Fear of a Black Phenotype

March 25, 2024 Fear of a Black Phenotype

This image makes me a little nervous. I created it through an idiosyncratic digital process, where the final image is largely unrelated to the initiating set of marks, and no clear authorial intention controls the outcome. In other words:

I didn’t set out to draw a Black woman.

That I think (and think others will think) it’s a drawing of a Black woman makes me a little nervous — because so much of the history of white artists depicting Black people is horrific, and the image places me in that history.

But if my authorial intention doesn’t make it a drawing of a Black woman, what, if anything, does?

I think (and I think others will think) it resembles a Black woman. Resemblances is distinct from racist caricature, but it’s still problematic since the image isn’t of and so doesn’t resemble any one specific person who happens to be Black. It’s an invented image, and so for it to resemble “a” Black woman, Black women would have to have some common appearance that the image somehow imitates.

Setting aside the considerable issues of gender and focusing just on race, the image would have to resemble a Black phenotype. 

In 2022, I received a reader’s report for an essay submission, “Reading Race in the Comics Medium,” that I’ve since revised and was just published in Closure #10. The reader reported:

“You must take into account how logics of race inform linguistic constructions, while also bearing in mind that racial phenotype is a very, very real thing. You seem to express tacit reservations about its existence … It is a very well-established and researched fact that Black phenotype is real, and consequential – even deadly – in white supremacist systems.”

I think the reader misread me. (The essay draft discussed, among other things, how men with Black phenotype receive harsher sentences and the specific attributes of noses drawn to represent Black faces.) But it also seems likely to me that I indirectly and unknowingly communicated, not a tacit reservation about the existence of Black phenotype, but a discomfort with talking about it. In other words:

Black phenotype makes me a little nervous.

And that nervousness apparently occurs whether I’m addressing the subject in words or image.

Being a little nervous isn’t a problem, especially if the nervousness results in my being more careful. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium.” Tacit reservations or not, I’m drafting a section about Black phenotype. It helps that I’ve been exchanging work with Jo Davis-McElligatt.

Here’s a passage I’ve been working on:

In her essay “Black Looking and Looking Black: African American Cartoon Aesthetics,” Joanna Davis-McElligatt uses the term “Black phenotype” three times. Though the phrase may communicate an immediate surface meaning (brown skin, black tightly curled hair, lips larger and nostrils wider than typical of non-Black people), no phenotype can simply be “Black” because phenotypes do not match racial categories. “Phenotypic traits have been used for centuries for the purpose of racial classification,” explains John H. Relethford, but “the boundaries in global variation are not abrupt and do not fit a strict view of the race concept; the number of races and the cutoffs used to define them are arbitrary. The race concept is at best a crude first-order approximation to the geographically structured phenotypic variation in the human species” (). As a result of that crudeness, the term’s adjective-noun combination is oxymoronic. “Phenotype” references physical qualities and “Black” references a socially constructed category, resulting in the impossibility of socially constructed physical qualities. To avoid that extrinsic-intrinsic contradiction, “Black phenotype” could mean physical qualities belonging to members of a socially constructed racial group. While technically accurate (group members necessarily have physical qualities), the phrase implies a unique subset of physical qualities that is consistent across members and therefore ultimately defining of the group – which then redefines “Black” as that set of physical traits and redefines “race” as not a social construction. To avoid that essentialist definition, I understand “phenotype” to mean: physical qualities perceived as belonging to members of a socially constructed racial group. The perception may be by members, non-members, both, or some combination, and the perception is always socially constructed. Since an individual whose appearance does not match a Black phenotype may still be Black, racial constructions also extend beyond phenotypes to include socially constructed perceptions of other qualities (such as speech, clothing, names, and social environment). Davis-McElligatt therefore references an artist’s rendering of a character’s “Black phenotype—his Black curly hair, dark eyes, rich brown skin, and wide nose and lips” and lists such “portrayals of Black phenotype” as distinct from both “Black expressive culture” and “the conventions of Black being,” as well as distinguishing “Black phenotype, or looking Black” from “Black behavior, or acting Black.”

This next bit may end up on the cutting floor, but it still seemed worth drafting:

My white phenotype includes beige skin, blue eyes, brown hair, a thinner than average nostril width, and smaller than average lip size. Distinguishing qualities of my white expressive culture, conventions of white being, and white behavior are too numerous and complex to easily list – though all align with my phenotype, and so a visual depiction of my phenotype may be sufficient to evoke them.

Weaving back to my digital art, I created this last image shortly after creating the image at the top of this post, using the same emergent process I described there.

I think it’s a drawing of a white person.

Is it?

Tags: Joanna Davis-McElligatt, reading race in the comics medium, the color of paper

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