Journal of Black Studies and Research
“There are new metaphors, there are new sounds, there are new relations.”
In 1973, TBS interviewed James Baldwin. Through the month of September, we’re opening up our archives and giving readers the opportunity to download and read this incredible, relevant piece of history. Follow this link and click on the green PDF button to access free of charge.
One hundred years ago, in 1917, angry white residents tore through the Black neighborhood of East St. Louis setting fire to homes and assaulting passersby. Black community members armed themselves against the racial pogrom.
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Fifty years ago, in 1967, police raided a “blind pig” in Detroit where a group had gathered to fete two GIs home from the war. Local residents vandalized or looted over 2,000 stores the next five days, causing in excess of forty million dollars of damage. 159 additional American cities reacted similarly to their own municipal injustices that year.
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Twenty-five years ago, in 1992, after a change of venue, a suburban Los Angeles jury acquitted the officers who brutalized Rodney King on videotape. South Central residents took to the streets to protest this injustice, the memory of the light sentence of fifteen-year-old LaTasha Harlins’ killer, still fresh in their minds.
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Three years ago, the Ferguson police permitted Michael Brown to lay uncovered in the street for over four hours. Enraged residents set a QuikTrip ablaze.
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One year ago, two Baton Rouge officers kneeled on Alton Sterling, shooting him multiple times.
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One year ago, a Minnesota patrolman shot Philando Castille, while his girlfriend filmed the encounter on Facebook Live.
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Violence is an unrelenting hallmark of the Black American experience. Kidnappings, savage beatings, summary executions, sexual assaults, massacres, and mass incarceration: the American state and its agents have continuously employed these corporal attacks as mechanisms for exerting social control over minority citizens. The year 2017 marks the gruesome anniversary of some of the most infamous events of anti-Black violence. And while the human toll in each of these incidents is immeasurable, so too is the suffocating omnipresence of structural violence in the everyday lives of those who occupy the lowest tiers of racial, classed, gendered, and sexual hierarchies.
Throughout American history this nation has collectively bought into the “myth of innocence.”[1] Citizens hold their heads high as they engage in what is construed as constructive violence, including “opening” the frontier, the Revolutionary War, and agrarian uprisings. Simultaneously, those who employ corporal force beyond these sanctioned means are punished for engaging in destructive violence.[2] This binary allows Americans to exonerate those who use bodily harm for agreed upon public benefit and discipline those who do not conform to normative ideals and hierarchies. This is the paradox of violence throughout American history. The public lauds force sanctioned by those in power. When the disenfranchised mobilize the same tactic, the public demonizes these actors for tearing apart the fabric of society; the lesson not to throw stones in glass houses, unheeded.
In 1969, appalled by the misinterpreted “explosion” of violence that occurred that decade, the United States government commissioned a study entitled The History of Violence in America. Although the nation had been wracked with on-going war in South Asia, numerous political assassinations, and urban uprisings, historian Richard Hofstadter remarked in his own study “what is impressive to one who begins to learn about American violence is its extraordinary frequency, its sheer commonplaceness in our history.”[3] Or, as black militant H. Rap Brown asserted more plainly, “violence is as American as cherry pie.”[4] Yet when marginalized citizens violently press back against unjust structures, as they did in the above examples, the country recoils in shock and dismay.
Defining violence seems straightforward: bodily harm inflicted by one human being upon another. While this type of violence certainly predominates the Black experience, other more clandestine versions occur simultaneously. John Galtung’s framing of the term captures the constant shadow of violence that creeps over the Black community, ranging beyond corporal terror. Galtung broadens the definition of violence to include the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs.”[5] Central city divestment, environmental racism, stop-and-frisk policies, non-indictments, and political gerrymandering are high-profile examples, yet represent only a fraction of the structural violence that plagues the Black community. Taken as a whole, these unjust structures have often forced African Americans to pursue new, violent forms of redress that frame Blacks as both victims and agents of change. Through the strategic mobilization of violence, the oppressed amplify their demands after years of sanctioned agitation had borne no fruit.
