Richard Dyer's 'The Matters Of Whiteness'

When reading, Richard Dyer’s, “The Matters of Whiteness”, there was two concepts that intrigued me, being the concepts of perspective in fim editing and how the characteristics attained and projected from visibility and invisibility of white people’s “whiteness”, reproduces racial power relations. White people are the only category of human beings that do not have to identify themselves with a race, they have the privilege of just being identified as human. I agree with Dyer’s concept in regards to the access of privilege that white people have by being visibly white. From looking at the beginning of the colonial era, white people had immediate and unquestionable authority and power over other races of people, because they had received the privilege from their visible whiteness. Along with the visibility, white people have the privilege of attaining power and having the authoritative narrative of other races by their invisible traits that characterize them as white. When reviewing this concept of invisibility, I thought of the power received by being the spectator when practicing the gaze. Richard Dyer, calls the spectator, ‘the watcher’, the white watcher receives power by …show more content…
Although artist of color can reverse the looking glass and place white people under the pressure of their gaze, people of color don't as often participate in this particular spectatorship that white people do in an oppressing manner. To my observation people of color who have the power of perspective, instead dig deeper within themselves and their culture to produce a true image of who they are as black, mexican/latino, asian, or native american. By not letting the white narrative define who people of color are as humans, subject, or objects is an action being used in postmodern