"White Sight" review, text only

White sight, white strikes

Review of Nicholas Mirzoeff, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. Boston: M.I.T. Press, 2023, 352 pages.

“One is not born but rather becomes white” (1).

Nicholas Mirzoeff begins White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness by adapting philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s words from The Second Sex, substituting the original “woman” with “white.” His modification of de Beauvoir is appropriate and timely. It is appropriate, of course, because White Sight explores how “the invented collective ‘white people’” (1) has not only been created through the arts and social infrastructure, perpetuating arbitrary and harmful (mortally so) stereotypes but also how it reinstates imperialist surveillance tactics. Timely, furthermore, for its relevance to the contemporary U.S. socio-cultural climate. To paraphrase Mirzoeff, the concept of whiteness is as visible as can be, yet the problems that we face as a nation have long persisted. (x). In just a matter of eight years, the country has reached a critical impasse. “[W]hiteness had been powerfully re-thought by scholars” (x) on the one hand, but on the other, everyday U.S. life is plagued by covertly, and more often than not, overtly racist and discriminatory imagery.

Even though I live in a relatively liberal state and work in academic settings that have prioritized (and, I would add, championed) diversity, equity, and inclusion, I am awash in a sea of rhetoric perpetuated by hate groups across the country. As I drive along the highway, I pass vans emblazoned with the Gadsden flag, a symbol of right-wing militarism seen during the 2021 attack of the U.S. Capitol building. I grab a cup of coffee at my local café, and Blue Lives Matter imagery—its racist connotations serving as a counter-movement to Black Lives Matter—greets me outside. At a recent trip to an outdoor arts event, I even saw a person wearing neo-Nazi insignia. Outside! Shopping for fun and kitschy crafts! With children!

And yet, as Mirzoeff astutely offers in White Sight, such harmful imagery does not exist in a vacuum. We didn’t just close our eyes on two election days—November 8, 2016, and November 5, 2024—to an equal, unified nation and reemerge from our slumber the following morning to a burning pyre of orange-hued hatred. Western society and by proxy, whiteness, developed from the legacy of colonial-era visual culture, from “a set of assumptions, concepts, infrastructures, learned experiences, symbols, and techniques that form a screen by which a person makes white reality” (xiii). White Sight looks at how we got here. As Mirzoeff puts it, “My task was to learn how to use the new ideas about whiteness in this dramatically changed context” (x).

The book’s title provokes a question: what is “white sight?” Mirzoeff operationalizes this concept in his introductory chapter, “The Strike Against Whiteness.” According to Mirzoeff, white sight is “a key operating system of what it is to make whiteness” (1). Peeling back the layers, he shows how white sight is a system of visual politics, a way that dictates how people are meant to understand the world around them and their place within it. According to Mirzoeff, white sight seeks “to create a time and space such that people identifying as white can act as if their reality is all there is” (1). From this perspective, white sight is a learned collective behavior, endorsed by visual culture, which presupposes that white identity is superior—the ultimate and only way of understanding reality. “Any failure to conform to this reality is corrected with violence” (1).

In the chapter “The Strike Against Whiteness,” Mirzoeff conceptualizes white sight as a byproduct of “racial capitalism, enabled by slavery and colonialism” (2). In effect, he shakes the very foundation of white sight, de-normalizing it, for lack of better terms, and revealing it as a mechanism derived from the earlier social and political tendency to establish power dynamics—a metaphorical “screen,” borrowing a term from Mirzoeff—between the hypothetical Us (white, patriarchal imperialist powers) and Them (non-white subjects). White sight does not derive from a natural, sensorial process; we are not born (one would hope) with the need to exert physical and psychological power over others. White sight is a racializing tool, establishing arbitrary, internalized and institutionalized categories in order to maintain ownership and therefore power over people. White sight, furthermore, makes standard a specific way of looking or a perspective that has further maintained the ownership of some specifically over non-white Others. Mirzoeff rightfully claims that perspective in specific “was a powerful place from which to survey and conduct surveillance—the key practices of white sight” (7). He continues,

“White sight is always measurable, quantifiable, and therefore real, creating one of the first forms of an ongoing ‘data colonialism.’ It makes a white reality in which ‘“what there is” depends on the way “one sees it.” And the way one sees is shaped today by the coloniality of knowledge and of being (sensing, seeing, feeling, hearing)’.” (7)

