In Black Like Me John Howard Griffin wrote about 'the hate stare'. It is what Sarfaz Manzoor calls one of the "routine torments of discrimination." It is an example what Jean-Paul Sartre called 'the look', an objectifying glance that classifies you without perceiving you. It's not necessarily a look of hate; it can be subject to any number of emotions, but it always feels distancing. This article captures the same concept from a different direction. You and I are going for a walk; we are going for a walk, and our collective experiences are felt through our embodied subjectivity. 'We' is described through "referring to the plurality as the subject (of an action, belief, judgment, emotion, perception, etc)." But when we are seen by a third party, that person sees us, and being seen this way is a very different kind of collective experience, what W.E.B. DuBois calls "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." How many of our experiences in education are of 'we' and how many are of 'us'? Image: from my film Bogota.
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