Sight unseen

Sight unseen explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through analysis of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, Berger illustrates how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly directs what European Americans see as true, and ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact. Reconstructing selected artworks, the author exposes the effects of racial thinking on our interpretation of the visual world. Berger shows how artworks are more significant for confirming internalized beliefs on race than they are for selling us on racial values we do not yet own. This book exposes how something as natural as sight is conditioned by the racial values of society.