"Unashamedly Black": Jim Crow Aesthetics and the Visual Logic of Shame

Abstract

In her autobiographical essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), Zora Neale Hurston famously positioned herself as a woman who is free of racial shame: “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me” (155). With this statement, Hurston rejects the notion that shame is an integral part of her experience as an African American woman during the Jim Crow period. However, just a few years later, in his essay, “On Being Ashamed of Oneself: An Essay on Race Pride” (1933), W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that statements such as Hurston’s are rare; despite political and social advances, African Americans “are still ashamed of ourselves and are thus estopped from valid objection when white folks are ashamed to call us human” (73). This racial shame is, Du Bois argues, a serious problem because it is more than an individual feeling; it has repercussions for the race as a whole due to its potential as a kind of “race suicide” (72). Instead, Du Bois’s response to shame lies in a rewriting of narratives of black inferiority that hold power within the race and outside of it. What Du Bois does not highlight in his essay is the visual dynamic of this race suicide, even though his well-known claims about double consciousness are founded on the gaze, making him, as Shawn Michelle Smith has pointed out, “an early visual theorist of race and racism” (2). Du Bois proposed that an African American person has a “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. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” (Souls 11). This sense of “two-ness,” epitomized by double consciousness, is also integral to the affect of shame with its internalizing of the imagined gaze of an other. At its core, shame is a dynamic of looking, as the philosopher Bernard Williams has noted: “Even if shame and its motivations always involve in some way or other an idea of the gaze of another, it is important that for many of its operations the imagined gaze of an imagined other will do” (82). Recent studies concerning the visual work of race and racism, such as those by Smith, Elizabeth Abel, Anne Elizabeth Carroll, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Miriam