Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms

Nanette Morton teaches English at McMaster University.

This book examines the ways in which men and women of the dominant
culture (including the “first world” and the able-bodied) look at
subordinate groups. Razack critiques legal and pedagogical ways of
“managing” diversity. While these strategies provide instructions on
how to recognize that cultural difference governs such things as making
eye contact, they simultaneously sustain existing power arrangements.
Rather than changing the status quo, such efforts tend to provide an
essentializing catalogue of differences that may be used to survey,
judge, and ultimately contain the “other.” While cultural
considerations help to contextualize justice claims in the law courts,
they can also reinforce notions of the subordinate group’s
inferiority. Judges, teachers, and activists may see themselves as
superior “saviors” of “less advanced” peoples. Alternatively,
sexism and violence may be lumped together with cultural difference,
excusing and thus reinforcing the oppression of women in minority
communities.

Razack contends that oppression can more properly be combated by
recognizing those constructs that “enable the suppression of histories
of oppression,” including the culturalization of differences, rights
thinking, and the notion of the essential women. The received ideology
of human rights, for example, insists that individuals are able to
choose their own destinies. This construct disguises the North’s
culpability: immigrants from the Southern Hemisphere migrate here not so
much because they choose to do so, but because they are responding to
“colonial and neocolonial economic conditions created by the North.”
Similarly, narratives of essential womanhood, which weigh all women’s
oppression equally, allow middle-class women to “escape into
victimhood” without considering that these women have a hand in the
subordination of domestic workers. Razak’s project, finally, is to get
readers to consider both the social hierarchies that surround them and
their positions within those hierarchies. Looking White People in the
Eye is thought-provoking and essential reading for those interested in
postcolonial, cultural, and legal studies in Canada.