Do You See?

THE RELATIONSHIP OF OPPRESSED people to their oppressors can be understood in terms of the prohibition to see or be seen.

Take the American example. Under Jim Crow in the South, Blacks understood that they were to be invisible—not seen and not seeing. No Black person could look at a white person in a way that reflected her humanity or the realities of her existence. Even the imagined gaze of a Black man at a white woman was grounds for lynching. After almost one hundred years of this invisibility, the nonviolent demonstrations of the civil rights movement forced the nation to see what was being done to Black people. It turned out that by then, the early 1960s, once it was forced to see, the nation discovered in itself the capacity to act on what it had seen. Historic civil rights legislation was passed and significant changes occurred.

Take the German example. Once Hitler had consolidated total power in Germany, the regime set about, first, placing in concentration camps all those whom it was felt people did not want to see due to their difference: homosexuals, people with disabilities, Roma people. Then the Nazis began their campaign against the Jews, which can be viewed (as Freud all but foresaw) as the elimination of those who because of their difference were able to see things differently from the majority. Stupendous crimes were committed in part to eliminate people who looked different or saw things differently.

Take the Russian example. The Soviet Union went from conditions of joint leadership in the late 1920s, in which people generally had the freedom to see what was happening in their country and say what they thought about it, to conditions of a totalitarian Stalinist state in the early 1930s, in which people were not permitted to see what was plainly in front of them. They were not permitted to see all around them the hideous suffering of millions of people caused by the first Five-Year Plan. They were only permitted to see a heroic