Later on in “The Strike Against Whiteness,” Mirzoeff specifies that “white sight is always sup- ported by a material infrastructure. In this way, it can ‘see’ even when no human is watching” (10). For example, from this material infrastructure we get statues and other landmarks, which establish a way to further build a collective fantasy of society (10) that sustains white supremacy. In contrast, any anti-colonial strike makes visible and actively reacts against infrastructures that “connect, distribute, enable, and store the set of desires and fantasies that comprise what it is to make whiteness” (11). The strike against whiteness, in Mirzoeff’s words,

“unbuilds the static field of white sight, constituted by the screen, statue, state, and its statutes. […] It works at the conscious level, countering the impulses of the received cultural unconscious. It always allows for the ‘right to opacity,’ to not be visible and transparent to all” (14).

One of the most successful aspects of White Sight, for me, comes from the section called “Acknowledged”—not “Acknowledgements,” as so often termed elsewhere. Mirzoeff plainly states:

“To begin at the beginning, I acknowledge being a person clearly identified as white in the United States. In the United Kingdom where I grew up, I was identified as not-Black but not fully English. My last name and being visibly Jewish disqualified me at once” (vii).

In my view, this statement of, and reflection on, Mirzoeff’s own declaration of identity is imperative, as it shows the scholar’s clear understanding of his own privilege and the ways that he, implicitly perhaps, has benefitted from the very institutions that he is writing about. Rather than trying to half-heartedly apologize for the sins of his fathers, so to speak, by mentioning his own identity, he instead importantly situates himself within the larger web of oppression woven by society at large. Racial identity is a learned, normalized, taken-for-granted aspect of our daily lives. To plainly confirm one’s own, sometimes uneasy relation with racial identity is an important first step in breaking the guise of white sight.

“Whiteness cannot be understood without thinking at those intersections and with this learning.

My work here situates my own ambivalent placing within that whiteness as a person in Jewish diaspora whose very body is the product of empire, primarily in relation to the Indigenous and Black radical traditions in the Atlantic world. I acknowledge that this framing is ‘all incomplete,’ while also bearing the knowledge that no one person or book can be adequate to the task.” (viii)

Such observations on Mirzoeff ‘s part inspire me to share my own relation to White Sight’ssubject matter. I identify as white; I am Italian-American and admittedly a recovering Catholic. Reflecting briefly on my upbringing, I can safely say that I grew up in a shockingly racist environment, unfortunately in line with many other Italian-American households of a certain generation. Some of my family members—mostly older, some long dead—held attitudes toward people of color that were cruel, bizarre, and openly articulated. Especially around the dinner table, Italian slurs for black people were wielded openly and carelessly. Since then, my privilege, like Mirzoeff’s, has given me advantages professionally, but from that myopic upbringing, I also keenly understand how white supremacy has thrived and been normalized in day-to-day life across generations. Yet other moments outside the home and in places that were not blatantly racist even more emphatically reiterate the insidious, taken-for-granted white supremacist messages that have surrounded me, extending now into my adulthood. After all, I grew up and currently live in a state that holds an annual festival for Christopher Columbus, heralded as an icon of Italian culture, where the mass slaughtering of indigenous peoples is conveniently repressed. Columbus has not one but two statues built in his honor in my home state, showing how commonplace white sight is in everyday life. As Mirzoeff notes earlier in “Acknowledged,” in 2017 “it became clear that whiteness was deeply connected to everything that visual culture might be” (x).

Impressively White Sight contains a large amount of research. It is expansive; it is a compendium of Western creative traditions that have placed whiteness as a racial ideal, which then becomes an excuse to control non-white people through surveillance and overall methods of subordination. In “Introduction: The Strike Against Whiteness,” Mirzoeff describes the book’s goal:

“[White Sight] is a tactical mapping of the contemporary forms of white sight and white reality—and the strike against them—that constitute our present and are still present. […] I first set out the key features of white sight, white infrastructure, and the cultural unconscious of whiteness that sustain white reality. I then turn to the constitution of the strike against whiteness that makes another world visible. I conclude with a summary of how the book maps the historic layers and circuits of whiteness in the contemporary Atlantic world across its eight chapters.” (3-4)

Mirzoeff accomplishes this so-called “tactical mapping” in two brilliant ways. On the one hand, Mirzoeff compiles information and breaks it down in an astute, analytical, yet accessible manner, covering periods of time spanning from the Italian Renaissance to the present. In doing so, He constructs “a transnational historical narrative from slavery to imperialism and the decolonial present” (23). His working chronologically with such an exhaustive reach helps further visualize how and by what means oppression has been maintained.