This past week, sandwiched between the anniversaries of the Newark and Detroit uprisings, we reflect on the impact, legacy, and meaning of the 1967 urban revolts. We must challenge and redefine the ways in which these events are recollected. By not doing so, erasure inflicts yet another wound. Violence does not incubate in a sterile petri dish. It grows in the muck and filth of an imbalanced society. The pattern that emerges is that cultural, state, political, gendered, racial, legal, and structural violence always precedes instances of collective response. Yet the dominant narratives focus on the barbarity of popular violence. How is it that the specter of violence employed by the marginalized is scarier than the structural violence perpetrated by the State? Only a radical disruption of these narratives will allow our descendants to mark the passage of time not in the anniversaries of anti-Black violence but rather in the markers of our collective liberation.
Notes
[1] Ira M. Leonard and Christopher C. Leonard, “The Historiography of American Violence,” Homicide Studies 7: 2 (2003), 104.
[2]Richard Maxwell Brown, “Historical Patterns of Violence in America,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, The History of Violence in America (New Work: Bantam Books, 1969), 45.
[3] Richard Hofstadter, “Reflections on Violence in the United States,” Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 7.
[4] W.S. Tkweme, “H. Rap Brown,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American Lives, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 107.
[5] Johan Galtung, “Kulturelle Gewalt” (1993) Vol. 43 Der Burger im Staat in Kathleen Ho “Structural Violence as a Human Rights Violation” (2007) Essex Human Rights Review 4: 2 (September 2007), 106.
Ashley M. Howard is a book reviews editor for TBS and an assistant professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.
More than three years after the death of South Africa’s first democratic president, Nelson Mandela, this issue of The Black Scholar offers a rich set of perspectives on the state of studying blackness from and in South Africa today. Edited by Christopher Ouma, Litheko Modisane, and Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi, After Madiba takes as its point of genesis the facts and fiction that surround Mandela as the first leader of a democratic, post-apartheid/postcolonial South Africa and the ways in which these shaped and informed the transition years. Taken together, this issue offers reflections on the legacies, heritages, and intellectual traditions out of which Nelson Mandela arose, their futures, and the emerging fault lines of South Africa, post 1994. Such fault lines include but are not limited to: xenophobia, citizenship, the rainbow nation, humanism, and peace.
This issue also speaks to challenges to South Africa’s efforts to re-imagine itself into Africa, its diasporas, and the global order of late capitalism that largely stem from the ways in which it is invoked and imagined by the rest of the continent and its diasporas. The issue therefore takes seriously the project of South Africa after apartheid as produced through the intersection of various postcolonial temporalities—continental and diasporic. At the same time it considers the need for South Africa’s postcoloniality to be consciously read, not just in its distinctively late entry in relation to the continent or African diasporas, or the peculiarities of its “post-apartheid” categorizations, but also as already prefigured in the raced archives of the eras of colonialism, segregation and apartheid, and in the Black intellectual histories generated during these periods which resonate and reverberate in contemporary South Africa’s constructions of citizenship in relation to blackness.
Though not limited to these, this issue places at its center several questions: What does it mean to study Black cultures in or from South Africa today? What is the status of blackness as a category of social, political, or economic signification in the wake of Nelson Mandela? Finally, is there a need for a theory and practice in and of Black cultural studies in contemporary South Africa?
For a limited time, download and read the introduction, Black Studies, South Africa, and the Mythology of Mandela and Beyond the Elder Statesman: Reflections on Teaching About Mandela and South Africa in Neo-liberal Times for free.
Preview the entire issue here.
Personal subscriptions to TBS‘s 4-issue volumes are $37. More information on institutional and personal subscriptions can be found here. Individual copies will be available to purchase in our online store soon.
*Each virtual issue collates some of the best writing from our archives, updated with new introductions written by prestigious scholars of black studies, and will be free to read and download for a limited time.*
Black theater and performance offer lenses into a range of Black spaces, experiences, and perspectives. Two TBS issues from 1979 and 1995 outline key priorities in studies of Black theater that have opened multiple and capacious trajectories for research and production. The ensuing collection attempts to capture the forms, archives, and methods of the field in its expected and idiosyncratic manifestations in TBS.
