White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. Take the white marble sculpture Venus de Milo, for example.
An overpaid NYU professor Nicholas Mirzoeff has written a book, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. In it, he claims that “classic works of art, face masks, or drones,” “cultural icons such as sculptures of Apollo Belvedere and Venus de Milo,” and “Confederate monuments” were all propping up ‘whiteness.’
Mirzoeff Wants a Visual Genocide
According to NYU, Mirzoeff writes about the visuality of white supremacy, the material infrastructures that construct this aesthetic of whiteness — “all the material and visible means to divide and thereby racialize, including neoclassical architecture, museums, national parks, prisons, triumphal arches, tombs of the unknown soldier, universities, zoos” — and how we might resist and dismantle it.
If you can see whites or something white they created, it’s the visuality of white supremacy.
An overview of the book at Barnes & Noble calls white supremacy [white people] a crisis since the George Floyd riots, but white supremacy has a history. The history of ‘white sight’ includes the beautiful statue of Venus de Milo created out of white marble.
Basically, anything whites did as part of their progress over the centuries is white supremacy to Mirzoeff.
Naturally, Capitalism Is White
Mirzoeff bizarrely connects Renaissance innovations—from the invention of perspective and the erection of Apollo statues as monuments to (white) beauty and power to the rise of racial capitalism dependent on slave labor—with the ever-expanding surveillance technologies of the twenty-first century to show that white sight creates an oppressively racializing world, in which subjects who do not appear as white are under constant threat of violence.
Front Page magazine refers to Mirzoeff’s cultural vandalism with one of his quotes.
“Monuments and statues embody that way of seeing. Removing some of them has been an interim success for the strike against white sight.”
In other words, the radical academics want white people out of sight. They don’t want to see whites, white art, culture, nothing. Pulling down statues, as in cultural communist revolutions, is glorified.
Front Page Explains
As it turns out, the statue has been a target of racists for some time, with complaints about its whiteness. A Forbes article claims that the “whiteness of ancient Greek statuary has been weaponized by racists”. A magazine rants about “Whiteness, Sculpture, Historical Inaccuracy, and Colonialism.”
In a deranged racist environment in which milk is treated as a symptom of whiteness and, therefore, racism, such academic behavior is the new normal.
It’s white, therefore, it’s bad. Racism works well in academia, especially NYU. It’s part of our transformation to a racist nation where whites transfer their wealth to non-whites.
Mirzoeff was involved in Occupy Wall Street, a communist movement.
Do you get it yet?
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