looks saw nothing on this view. "True Story" explicitly turns on gazes, but it grows not out of the dynamics of imperialism but rather of races and slavery. Twain explodes the logic of the white look, not of the imperialist gaze. That he may have had private, careerist reasons for doing so, that what he "heard" is not an untainted truth, and that Twain somehow ended with the byline for a Black woman's story, are all of interest. But so too is the remarkable set of circumstances which made such a critique of whiteness possible. That such major literary figures, North and semi-South, as Howells and Twain could validate this critique of the entire viewpoint of whiteness is remarkable. When Herman Melville made a parallel effort to equate whiteness and blindness two decades before in his marvelous novella of a slave revolt, Benito Cereno, the reception had been largely uncomprehending (see Karcher 2, 13). But in 1874, a decade after slaves had freed themselves and four years after they achieved full citizenship and suffrage, whites could not look at Black subjects in anything like so fixed a manner. The behavior of many supposedly privileged and loyal ex-house slaves who, like Aunt Rachel, came to support the Union Army during the war and to move from the plantation after it, made the possibility that African Americans "are not what they seem" a particularly live one (see Kelley 3, 75; also Litwack 55, 105-07, 136-38, 155-57; and Barkley Brown). For a time, the leading ex-abolitionist and the leading ex-Rebel cultural figures in the nation could agree that white looks are white lies and could give over their pages to an ex-slave's self-representation, a view which was simultaneously a searing commentary on whiteness.
Rush to Whiteness Deep connections between Limbaugh's white looks and the history of imperialist gazes determined that Dr. Jocelyn Elders would be the favorite object of his split-screen attention. Indeed, so treasured were former Surgeon General Elders' appearances that when she was removed from office, Limbaugh and his listeners were nearly inconsolable. That she was an expert African-American woman made Elder an obvious choice for ridicule. Her scientific jargon, her frequent slips and the play-Army uniform of her office fit perfectly into right-wing populist delight in deflating liberal intellectual pretensions, a trope which runs through much of Limbaugh's lampooning of what he calls "the left," Black or white. But beyond all that, through Elders Limbaugh brought together familiar elements in the long history of imperialist display of nonwhite female bodies. Like the promoters of the Hottentot Venus, like P. T. Barnum, and like National Geographic, he put the combination of sexual suggestion, images of the bodies of Black females and scientific expertise before the white male gaze. The wonderful (for Limbaugh) twist in this instance was that the Black woman provided the talk about sex and science on which Limbaugh could sit in judgment. Indeed, Elders' final undoing, which resulted from her open discussion of masturbation, put virtually the whole complex of images and actions surrounding National Geographic into a house of mirrors (see Fusco; Lutz and Collins; Adams). However, the dynamics of Limbaugh's clowning, leering gambit differ enough from what we know of the workings of the imperialist gaze to suggest again the need to scrutinize and historicize the white look as a distinct subject. Limbaugh's look clashed dramatically with one much-emphasized attribute of the imperialist gaze-its production of the illusion of an absence of the European male viewer, an absence Giselda Pollock characterized as the "real meaning of the Orientalist project" (77). Limbaugh is not only present as he looks but is never more active on the show than when watching others speak. Moreover, Limbaugh does not occupy the vantage point of the imperial "master of all I survey." He is, instead, boxed-in, dwarfed, low and still in power. That power hinges in critical ways on a sense of reciprocity, as theorists of the imperialist gaze would put it, within the look. But Rush-on-TV seeks none of the reciprocity with nonwhite subjects which Pratt so ably discusses in Imperial Eyes (221). Rather he cultivates the reciprocity of white entertainer, white studio audience and white viewers to endow his look with awful power. There is no risk for Limbaugh, as Homi Bhabha argues there is for imperialist gazers, of the "threatened return of the look" by the non-white subject (13). This white reciprocity rests in large part on Limbaugh's ability to reprise the role of the straight man/interlocutor in countless blackface entertainments. He registers the initial interest and growing exasperation with the supposed crudities and excesses of Black speech, appearance and behavior. To be reminded of this resonance is apposite because it evokes the white audience's ritualized watching of blackface comedians and of each other which had already made the production of white looks an important commodity on the minstrel stage by the 1830s. Anne McClintock has recently mounted a wonderful argument, centered mainly in the British Empire, that a "commodity racism" which attached imperial conquest to advertised images of domestic products came to replace scientific racism in important ways at imperialism's height. But in the U.S., minstrelsy, the massive commodification of Black labor and more generalized connections of "whiteness" and "property," all linked the commodity and consciousness of race far earlier and, especially through minstrelsy, influenced subsequent imperialist gazes. The ubiquitous symbol of commodity racism in the U.S., Aunt Jemima, was directly inspired by minstrel performance (see McClintock, Imperial Leather 31-36, 207-31; Manring 36; and Harris). The hundreds of millions of white looks at her image on boxes helped to allay the anxieties raised by the possibility that Aunt Rachels were not what they appeared to be. The hundreds of millions of white looks at a chortling Rush in boxes on the screen likewise re-establish control over the meaning and direction of laughter across the color line.