Furthermore White Sight doesn’t study just one visual medium, for instance, focus solely on sculpture or photography. Rather, Mirzoeff surveys many creative practices and their representational strategies—sculpture, photography, painting, illustration, literature, performance art, protests. Borrowing from anti-colonial theories as well as theories of the gaze and looking relations, Mirzoeff closely examines specific works including The Rape of Europa (Titian, 1560), Monumento dei quattro mori a Ferdinando II (Tacca, 1626), dioramas from the American Museum of Natural History, statues of public figures like the Duc d’Orleans in Algiers (1962), and many others to explore the exact ways that whiteness has been produced and reinforced. As Mirzoeff asserts, “what white sight sees is made, not found” (4) he pulls from a broad trajectory of visual culture to illustrate that fact. Furthermore, he conceptualizes race alongside gender, religion, geography, politics, and even the natural world. In effect, these cultural dimensions mirror his concept of “monohumanism,” defined elsewhere as acting “as if it were the being of being human. As a concept, monohumanism means that there is only one way to be fully human, which becomes known as whiteness” (1). Whiteness, by this logic, swallows whole all that surrounds it, providing the illusion of one true, “correct” way to be, to exist in modern society. In studying all aspects of visual culture, Mizroeff shows how monohumanism has been materialized not only spatially and temporally, but also artistically.

Finally, White Sight explores strikes against whiteness, whether they materialize as literal strikes, as in protests, or figurative strikes, fighting against white supremacist imagery and oppressive looking relations. The latter section of White Sight, “The Crisis of Whiteness,” which I will discuss later, details a current “decolonial wave” and “removal of colonial symbols” (26) in both the United Sates and abroad. In the chapters leading up to “The Crisis of Whiteness,” Mirzoeff details the long, complex history of colonization through visual culture. In this section, the author shows how such long-standing traditions are being radically transgressed. Exploring various modern-day strikes against whiteness, such as toppling colonial-era statues, adds additional depth to an analysis of the trajectory of white sight. White sight and tactics to maintain white sight (through things like statues) didn’t end in an historical past. Nor have the responses against white sight ended. “The Crisis of Whiteness” sheds light on the never-ending struggle that people face in eras of white supremacy and the radical and powerful ways they fight back. Borrowing from Mirzoeff, symbols of white sight are no longer tolerable (26), and in chronicling local and global fights against such symbols, White Sight offers some new, maybe optimistic, ways out.

Across White Sight, Mirzoeff teases out the construction, enactment, normalization, and upheaval of white sight across temporal, spatial, and geographic boundaries. Divided into three sections, White Sight is “cued from present-day experience to indicate how each segment of past time remains contemporary” (23). In section one, “White Sight in the World of Atlantic Slavery,” Mirzoeff explores the creation of white sight across the “Atlantic world” (23) during, for instance, the Italian Renaissance, Enlightenment period, and slave trade. Chapter 1, “The City, Ship, and Plantation,”

“examines how and why these connections between perspective, political and economic power, and making race first cohered in the early modern Atlantic world in such a way that they are still in effect hundreds of years later” (29).

To do this, Mirzoeff pulls from art historical and geo-political histories of the early colonial city state, inspired in large part by Renaissance-era paintings of “ideal” cities. Such paintings “gave material form to racializing hierarchy and white seeing” (38), granting colonizers the leeway to take possession of nature and human beings as well as devising surveillance measures (infrastructure including statues) that kept power balances in check. What inspired me the most about “The City, Ship, and Plantation,” however, comes from Mirzoeff’s merging of past and present depictions. For example, Mirzoeff keenly prefaces his discussion of colonial-era surveillance methods with a consideration of contemporary artist Isaac Julien’s works like Baltimore (2003). Mirzoeff does so to better understand “how and why these connections between perspective, political and economic power, and making race first cohered in the early modern Atlantic world in such a way that they are still in effect hundreds of years later” (29). On Baltimore, Mirzoeff writes:

“The whole film, to quote Julien’s website, is ‘characterized by oscillation and an insistent formal play with linear perspective.’ Baltimore made me understand linear perspective as white seeing in white space. Perspective was one of a set of artificial machines, extending from the city, to the ship, plantation, and colonizing state that produced colonial white reality. That trajectory connects the Renaissance city-state to plantation slavery and ultimately the drone.” (31)