For the summer of 1979 Vévé Clark and Margaret Wilkerson edited Black Theater Traditions. A thorough and vibrant collection, this groundbreaking issue features scholars and scholar/artists who, as James V. Hatch asserts in the title of his entry with Krystyna Bakowski, “resuscitated” Black theater history. In a post-Civil Rights explosion of Black creativity, studies in Black theater accrued objects, methodologies, and repertoires that reflected Black Arts Movement priorities. Luminary scholars and practitioners in this issue lay a foundation that has supported the continued illumination of vernacular, everyday, working class experience alongside the poetics of Black performance and performativity in diverse venues. While acknowledging that scholarship, repertoires, and archives of Black performance offer revolutionary potential, contributors also amplify that potential to extend notions of theatrical practice to encompass practices of daily life. Vévé Clark and Amiri Baraka discuss his restaging of Langston Hughes’ revolutionary play Scottsboro, Limited, a topic that saw yet another landmark revival in a trenchant musical pageant in 2010 for a five-year run. Margaret Wilkerson argues that Black theatrical acts necessarily occur off the proscenium stage in community “event,” while also reviewing the productions and institution-building work of Black community theaters. Katherine Dunham and Vévé Clark emphasize diaspora and attune to an Africanist presence. John O’Neal and a posthumous offering by Lorraine Hansberry articulate the social and community goals of Black American theater. Rhett Jones, Ramona Bass, and George Bass consider the role of community and children in theatrical practice. Errol Hill attends to form and style rooted in Black experience while others characterize Black music and poetry as foundational to theatrical aesthetics rather than scripts, Aristotelian plotlines, and linearity characteristic of European theater. Performance, both on and off the stage, structures and transforms Black culture as well as social and personal experience. Scholars address technique, stagecraft, ritual, aesthetics, venue, audience, training, casting, and plays.
Articles in TBS’s 25th Anniversary issue, Black Drama and Film (Spring 1995), emphasize ritual in Black drama as form, content, and significance. Scholars draw on oral, church, musical, and secular traditions and Africanist practice to illuminate ritual form and force. Contributions to this TBS issue invoke filmmaking and film content as trajectories of ritual form and explore film as a site for the performance of gender and culture. This issue includes an extensive index of films by Black women. The emphasis on ritual as performance form and history positions this commemorative celebratory issue of TBS to offer its continued support and blessing to black knowledge and freedom movements.
Beyond these issues, Black theater and performance research in TBS has illuminated practices and experiences of identity and instances of Black performative mastery. The fundamentally interdisciplinary research considers the work of performers, playwrights, plays, and performances to analyze race, diaspora, gender, identity, self-activity, and belonging. Performance offers a material and symbolic ground for the investigation of the ways Black people experience our lives and identities. Together these examples outline the critical force of performance as an analytic in Black Studies.
Stephanie Leigh Batiste
University of California, Santa Barbara
Articles are free to access through August 2017 and can be accessed here.
Though the term “special issue” can easily be overused and undervalued in contemporary journal publishing, this issue of The Black Scholar very clearly stands out in its engagement with the increasingly present and influential world of Black experimental poetics. Because some might think this world hermetic and distant from the broader assumptions and expectations of African-American writing and African-American thinking about writing, this issue colludes with a number of transformational figures in how the Black word is produced and consumed. They are leading poets and critics exploring the range of Black experimental writing in the U.S.
After a brief introduction by poet/critic, David Marriott, Aldon Lynn Nielsen opens with the complex notion of ‘nation times’ in the poetry of Amiri Baraka, including the notion of Black poetry as an event of political transformation and transfiguration. There is arguably no greater poet of Black poetic transfiguration than Nathaniel Mackey who follows with a poem from his epic cycle, “Song of the Andomboulou,” which begins: “Again we awoke remembering the dead” as he explores the link between reminiscence and the “never not to be remembered.”
In “The Erotics of Mourning in Recent Experimental Black Poetry,” Anthony Reed examines the Black ‘post-lyric,’ with particular reference to the poetry of Claudia Rankine. For Reed, contemporary Black experimental poetry calls for a different kind of reading that dispenses with the dominant cultural emphasis on “lyricization” and all of its cultural and embodied associations. In “Please feel free to perform the text”: Making Slavery Work in a “Colorblind” Era,” Evie Shockley provides a multi-layered discussion of Mendi and Keith Obadike’s, Big House / Disclosure. Arguing that an aesthetic of colorblindness continues to inform white readings of Black poetic forms, gestures, and language, Shockley sees the Obadikes’ work as providing different possibilities and challenges for those who would imagine a race-less universality.
