The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment

209 Pages·2017·1.81 MB·English

by  Helen Ngo

i
The Habits of Racism
Philosophy of Race
Series Editor: George Yancy, Emory University
Editorial Board: Sybol Anderson, Barbara Applebaum, Alison Bailey, Chike Jeffers,
Janine Jones, David Kim, Emily S. Lee, Zeus Leonardo, Falguni A. Sheth, Grant Silva
The Philosophy of Race book series publishes interdisciplinary projects that center upon
the concept of race, a concept that continues to have very profound contemporary implica-
tions. Philosophers and other scholars, more generally, are strongly encouraged to sub-
mit book projects that seriously address race and the process of racialization as a deeply
embodied, existential, political, social, and historical phenomenon. The series is open to
examine monographs, edited collections, and revised dissertations that critically engage
the concept of race from multiple perspectives: sociopolitical, feminist, existential, phe-
nomenological, theological, and historical.
White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism, edited by George Yancy
The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning,
by Alfred Frankowski
Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience, edited by Tina Fernandes Botts
The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment,
by Helen Ngo
The Habits of Racism
A Phenomenology of Racism
and Racialized Embodiment
Helen Ngo
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans. Donald A. Landes,
Copyright © 2012 Routledge. Excerpts reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis
Books UK.
Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race, George Yancy, 2008.
Excerpts reproduced with permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group,
permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ngo, Helen, 1981- author.
Title: The habits of racism : a phenomenology of racism and racialized
embodiment / Helen Ngo.
Description: Lanham : Lexington, 2017. | Series: Philosophy of race |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017022513 (print) | LCCN 2017024838 (ebook) | ISBN
9781498534659 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498534642 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Racism--Psychological aspects. | Phenomenology.
Classification: LCC HT1521 (ebook) | LCC HT1521 .N396 2017 (print) | DDC
305.8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022513
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
1 Racist Habits: Bodily Gesture, Perception, and Orientation 1
2 The Lived Experience of Racism and Racialized Embodiment 55
3 Die Unheimlichkeit: The Racialized Body Not-at-Home 93
4 Racism’s Gaze: Between Sartre’s Being-Object
and Merleau-Ponty’s Intertwining 135
Conclusion 175
Bibliography 179
Index 185
About the Author 193
v

Acknowledgments
My first thanks go to series editor George Yancy, whose vision and infectious
enthusiasm helped bring this book into fruition. I also owe a special debt of
gratitude to my doctoral advisors, Anne O’Byrne and Ed Casey, for their
valuable guidance and close reading in the formative stages of this project;
and to Alia Al-Saji, Eduardo Mendieta, and George Yancy for their insightful
feedback on subsequent drafts. I count myself lucky to have benefitted from
the expertise and generous attention of such wonderful, inspiring thinkers.
For their sustained friendship and engagement with the ideas in this text, I
wish to thank Brian Irwin and Amir Jaima; they have been excellent philosophi-
cal interlocutors. For their encouragement, motivation, camaraderie, or mentor-
ing throughout the different stages of writing, I thank: Eunah Lee, Tim Johnston,
Daniel Susser, Lori Gallegos de Castillo, Eva Kittay, Mary Rawlinson, Amma
Asare, Ramesh Fernandez, Nathalie Batraville, Robert Ramos, Gustavo Gómez
Perez, Hugues Dusausoit, Laura Roberts, Bryan Mukandi, Simone Gustafsson,
Rebecca Hill, Catherine Mills, and Michelle Boulous Walker. I also thank the
Stony Brook philosophy graduate student community for the supportive envi-
ronment that nurtured the first seeds of this project, along with participants of
the Collegium Phaenomenologicum (2013), PIKSI (2013), and audience mem-
bers at conferences where I have presented early work from this book.
I extend a deep thanks to my parents, Thanh Chi and Thuc Trinh, whose
resilience inspire and sustain me more than they know, and to Cathy and
Steven, for being the most supportive (and fun!) siblings I could ask for.
Finally, I thank Patrick for seeing this project through with me from its
inception to its completion, for living through its many highs and lows
(rallying me through those lows), and for making the time and space for this
book to come into being. And to Maia, whose recent appearance in the world
has made the final period of writing a most happy one.
vii

Introduction
When I was young—around eight or nine years old—I remember having a
conversation with my older sister, whom I looked up to a great deal. We were
talking about the jade bracelet around her wrist; a nice enough looking red
Chinese jade bracelet, similar to the one my mother and her generation of
friends wore. I neither particularly liked nor disliked these bracelets, but even
back then they were to my mind associated with the cumbersome and often
painful experience of removal; a simple, circular, hard-stone bangle designed
to fit the narrowness of a wrist, its removal would usually involve wringing
it over the width of your hand with the help of soapy water and a fair amount
of force. For this reason one wore the bracelet either as a semi-permanent
appendage or suffered the sore and reddened hand upon its removal. Given
that, along with its weightiness, and obtrusive clunk when inadvertently
struck against a hard surface, I wondered why my sister bothered with it.
“I wear it to remind myself that I’m Asian,” she, then aged 12 or 13, said.
“When I look down at my wrist and see the jade bracelet, I remember that
I’m not white.” How funny, I remember thinking to myself. Of course you’re
Asian, why would you need reminding of that? And yet at the same time, there
was something in her response that I understood immediately and intuitively.
I, too, would sometimes “forget” I was Asian, even growing up as we did, in
a migrant suburb among other Chinese-Vietnamese refugee families. Some-
times, I thought with a tiny pang of guilt, it was nicer to “forget.” Reflecting
on that conversation now, I am struck by the deep and poignant insight of two
young girls navigating the complex world of race, alterity, embodiment. and
identity. The quiet hegemony of whiteness, the tension in experiencing one-
self from the “inside” as invisible but from the “outside” as visibly “raced,”
and the sense of “burden” that this duality brought with it (much like the
ix