Rhizome Experiment, Fall 2015

Bleaching the Ethiopian: the threat of blackness becoming white

Bleaching the Ethiopian

          “By the twentieth century race was no longer a stable category, but rather an identity that required maintenance and display.”  The white man’s idea of a racial binary and hierarchy was on the rocks, and new “Technology contributed to the difficulties of perpetuating the fiction of racial separation.”  One such technology: the x ray.  X Ray technology itself suggested that the composition of man beneath the skin, both black and white, was identical, threatening past “scientific evidence” that supposedly had proven that black men were biologically inferior.  Because of this, these notions of biological ineptitude were rather close to being debunked, so the outward, visual differences between black and white were what the hierarchy, entirely established on socially constructed ideas of difference, depended on. 
         Technological determinism argues that a technology blindly emerges and begins changing the world around it. The evolution of x rays however openly refutes the concept of technological determinism, as x ray technology was brought into society as, first, a diagnostic tool, and second, a possible treatment for lupus and cancer, yet because of white man’s fear of the collapse of the established racial hierarchy, the racial implications of this new technology nearly brought the abandonment of a significant and innovative technology.
         After the original exploration of x-rays as a tool for seeing beneath the skin, x-rays were explored in the early 1900’s as a treatment for diseases like lupus and cancer.  While the intentions of the technology were as a curative measure, it was discovered that it had scarring side effects that left black skin white.  While x-rays may have caused some scarring, the “whitening” effects were largely blown out of proportion and caused national uproar.  The fear was that the use of x-rays, despite being a medical technology, were not regulated or restricted to licensed people, like surgeries were, so anyone could get ahold of x-ray technology and turn black skin white.  With visual difference being one of the few remaining differences on which American racism was founded, it was feared that those in black skin could not only “pass” as white, but “surpass” the historically powerful white population.
         As stated by Bruce Sinclair in Technology and the African-American Experience, “the history of race in America has been written as if technologies scarcely existed, and the history of technology as if it were utterly innocent of racial significance.”  The original use of x-rays as a tool for seeing beneath the skin contributed to the history of race in America by helping debunk the idea of biological inferiority, while the racial implications of the scarring effects of x-rays as a diagnostic tool impeded the immediate acceptancy of radiation as a treatment. 

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