Ronaldo Wilson’s performance work, Lucy & All of Us, continues this exploration of race, genre, and praxis using images as well as text, while Dionne Brand closes out this truly remarkable issue with “An Ars Poetica from the Blue Clerk,” meditating on her attempt to “produce a grammar in which Black existence might be the thought and not the unthought.”
Preview the issue here.
Personal subscriptions to TBS‘s 4-issue volumes are $37. More information on institutional and personal subscriptions can be found here.
Select individual copies can be purchased here.
Why do we continue to let presidential elections determine how we breathe?
Who owns the air? Why all the gasping after a vote? Always believe in a second wind. Don’t run with your mouth open. Listen to your heart. Does it continue to beat? Celebrate life. Work and love. Change is but a kiss.
– E. Ethelbert Miller
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The Spirit of Ida B. Wells – How Will Black Women Fare Under Donald. J. Trump?
By Julianne Malveaux
The unfortunate election of Donald J. Trump is a bitter pill for those African American women who have been focused on social and economic justice. To be sure, the sycophants like Omarosa Manigault are overjoyed with their new power and position, especially as Ms. Manigault asserted that we would all have to “bow down” to Mr. Trump when he was elected. Many of us are not bowing, we are strategizing, organizing, and assessing the damage that African American women will experience during a Trump Presidency.
Mr. Trump has asserted that the size of government is too large and has indicated that he intends to shrink its size. Indeed, days after he was inaugurated, he signed an executive order freezing federal hiring. Although the executive order is loosely worded and allows for many exceptions, the fact is that more than 20 percent of federal workers are African American women. Many work at the bottom, as clerical and administrative workers, with salaries at $40,000 or less, but many also work in “middle management” with higher salaries. One cannot say that Trump intends to impact African American women by freezing or cutting (which may be the next step) federal employment, the fact (real, not alternative) is that African American women will experience a disproportionate burden from this freeze and possible subsequent cut.
Mr. Trump has also issued ill-advised and potentially budget busting executive orders. He wants to build a costly wall, although there has been no appropriation to do so. He wants to embark on a multi-million dollar (low estimate_ investigation of voting fraud. He has talked about balancing a budget, so where will the money come from? Likely from the social services, health and education. Likely from those government functions that are helpful to Black women.
Mr. Trump has illustrated his hostility to women with his comments about “grabbing”, and more. If he has contempt for all women, how must he feel about African American women? His affection for Ms. Manigault notwithstanding, it is telling that there is no African American woman in his cabinet, or any Latino man or woman. His commitment to diversity is minimal, and it is unlikely that the Department of Labor will have the resources or leadership to continue to monitor labor market discrimination. Will the EEOC survive, and with what resources? African American women have relied on these agencies for oversight and protection in the workplace.
The impulsive, egotistical and narcissistic nature of this President suggests that he will represent in the Oval Office exactly as he has as a candidate – arrogant, self-absorbed, myopic, enamored of billionaires (we still don’t have proof of his financial status), and contemptuous of the “little people”. We, African American women, are all “little people”, and “big people” like BET Founder Bob Johnson have cautioned us to “wait and see” what Trump produces. Well, we have waited weeks since the November x election, and we have seen the havoc and destruction that one man can wreak on a nation when he is the one in power.
We must summon the spirit of Ida. B. Wells, the Truth-Teller who documented outrages against those lynched. Now, with the possibility of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, we must be ever vigilant to see with the “Justice” Department does to enforce equal justice. We must summon the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer, who was beaten to within an inch of her life because she dared register people to vote, as we fight to ensure voting rights for the nation, and for the restoral of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act. We must summon the spirit of Coretta Scott King, who managed to get concessions from both Democrats and Republicans as she worked to establish a Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday. And we must summon the spirit of every ancestor as we remember that we have gone too far to turn back now.
While Mr. Trump will not target African American women, his actions will disproportionately hurt African American women. Still, we have tools to resist his “carnage”. We can fight at the state and local level, we can pressure our national officers, and we must insist the we won’t “let nobody turn us around”. We have survived through more challenging times and we have role models to remind us that resistance is victory.
