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Steve Garner credits American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois with the origins of the idea of the "white gaze". Du Bois wrote of a concept called "double consciousness" that illustrated an unequal power relationship; he called it a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” – black people having to understand themselves as two people: their real selves, and the people that white people perceive.

“It's talking about how black Americans have to understand that white people as a group see you through frames that are imposed on you and over which you have no control,” explains Garner, “so you might have to modify behaviour accordingly, and you always have to bear this in mind in your everyday life.”

Toni Morrison popularised it in the 1990s

In an interview with a US public service broadcaster in 1998, Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison used the phrase “the white gaze” to talk about the tension she felt when she was writing her first books.

Morrison said: “I remember a review of Sula [her second novel] in which the reviewer said, ‘this is all well and good, but one day she – meaning me – will have to face up to the real responsibilities and get mature and write about the real confrontation for black people, which is white people’, as though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze. And I've spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”

As Garner notes, Toni Morrison’s use of the “white gaze” describes “how she felt that she had to constantly account for what she described as a white voice, reading her work over her shoulder and pushing her to explain and articulate things differently than if she were talking to other black people and generating a kind of self-censorship.”

The phrase has migrated across academia from humanities, philosophy and social sciences and now headlines over 100 pieces of academic writing, with more than 13,000 using the phrase within them. “So, it's not a hugely important shorthand,” says Steve Garner, “but it's widely understood.”

The "white gaze" is about collective experience

Used as “a complicated shorthand to explain intergenerational experiences that people of colour have had,” Steve Garner believes that the biggest misunderstanding about the use of the the "white gaze" is that some people believe it is directed at individuals. “It's about groups who are discriminated against finding a way to articulate what they experience,” he says, “and try to think about how to resist it in different ways.”