Concluding Race

First, some very happy news: my next book, The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium, has been accepted for publication.

The external readers had some very nice things to say:

“The Color of Paper is unique and groundbreaking in its efforts to link literal whiteness on the page to metaphoric Whiteness, focusing readers’ attention to the relationship between race, paper, ink, color, and text.”

Also:

“It will be a highly influential contribution to Comics Studies and Whiteness Studies.”

And:

“Gavaler draws on a diverse and broad group of scholars, thinkers, artists, and theorists. He is particularly skilled at breaking down theoretical concepts and demonstrating how they strengthen our reading and understanding of race in comics.”

And, what the hell, one more:

“Gavaler has admirable fluency, shifting between theoretical grounding, historical context, deep close reading, and adept analysis. The writing is both sophisticated and accessible, appropriate for undergraduates, graduate students, and advanced scholars.”

But the external readers did note one significant flaw:

“I do think that a stronger conclusion does need to be included.”

In this case “a stronger conclusion” is a polite euphemism for “any conclusion whatsoever,” since the version of the book I submitted ends with its final chapter and without the slightest gesture toward a culminating statement.

I think I needed to get the rest of the book fully in place before attempting a summary, but it is a little funny since in the version prior to this one, I wrote a peculiarly inept introduction (I later shared the opening of the much-improved version here). It seems I have trouble with doors: stepping in and stepping out. I seem reasonably capable while hanging out inside a room, so I hope it’s just a matter of cutting the right hole in the wall to guide readers in and out.

Summarizing the takeaways of The Color of Paper took me a long weekend and about 2,500 words, more than I’m going to post here, but I would like to share the final portion. As I was drafting the last paragraph, I remembered I had the perfect image to illustrate the ideas. I had it because it used to be the very first image in the manuscript — which I cut while revising the introduction because it was a part of my door problem. Beginning with a 1955 painting by an abstract expressionist is not a good way to signal a focus on the comics medium. I happily cut it. But I also happily added it to the end of the conclusion where a gesture out toward other media feels appropriate.

Or so I hope.

Here’s a draft of the last third of the conclusion:

Because black-and-white images tend to be black marks printed on white surfaces, they also highlight The Color of Paper’s second question: How does whiteness relate to Whiteness?

Though hatched and crosshatched areas produce various gray effects, the marks in black-and-white art are black ink spaced to optically combine with the white of a paper surface. Black ink (or less often a black surface) can represent skin (and has in the racist blackface minstrel tradition), but the dominant norm in and outside of the comics medium is for an unmarked and paradigmatically white surface to represent the skin of characters of all racial categories. That paradoxical range is possible because, rather than linguistically reading or spatiotemporally observing, viewers ignore paper color. They therefore typically treat the color of a page as meaningless when assessing the race of a drawn character.

The expectation that skin represented by white paper would be perceived as White skin reveals the illogic of racial categorizations. Viewers do not perceive white skin as White skin because White is not white. A more logical (though not necessarily accurate) assumption is that skin represented by beige paper would be perceived as White skin. The logical expectation is blocked and the illogical expectation is highlighted, because U.S. racial categorizations are grounded in an ink-on-paper metaphor that produces false racial binaries through the double visual dichotomies of white/black and white/color.

Because race is not a coherent concept, racial thinking appropriates and misapplies the materiality of black-on-white print and colors-on-white art to construct the illusion of coherence. The whiteness of paper allows black and color marks to be legible, and since white marks would be illegible, the interiors of white objects are represented by the negative spaces of unmarked paper. Racial illogic extends and combines that dual quality of whiteness to Whiteness: it is both one race among multiple races (just as white is one color among multiple colors visible on a page), and it is also the ubiquitous background necessary to make the concept of race legible. Because white requires no addition of marks, it is the unmarked default state of the page, which metaphorically naturalizes Whiteness as the unmarked default state of humanity which other races mar or obscure.

Though viewers do not interpret white paper visible in areas representing skin as White skin, the conflations of whiteness and Whiteness reverberate through a medium developed and still partially dependent on white paper. While not required, the negative spaces between images are the most pervasive device for structuring image-text relationships in the comics medium and perhaps print culture generally. The white frames of gutters produced by the absence of marks evoke Whiteness as a larger social system framing and controlling all other cultural content. Because paper may be perceived as outside authorial choice and so paradoxically not a part of works that exist only when printed on its surface, the color of paper is perceptually neutral. It is as if works exist in an ideal state where ink is printed on invisible surfaces. Because neutrality and invisibility are connotatively aligned with Whiteness, these deeper structuring qualities of whiteness further structure racial thinking. Whiteness partitions and juxtaposes other cultural elements in relationship to itself and within its all-encompassing frame. By misapplying the norms of ink-on-paper visual works, U.S. culture functions as a White page. 

Previous illustrations included in The Color of Paper are representational images, most of or including faces. For a final example visualizing how whiteness and Whiteness relate, consider abstract expressionist Franz Kline’s 1955 black-and-white painting Untitled. The work hangs in the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, where curators include a statement by the artist on an accompanying plaque: “People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.” Though a small portion of Kline’s beige canvas appears visible along its top edge, the misimpression is reinforced by the gallery wall surrounding the minimally framed painting. The seemingly unpainted white canvas of Untitled appears to be continuous with the white of the wall, expanding and reinforcing the illusion that the black marks are the only added marks, including to the white, black-lettered plaque beside it.

Untitled illustrates Whiteness.