Dr. Julianne Malveaux is an economist, author, and educator. Her most recent book is, Are We Better Off: Race, Obama, and Public Policy.
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Blind Faith: A Contemplation of the Alt-Right White
By Jodi J Thompson
“I sat reading a children’s book, the ideology so thinly veiled, the congregation blushed scarlet.”
Analogy of subjective belief aka Faith:
when you find out that Mary meant dance soiree
but couldn’t pronounce the alien word. That everyone
else thought dancery. And you, sole dandelion, heard
deseree, you shake your head and wonder at why not
one fool close to Mary told her any better, why no one
close to you seems to have enough wind to rustle your
beliefs, make silly something you held as truth, witch-
craft your eyes to make you observe a new reality. but
Mary answered that – “no hateration in this deseree.”
we choose the people who allow us the space to keep
all our little quirky crooked spores intact regardless of
how hard the wind blows any day in the dance soiree.
Doubt vs Belief:
Doubt is just Belief giving you the middle finger. Two sides
of the same feather. Trump says that a woman who knows too
much, knows without knowing. Knowledge becomes a burden,
not a flowering. Does that mean that the mystical Knowledge of
my black pussy weighs me down like a Palms Spring snow globe?
Or like a NYPD choke hold? Or a bath of bullets after a long day
of slave labor? Or like the future president, an alleged child raper?
True Knowledge vs Faith:
Knowledge is a powerful hallucinogenic. It gives you the allusion of
knowing. So the real knowing doesn’t come from actually knowing. It
comes from the belief in knowing. The blind faith in True Knowledge.
I must not know – not have Faith in my mind’s eye. Because reality is
subjective and thus impermanent. If I decide to let go of that last thread
of humanity. That thing we all have but often ignore. Then I can bend
under the burden of Knowledge without breaking. Then I can remain
blind with eyes wide open, like all-knowing belief systems built on Faith.
Jodi J. Thompson is a poet, teacher, dancer, and scholar. She was born in Jamaica and immigrated to Brooklyn as a child. Migration, whether forced or voluntary, has been at the forefront of her scholarly work – specifically political solidarity among people of Asian and African descent. An avid traveler, Jodi currently resides in Taipei where she teaches literature of the Asian and African diaspora.
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Letter to My Students for the Day After the Election of Donald Trump
We are all in a privileged space: A space where we can take the time to reflect on our lives, hope for better, and work to make it happen. The privilege isn’t the same for all of us. Some of us feel like our voices don’t matter so we don’t speak up in class. We don’t join clubs on campus or engage in politics at all because we see the system as rigged against us or we are worried we’ll be attacked for our beliefs or the way we look or sound. I am afraid today. But I know that it was not that long ago that being brown meant that you would not be allowed to become educated. That being a woman meant that you would not be allowed to be educated. Some of us still live in fear every day that the status of their documentation will keep them from being educated. But right here and right now, we have the privilege of access to mental and physical health care on campus and we have the very hard-earned privilege of diversity. I encourage all of you to speak with and really listen to those you disagree with. Intolerance is based on ignorance. Right here and right now we have the opportunity to learn – not just from our teachers but from one another. We do not have to be bullied. We are here in this room because people fought for us to have the privilege of meeting people from all walks of life and learn from one another rather than being isolated in our own ideas of the world. If you are feeling afraid, please know that I am here and there are many resources available to you.
Anger can be constructive if you decide to make it so.
We are our greatest resource.
We “are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
We are the past, present, and future.
Please don’t take your education for granted. For all of its flaws, there is great potential for each of us to be better; To do better. We have each other.
Rainy Demerson
Ph.D. student and T.A.,
University of California, Riverside
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“Throwing a Molotov Cocktail” or “Setting off a Suicide Bomb?” Which Metaphor for Pro-Trump White Workers?
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
I was struck by film-maker Michael Moore’s metaphor, prior to the November 8th election, of angry white voters—particularly those who have been victims of the restructuring of global capitalism—throwing a Molotov cocktail through their voting for Donald Trump in order to express their outrage with the system. The basic idea behind that vote was to create a crisis and demonstrate to the system their fury with neo-liberal globalization.
