Re-Orientation: Viewing Justice in a Racially Violent World

Abstract

There is a tendency by some whites to view African Americans as insignificant and nonthreatening.¹ At the same time, examinations of black/white racial relationships in the United States call forth questions about black invisibility as a tool of resistance. In an editorial titled “Affirmative Action,” Santa Clara University English Professor Jeff Zorn, quoting Cornel West, said that

every major institution in American society—churches, universities, courts, academies of science, governments, economies, television, film, and others—attempted to exclude black people from the human family in the name of white supremacist ideology. This unrelenting assault on black humanity produced the fundamental condition of black culture—that of black invisibility and namelessness.²