Whiteness as Exotic
“…Whiteness refuses to see itself as alien, as seen, as recognized…They came to see, but not to be seen…I took the risk and named their whiteness. I attempted to disrupt their strategy to remain absent. I wanted to communicate to them that they were not unseen, but seen. They were specifically seen from an embodied Black subjectivity…” -George Yancy
What happens when the gaze turns back—when whiteness becomes the spectacle rather than the spectator?
To name whiteness as exotic is to reverse the colonial gaze, to redirect the lens that once rendered Blackness as spectacle, as deviation, as other. Under this reversal, whiteness becomes the anomaly. Its supposed neutrality collapses. Its illusion of universality dissolves under the pressure of being seen.
Ruth Frankenberg reminds us that “whiteness, as a set of normative cultural practices, is visible most clearly to those it definitely excludes and those to whom it does violence. Those who are securely housed within its borders usually do not examine it.” In this sense, whiteness thrives through invisibility—its power dependent upon remaining unnamed. To be unseen is to remain unaccountable.
Historically, exoticism served as a mechanism of domination: non-white bodies were made hyper-visible, fetishised, and othered under the colonial gaze. The “exotic” was framed as something outside the norm—an object of curiosity and desire that reinforced white centrality. But when whiteness is rendered exotic, the dynamic shifts. The unmarked becomes marked.
George Yancy describes whiteness as a “site of release,” a condition that allows white bodies to forget themselves.“…Whites believe themselves able to inhabit a space that is not granted to those who are “trapped” in their bodies, who are nothing more than their bodies… Non-raced white bodies are able to “soar free” of the messy world of racism…to float free of the material, to forget the body, and to forget the body’s implication in the machinery of racialized and racist actions…This process of “forgetting the body” has profound existential implications…”
This capacity to forget the body—to move through the world unmarked by race—is a privilege that depends on others being made hyper-visible. When whiteness is made visible, when it can no longer forget its own embodiment, it is forced into confrontation with itself.
This reversal is deeply destabilising. To be seen is to be held accountable; to be rendered visible is to lose the comfort of unexamined dominance. The oppositional gaze fractures the ease of never having to acknowledge one’s own racial particularity. It demands that whiteness reckon with itself—not as the unspoken centre of human experience, but as one racialised position among many.
Can whiteness bear to see itself?