In a photograph, I’ve juxtaposed Roosevelt’s sculpted head with the “Greek” skull that exemplified whiteness, as circulated in Josiah Nott’s racist best-seller Types of Mankind (1854). My point is not to prove that Fraser was influenced by this specific source but to make apparent to present-day viewers the visual vocabulary of racism, that operates in arenas beyond skin color and nationality. Notice how both have an absurdly straight and long forehead. Even more absurd is that the comparison is of one statue to another. Nott claimed skull shape revealed permanent and unchanging types of human. However, his “Greek” skull was not human but the imagined skull of the classical sculpture known as the Apollo Belvedere. If the science is outdated, it still exerts its force every time someone uses the expression “highbrow” to mean cultivated or learned, reprising a racialized hierarchy of intelligence measured by skulls.
Following the revolution in Haiti against slavery (1791–1804), to be white was to be kin to a divine being, whereas to be African was something other than human. The constructed homology of “white” skin with the white marble of the statues was a historical accident. In antiquity, statues were brightly painted but time and the elements had eroded their color. The “whiteness” of the classical statue is an imagined projection. Its “skull” is pure fantasy — because statues don’t have skulls. These statues are not examples of racism, they are its form. The resulting “whiteness” is not a neutral variant of the human but a fantasy constructed in imaginary relation to classical sculpture.
I want to be clear: Fraser’s sculpture would be no less offensive if it were a single figure of Roosevelt. It would still exemplify these racialized fantasies. The whiteness on display here does not think of itself as being connected to other humans. Philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls this “monohumanism,” a way of thinking in which being human is an exclusionary category. To cut out the African and Indigenous figures is to act out the logic of this singular way of seeing. To see the white figure alone in this monocular vision is, as they say, a feature not a bug. My point is not just that this sculpture is exceptionally offensive but that it effectively and monolithically represents what whiteness wants. When many are saying that they did not previously notice the statue, or were not aware it was offensive, it shows these monocular ways of seeing remain in force.
Further, this way of seeing is entirely consistent with the ongoing uprising. If the appalling video of George Floyd’s murder made anything apparent, it was that the police did not see him as human. In one of the few cases where a police officer has testified in relation to a shooting, former officer Jason van Dyke, who killed Laquan McDonald in Chicago, testified emotionally about Laquan’s “huge white eyes just staring right through me.” McDonald was 17 and van Dyke shot him 16 times. He did not see a person. He saw the racist stereotype he had been trained to see by segregated white culture in general and by the police in particular.