The Workings of Whiteness One temptation is to assume that, because a minstrel-derived white look like Limbaugh's still carries so much power, it represents the "white look"-singular and virtually transhistorical. This misstates the case, as do analyses which posit a singular imperialist gaze. However much one look might work better than others, white looks also come in multiple forms, carrying differing class and gender dynamics. The task is to investigate why some looks come to undergird a mass sense of whiteness and others cannot. Mildred Douglas' "looking it" at Yank clearly qualifies as a white look, and like all white looks centers on inclusion and exclusion. But, however convincing O'Neill is in showing that it could work to make Yank nonwhite at a particular, early 1920s juncture, its extreme identification of whiteness with great wealth made race too narrowly and purely a stand-in for class to compete with the populist, "y'all come" whiteness typified by Limbaugh's look. (Indeed, in many shows Limbaugh first delivers his populist performances of whiteness and then goes on to defend explicitly great differences of wealth as a positive good.) In understanding why and how white looks work, it is equally necessary to emphasize that such looks are historical. As such, they draw on deep and long patterns of seeing, such as those of the minstrel tradition, but they also change over time. The ability of "A True Story"'s white look to become shared by Twain, Howells and at least some readers in the era of emancipation was clearly greater than it would have been in the period of reconsolidated white supremacy and diminishing opportunities for Black self-activity of the early twentieth century, for example. Even Limbaugh's look responds to its historical context in ways which make it far more than just minstrelsy plus electrification. For all its glee, it remains very much a post-Black Freedom Movement look. Its utter silence-its boxed-in protection against any dialogue with the Other-fits snugly into a situation described by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, who argue that recent rightward political motion on race has not easily been able to find an openly racist voice. The capture of the moral high ground by the civil rights movement's rhetoric of equality has proven quite durable (Omi and Winant 140-42). Even initiatives against racial equality have adopted the rhetoric of equal treatment and pressed white claims to status as victims, from the anti-affirmative action campaigns to Limbaugh's own recent protests that Black folks can get away with saying nigger while whites cannot. In this soil a feeling has grown among the white right that whites have been "silenced." Limbaugh frequently describes his own "rightness" and "excellence" as resting on his saying what listeners already believe. But he equally shares and embodies silent white looks. Limbaugh's jowls and blank expression perfectly suit him to be a put-upon white everyman at a time when many of his watchers see their whiteness as a weight, rather than a privilege. But at the same time, silence itself has become far more freighted with meaning. Thus, when successful 1991 Mississippi gubernatorial candidate Kirk Fordice closed his dramatic antiwelfare campaign advertisement, it was with silence and a still photograph of a black woman and her baby. Fordice trusted that white viewers would fill in the gaps (see my Abolition of Whiteness 8). Limbaugh is seldom without words, but is perhaps never more dangerous than when he is. The performance enables Limbaugh to walk the borders between the unspoken and the (until recently) unspeakable. He both participates in the refurbishment of openly racist discourse à la The Bell Curve and its mainstream press hoopla, while retaining the possibility of defending his performance not only as a joke and as a neutral attack on liberals but also on the grounds that he didn't say a word. But if this powerful, banal, silent onlooking fills new functions at the end of the twentieth century, it should also remind us of the need to consider the white look in the much longer run. From slave sales and whippings, to highly publicized and massively attended lynchings, to the world's fair displays of confined nonwhites, to Rush Limbaugh, white consciousness has been formed not only out of terror but out of the mutual, self-recognizing and changing witness of terror, out of white looks at the oppression of Others and the privileges of each other. Works Cited
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