Over forty years ago, the noted Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall, one of the founders of Cultural Studies, wrote an essay entitled ‘The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media.’ In this essay, Hall examined the structural forms of racism in the British media. By structural forms, he meant that racism was not to be reduced to the individual pathology of someone being a racist but to consider racism as a structure of power naturalized in the common sense that organized the world to the benefit of some and the detrimental discrimination of others.

Thinking today of the Occidental media presentation of the ongoing massacre, ethnic cleansing, and the genocidal intent of Israel in Gaza, this essay returned to mind. One of the key strategies in representing your enemy is to dehumanize him or her. To reduce them to an animal state destined for anonymous annihilation. This strategy was certainly not invented by Israel in the present situation. As with all colonial enterprises, it has been part of its political and military lexicon for decades in the concerted denial of the existence of Palestinians. The adoption of this state-sponsored narrative by the Western media inadvertently reveals the racism that structures power throughout the West and its representations of the world. Concepts of balance, neutrality, and critical distance have evaporated in the ideological flurry. Claims of impartiality have been shamelessly lost in the storm of blatant partisanship where history is erased and time telescoped into the reductive present of ‘Do you condemn Hamas?’. Palestinians remain without voices, reduced to dead and mutilated bodies. At the most, the natives are victims, never protagonists with their own version of the ‘facts.’ Alongside the obvious comparisons between Ukraine and Palestine, where one is supported and speaks, and the other abandoned and silenced, the line of color touches the core of the political economy of images and narratives that expose the ethical hypocrisy of Occidental democracy.

To insist that what is happening in the eastern Mediterranean, in a tiny strip of land clinging to the Mediterranean, is far more than a local conflict or geopolitical event is to underline that Palestine is the question of our time. Discussion of antisemitism and the Shoah that swirl around Israel and the continual justification of the colonial war against native Palestinians necessarily take us into the dark archives of the West and its refusal of responsibility. To talk of the constancy of antisemitism, the Occidental (and not simply German) accountability for the Holocaust, of racism and Islamophobia today, is to talk of the racist configuration of our culture. It is so deeply sedimented in the texture of our lives as to be marginalized and deviated from the ongoing political and philosophical discussion that continues to live the illusion of white supremacy.

Centuries of antisemitism have certainly not been resolved by being displaced to a ‘solution’ in the Middle East or in unconditional support for the state of Israel, nor in transferring fear of the other from the Jew to the Muslim. Shielding itself in an illusory rationalism that seemingly only finds confirmation in Western institutions of power, the narrative reveals all of its limits. Students in Italy being beaten by the police for protesting against the genocide in Gaza that is being live-streamed around the world is only the most acute expression of the moral bankruptcy and siege-like mentality that has seized the increasingly conservative West and its adherence to the status quo. What is clearly emerging is an increasing public divergence within Occidental society itself between popular sentiments and the political institutions that supposedly represent them. The Guardian journalist Owen Jones recently pointed out that a public opinion poll in the UK last month, where, incidentally, school children are discouraged from speaking about Gaza, showed that those strongly agreeing with the British government’s handling of the ‘crisis’ in Gaza was the same number as those who believe in a flat earth: 3%. To speak of Palestine poses the question of democracy for all of us.

The most striking aspect of the present situation is the fear of history. There is a continual attempt to erase the past and annihilate memory, whether in the Israeli destruction of all the cultural institutions in Gaza or the European policing of its colonial constitution as its museums cling to the pillage of empire. The threat that the past might interrogate us is desperately avoided. Other archives, not necessarily authorized by the West but intrinsic to its formation, challenge the God-like omnipotence of white eyes, as Stuart Hall put it. They produce black holes, concentrated accumulations of historical and cultural energy destined to burn the existing narrative and sear our eyes and ears with other historical truths.

An Italian version of this text was previously published at Il Manifesto: https://ilmanifesto.it/i-buchi-neri-del-razzismo-occidentale

Iain Chambers is a writer and independent scholar. He previously taught Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies at the Oriental University in Naples, where he was director of the doctoral programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies in the Anglophone world. His research work is in different fields, including migration, music and the phenomena of identity in the Mediterranean. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Media & Philosophy and Postcolonial Studies and he is author, inter alia, of the books Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008).