I have a different metaphor: a suicide bomber. I started thinking about this after reading a letter written by a white union member to his union’s leadership explaining his decision to vote for Trump. The letter, shared with me by a friend, was brief. The writer claimed that he had previously voted for Obama but this time he and many other members of his union were going to vote for Trump. He claimed that he was doing this because he needed to do something in the interest of his son’s future.
Upon reading this letter, my first reaction was to say to myself: “So, this guy is going to look out for his son…by doing it on my back…” It was at that point that the notion of a ‘suicide bomber’ emerged for me.
Hillary Clinton actually won the election by more than 2 million votes. In any other country, she would be the President-elect. But due to a legacy of slavery known as the Electoral College, we now face the prospect of the incoming Trump administration. And Trump was able to win not because of a mass working class uprising but due to a series of factors that ultimately influenced a relatively small number of voters in key—traditionally blue—states to vote for delusional Donald.
But what about those white workers who turned to Trump? This is where the ‘suicide bomber’ metaphor emerges. A suicide bomber is carrying out asymmetric warfare. They are aiming to make a statement. They are not necessarily concerned with winning in the classical sense but seeking to disrupt the established order. They obviously do not, ultimately, care about their own life, and they do not care about “collateral damage.” In fact, the distinction between combatant and non-combatant is largely non-existent for a suicide bomber.
Pro-Trump white workers have to be distinguished from the core Republican electorate. The latter are those who one can count on to vote Republican and are hardcore conservatives (of different varieties). They hate Democrats and they especially hated President Obama. On the other hand, the white worker who turned away from Democrats and consciously chose to vote for Trump was not simply disenchanted with Hillary Clinton (for whatever set of reasons) but was prepared to cast a vote with a complete understanding of the extent of the havoc they were wreaking. These voters were not naïve, nor were they voting “against their own interests”; rather, they had defined their own interests in a way that aligned with the racism, sexism and xenophobia of the Trump campaign, even if they did not see themselves as racists, sexists and/or xenophobes.
In the case of the white union member who voted for Trump in the name of his son’s future, this particular “suicide bomber”/angry white worker voter was prepared to push the button in favor of destroying the lives of people of color, women and immigrants, not to mention other union members, as a way of making a statement that he hoped would benefit his WHITE son.
In this sense, these voters were not voting for Trump despite Trump’s white nationalism and sexism. They were fully conscious of Trump’s total politics but saw in that candidacy what a suicide bomber sees in carrying out their own mission: destruction and chaos that can bring attention to one’s ‘cause,’ i.e., the cause of those who feel that the so-called American Dream is no longer serving the interests of white Americans.
Michael Moore was onto something when he spoke about angry white voters ‘throwing a Molotov cocktail’ in the November 2016 election, though he was inadvertently removing a discussion of the physical pain suffered by others because of this act. A Molotov cocktail typically is thrown against or into a building or, during combat, against an enemy vehicle or position. Individuals may or may not be killed as a result.
The objective of a suicide bomber, however, is something else. Their aim is to destroy people. They look at a mass of civilians as part of the enemy and, in destroying them and their lives, the suicide bomber hopes to make a statement about a larger cause or about the enemy to which the suicide bomber believes those civilians to be part. There is pain connected with the impact of a suicide bombing. People are taken down. The cause is upheld.
The button pushed on November 8th has already begun the process of taking down “non-combatants.” Certainly, the political establishment has been awakened to the fact that there are angry white voters out there, many of them workers and some of them white union members. But the cost of pushing that button will be felt less by the political establishment—which is already in the process of adjusting—and more by the populations the Trump campaign explicitly targeted in its maniacal rush for power.
That white union member who voted for Trump in the interests of his son’s future may have, in fact, condemned his son to an inferno. Time will tell.
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the former President of Trans Africa Forum. He is a talk show host, writer and activist. He can be followed on Twitter, Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.