Mirzoeff’s thoughts about how film could lead to challenging mechanisms of white sight led to my thinking about how this has happened to me. In my case, it happened through watching works by transgressive Black filmmakers such as Wendell B. Harris Jr. in 1989’s Chameleon Street, Julie Dash in her magnum opus Daughters of the Dust (1991), and Marlon Riggs in his final film Black Is…Black Ain’t (1994). In these examples and more, I’m reminded of bell hook’s “The Oppositional Gaze,” where she posits that Black (and Black feminist, and perhaps Black queer) filmmaking emerges as a site of resistance against white supremacist ideals, affording the potential to “contest, resist, revise, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels” (hooks 691). It seems to me that Baltimore, for Mirzoeff, functions in this same way as a direct challenge to the dominant forms of white sight chronicled elsewhere in the monograph. Mirzoeff understand the important way in which such challenges are replicated in protests and performances. For me, Chapter 1 is a distillation of the success of White Sight because it makes such critical connections between past and present, between the visual, plastic, literary, and performance arts, bringing the book’s discussion of white sight into a conceptual full circle.

Chapter 2, “The World of Statues in America,” follows chronologically from “The City, Ship, and Plantation” in that it details “how the statue became the ‘perfect’ white body, also described in the European Enlightenment as a ‘machine,’ but one that was the source and type of beauty” (23). Using the aforementioned Apollo Belvedere as case in point, Mirzoeff “describes how the statue of Apollo first became the symbol of colonization as Adam in the Garden of Eden in the Americas, even as Eden was also the location of an imagined commons” (59). For Mirzoeff, whiteness is therefore intrinsically linked to ideal body types as expressed through similar, religious iconography and above all through European colonizers’ interpretation of religious texts as conditions for their imperialist conquest.

While reading “The World of Statues in America,” I was once again impressed by the scale and scope of Mirzoeff’s discussion. Moreover, this chapter (and to be quite honest, almost all of the book) introduced me to aspects of art history that I was unfamiliar with, so the sheer educational aspect of Mirzoeff’s discussion had an impact on me. And, I also greatly appreciated the author’s consideration of gender amidst his consideration of race in the Western world. After all, gender, like race, is an arbitrary construct used to establish oppressive power dynamics. In Chapter 2, gender becomes another long arm of the colonialist regime that defines the ideal white body and also gives a type of justification for conquering land and the peoples occupying it. Apollo, Adam, the white male European body—all became the ideal “human” type, the representation of monohumanism.

Chapter 3, “The Natural History of White Supremacy” is, in my opinion, the most interesting segment of White Sight for comparing the natural history museum to imperial empire. I remember that in visiting museums in my childhood, I felt uneasy while looking at tableaux of taxidermized animals, seemingly frozen in time and looking back at the viewer with glossy, blank stares. Although Mirzoeff doesn’t articulate why I might hold such a queasy nostalgia for these exhibits, the brilliance of “The Natural History of White Sight” lies in its detailed consideration of “the history of how white dominance was made natural and in turn claimed nature as part of its domain” (94). Mirzoeff explains,

“To be divine, as Apollo, is to have dominion over nature, understand its processes, and make them valuable by extraction. Over the course of the long nineteenth century (1791–1914), a white way of seeing nature through the lens of extinction was formed in transnational exchange across the Atlantic and around the circuits of European settler colonies. In the present moment—comprising the sixth mass extinction, climate crisis, and global heating—attention should be paid as to how nature was made white” (94).

From this perspective, institutions like natural history museums extended the longstanding colonialist aim of finding terra nullius, of staking a God-given claim to a land otherwise believed to be uninhabited; the museum does so through the extermination and collection of animals. Control is key here; governing the bodies of animals, namely birds, in staged exhibits is akin to the control of bodies through slavery and surveillance. Moreover, bodily control is exerted upon the stance of the viewer, who adopts “the gaze of the white person whose perfect type was the statue” (96). Most hauntingly, natural history museums and other similar institutions that exhibit unusual animal specimens function in the same way as those public (or, sometimes, private) exhibits transforming enslaved human beings into non-human spectacles. With all of this in mind, for me Chapter 3 was eye-opening, challenging my previous relations with natural history museums in the process.

Section two, “Imperial Visions, Anticolonial Ways of Seeing,” consists of three chapters that each concern “white sight and empire, centering on the British Empire in the century from First Indian War of Independence in 1857 to the onset of decolonization after the Second World War” (24). If “White Sight in the World of Atlantic Slavery” discusses the rise of white sight and the ways in which colonial-era visual culture maintained ideals related to power, dominance, and surveillance, “Imperial Visions, Anticolonial Ways of Seeing” looks at those moments when such institutions began to be called into question. Mirzoeff states,

“imperial modernity always saw itself at risk of collapse. It is not that empire is now coming to an end. Rather, empire always creates moral panics about its impending collapse” (24).

