This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. This lecture in the series

The Genealogy of Race, given by Patricia Williams, was originally broadcast in 1997.

If race is something about which we dare not speak in polite society, the same cannot be said

of the viewing of race.

How or whether blacks are seen depends upon a dynamic of display that ricochets between hypervisibility and oblivion.

Blacks are seen everywhere, taking over the world one minute.

Yet the great ongoing toll of poverty and isolation that engulfs so many people remains the object of persistent oversight. If, moreover, the real lives of real blacks unfold outside the view of many whites, the fantasy of black life as a theatrical enterprise is an almost obsessive

indulgence. This sort of voyeurism is hardly peculiar to the mechanics of racial colonization,

of course. Any group designated the colorful local, the bangled native, or the folksy ethnic,

stands to suffer its peculiar limitation.

But since it is racial voyeurism that has produced some of the biggest visual blockbusters of the century,

one might as well begin there.

Consider, if you will indulge me, for what I promise will be just a moment of exquisitely bad taste,

the lurid babble that has been O.J. Simpson mania.

It might be a version, I suppose, of that great conversation about race we Americans are always telling ourselves we're going to have,

albeit a conversation waged in a fan-danced pantomime of naked revelations

followed by quick flutters of denial. Words and images on completely different wavelengths

at constant war in a swirling mush of conflictual so-called information. Race, sex, miscegenation screamed the front-page photos. No race, no class,

just the American way of colorblind justice demurely intoned so many of the sober wordsmiths

and solemn television anchorman. Those who did talk about race, blacks by and large, were denounced grandly, not on substantive

grounds, but for ever having imagined the subject into existence.

This scripted denial ultimately allowed visual images to remain in the realm of the unspoken.

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