For instance, in chapter 4, “The Imperial Screen,” the author looks at how a metaphorical glass screen, a way of separating colonizer from colonized, was maintained so as to create “an emotional and cultural barrier, a form of affective border, preventing the imperial viewer from identifying with what was being looked at” (25). To do so, art historians in particular devised writings that both prescribed ways of looking to art’s audience as well as stipulated norms for artists on how to best portray the real world aesthetically through the lens of white sight. For Mirzoeff, such reading and creative protocols in effect welcomed an alternative or “strange” (128) perspective for other, outsider artists to craft their work. However, as they used “cultural, decorative, and sartorial codes that were temporarily illegible to the dominant” (128), artists pushing back against white sight were still subject to isolation and persecution. Mirzoeff gives the example of author Oscar Wilde, namely in the 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Grey, as a practitioner of resistant, strange perspectives. “In The Picture of Dorian Grey,” writes Mirzoeff,

“Basil Hallward sent Gray a fateful yellow book and rumor incorrectly asserted that Wilde himself was carrying a yellow book at the time of his arrest in 1895. Yellow was a strange perspective refracting between the style of the aesthetic movement and mainstream imperial culture. Read one way, it indicated the strange affinities between Jewish and queer cultures in London. Or it was just a color. Or once decoded, it signaled what became known as ‘decadence,’ which needed to be purged from the imperial body politic.” (129)

“Women, queers, and Jews,” like their colonized counterparts, were pushed to the margins of white society, and in their art, had to visualize their “refracted community” (134) through alternative means.

From there, in Chapter 5, “The Anticolonial Way of Seeing,” Mirzoeff provides a case study of the poet George Lamming, detailing how Lamming “de-invisibilized white sight and registered the anticolonial contemporary” (25). Mirzoeff says that Lamming coined the phrase “ways of seeing” as a practice of resistance—“It was a way to see himself by seeing how others excluded from English whiteness were seen” (149). He adds,

“The anticolonial way of seeing was a means of detecting the networks of white violence and creating a structure of immigrant feeling in this persistently hostile environment. Yet by the time [art critic] John Berger used ‘ways of seeing’ for his television series and now-classic accompanying book in 1972, the anticolonial and decolonial affects of the phrase had subsided. It is time to revive it” (150).

Here, as in Chapter 4, I was most impressed by the depth Mirzoeff dedicates to his study of Lamming and anticolonial ways of seeing more broadly, but I was also inspired by his consideration of scholarship, politics, and art (literary and visual) in the chapter. Weaving such a web across disciplines again points to the strengths of White Sight, in that it provides a thorough, tangible, and perhaps for some readers, relatable narrative of oppositional practices, of striking back. Mirzoeff notes in this chapter that the “anticolonial way of seeing did not, then, simply arise from a specific place and time but rather from a reflection on place and time over time” (160). Mirzoeff’s chapter “The Anticolonial Way of Seeing” further reflects on place and time over time, also incorporating more nuanced discussions on aesthetics, politics, and culture within such spatio-temporal boundaries.

In Chapter 6, “The Cultural Unconscious and the Dispossessed,” Mirzoeff continues his work in Chapter 5 establishing “transnational networks of seeing” (177), this time exploring how the crisis of whiteness outlined in subsequent chapters started. Earlier in the monograph, Mirzoeff notes that “The Cultural Unconscious and the Dispossessed” isolates Lamming’s meeting with theorist Frantz Fanon in 1956,

“where Fanon also used the expression ‘way of seeing’ in analyzing racism and culture […] His vision was that those entirely excluded from this culture, the urban dispossessed, would be capable of creating a new humanity no longer subject to these phantasms” (25-26).

Indeed, in this chapter, the author provides a vivid summary of this chance meeting, detailing how key theoretical terms were coined and later how Black and Jewish interactions further disrupted white sight. Here, Mirzoeff borrows heavily from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to draw parallels “between colonialism and fascism” (180), and as a result, he expertly communicates a watershed moment “of mutual self-recognition. It broke the Black-white binary and allowed for a comparative way of seeing each other” (181). Chapter 6 accomplishes the task of communicating Fanon and Lamming’s mission to make “the way of seeing as a means of making decolonial change” (185), a task extending into the contemporary anti-colonial movements outlined in the final section of White Sight.

Section three, “The Crisis of Whiteness,” lays out the aforesaid “decolonial wave” that has “jumped the Atlantic Ocean following the forced journey made by so many thousands of Africans to unsettle the symbolic order of the Americas” (26). In other words, this decolonial wave began during independence movements in formerly-colonized African nations and has extended into acts of protest in the African diaspora and in the United States. In Chapter 7, “The Strike Against Statues,” Mirzoeff chronicles the titular resistance movements beginning in the 1960s, in nations like Algeria, Angola and in modern day South Africa. Described as the “war of statues,” the toppling of colonial-era statues—stark reminders of white sight and its surveilling capacity—serves as a symbolic task representing power changing hands “from colonizer to formerly colonized” (197-198). Mirzoeff describes moments where liberators in African nations literally and figuratively reclaim power from European colonizers, including the recent Rhodes Must Fall movement in 2015, wherein South African students protested an on-campus statue of imperial ruler Cecil John Rhodes. Furthermore, the protests described in “The Strike Against Statues” also encompass those movements reclaiming bodily autonomy on the part of the queer and trans community, for instance, the photo series Redefining the Power III (With Miguel Prince) by Kiluanji Kia Henda, wherein the artist depicts “his ‘cultural heroes’ on top of their vacated pedestals” (201). Describing one of the photos, Mirzoeff explains:

“The dreamlike effect in the photo evokes the continuing displacement by which the cultural unconscious might be changed. The multiframe format depicts change over time, but also evokes the gaps in between each image and the future that is yet to come. […] Queer and trans bodies claimed a redefined constituent power (potencia) to imagine the global. While the skyscraper makes it clear that the global city world continues to constrain and compartmentalize life for that majority, the triptych suggests that maybe the queer African can de-dehumanize the world. The three young Africans sitting below could be the foot soldiers of that transformation, just as the Portuguese soldiers in the first panel were for imperialism.” (203-4)

Such a thorough consideration of race and national identity alongside gender and sexual identity importantly circles back to Mirzoeff’s discussion of white sight as endorsing monohumanism along the lines of gender and racial ideals. To be wholly perfectly human is to identify as white and male, and by actively resisting such ideals activists “make visible ‘an aperture, an opening, a possibility’ in settler colonial reality through which a different future may be accessed” (203).

Earlier in Chapter 7, Mirzoeff notes that strikes against colonial statues “refuse racialized ‘common sense’ about what is contemporary and what counts as history” (197). This statement in my view carries over into Chapter 8, “The General Crisis of Whiteness,” where Mirzoeff concludes with a reflection on the United States in 2020. Specifically, the author summarizes the “general crisis of whiteness in that year from the first impact of the virus in March to white claims to immunity from the virus in April and the impact of the George Floyd Uprising starting in May” (26). Catalyzed in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, the decolonizing events discussed in “The General Crisis of Whiteness” further

“made the visual politics and practices of white sight and white reality starkly visible in the United States, expressed in a chaotic mix of police, political, and viral immunities” (227).

The last portion of that quotation—a chaotic mix of police, political, and viral immunities—is of note. Recent activism and pushes towards resistance, such as the toppling of confederate statues and protests against the murder of George Floyd (among many other murders that soon followed), according to Mirzoeff, were met with forceful, sometimes violent push-back from white supremacists. “The city may have been empty at the street level,” writes Mirzoeff, of his own experiences in New York during the pandemic, “but it continued to function as a globalized machine of inequality” (232). Indeed, in 2020, white sight reemerged within the Blue Lives Matter movement, through the conspiracy theories against COVID-19 immunization, through the January 6 insurrection. “The single imperial screen was reconstituted as many distributed devices, streaming video and downloading images that reconstructed white reality” (249). However, towards the end of “The General Crisis of Whiteness, Mirzoeff ends with a glimmer, a sliver of hope. Quoting Christina Sharpe, he writes, “despite all the worsening of the ‘weather’ of antiblackness […] there is nonetheless the possibility to undo its nationalism” (255). Strikes against white sight open up that possibility.

The best academic monographs expand my horizons, exposing me to new disciplines along the way. I enjoy reading books that open my eyes, shape my point of view, and make me think. White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness does just that. “To look forward is to look toward future decolonizing” (16), Mirzoeff writes early in White Sight, and after reading his work, I too see this future as far off as it may seem