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My mother, who is Scottish, English, Italian, rosy freckled, and knows who’s mother she is, said to me on the phone, “The old gods are tired of not being prayed to.” Is that what those that would see us banished or crushed did? My father, who is Black like soft dirt, leather, butterflies, and rainbows, said, that he hoped this now finally would be an impetus to get woke. I am pulling at thin strands when I say I think magic will do the trick. We on the side of justice still come from people that believed praying, could do as many wonders as running, and that the Earth, can take care of herself by herself only when she is not being messed with by her boarders. Toni says now is not the time to fall, to sit, to lie down, we must rise to the challege of creating something beautiful in the face of tyranny, and Katy Perry says, America will not be run by hate. But it was founded on it. And I have been flying while lying down. I am as much disabled as I am black, and I do not have the privilege not to have faith in the body’s capacity to want what is good for us. I ask my lovers to remember that they are in relationship. To be living, is to be in relationship. I ask my friends and would be comrades to wean themselves from the addiction to the name given to brown land by the people who crashed into us and coiled around our bodies, valleys, peaks, and trees. Stole our land or stole us from our land or told us we would never be better off anywhere but on the land they stole but that we better learn to learn our place. We on the side of justice for the most suppressed, we of sweet tea and soft dirt, of twisted ankles, limp wrists, and pink beating hearts, might be tempted to believe the problem lies in allowing the privileged descendent of our enslavers to hold the hand of the disprivileged and call themselves our ally. I just don’t know, baby. What I do know is that there are many righteous bodies who do not look or move alike, who’s stories and desires and needs are not identical, who want to lace what they’ve got together like a net or shield or floor or roof or bow. Our ways of asking for help, for connecting to one another too have been colonized. But that is not all there is. I will be a brown and green forest floor with you. I will be a black wave with you. I will be a hourde of fur lined, toothy on the inside animals with you, armed and open- strong and always vulnerable. United doesn’t have to mean imperialist nation, does it? Does it now? The realest, deepest, most diverse and beautiful America, is not “America” at all, my people.
Neve Be is a Black, disabled, queer, offgender femme, of Sudanese and Scottish-Italian descent. Neve was born and raised in the gorgeous dirty Jersey countryside and educated by their artistic and spiritually brilliant birth and adoptive parents, and by wandering around and dancing in New York City. They attended Hampshire College studying visual culture, film, dance, and the creation of disabled mythology. They are currently an integrated dance educator, performance artist, and disability justice activist living, working, fighting, and loving in South Seattle. Follow them at littlebeasthood.tumblr.com and on Instagram: @littlebeasthood
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We here at #StayMadAbbyProfsINC are pleased to release our highly anticipated post-election app!!!! Called, “People of Color Have Been Knowing and Doing this Shit for Centuries,” our new app is designed especially for our white friends and colleagues who are surprised by “how divided this country really is” by racism and intersecting forms of systemic oppression and who are looking for ways to (further) join in the work. And due to technical breakthroughs having to do with human life, the app is our most accessible yet!!!! In fact, it’s not even an app– it’s just the library, the google, and the work and lives of real, everyday people of color. Spend hours, days, weeks– even entire lifetimes!!!– engaging these realms of knowledge about the unending, continuing struggle for justice in this settler colonial, white supremacist, cis-hetero-patriarchal, ableist, anti-Muslim nation-state. We recommend beginning and staying with the parts about Indigenous people and about Black women and then working your way from there and simultaneously back again. Those who ask why we didn’t release this app before the election– we actually did. We have released it every day for centuries…
Forward,
#StayMadAbbyProfsINC
Django Paris is Associate Professor of Language and Literacy and Core Faculty in the African American and African Studies Program at Michigan State University. He also occasionally posts apps and other musings for our scholarly getting-free under the #StayMadAbby hashtag.
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To my fellow “minorities” who are disheartened, horrified, confused and afraid, I am with you. However, there is very little time to be overcome by sorrow and hopelessness. We cannot wallow, we cannot afford to let fear make us quiet or anger make us small. We cannot allow ourselves the salve of self-righteous revulsion directed toward fellow citizens who voted against our lives and livelihoods, against our children and our futures. It is those very people to whom we must now turn with minds and hearts more open than they have ever been. Many of those celebrating Trump will not understand for some time that they have voted against themselves, against their country and against the future of Earth and humanity as a whole. Eventually, they too will feel the truth of their mistake, but we cannot wait for that. The work ahead is daunting, terrifying even; it seems impossible, like all important work at first appears. Yet, it is work that absolutely must be done if we have any hope of reclaiming our dignity, leaving a world worth living in to our children and saving our planet from its near imminent demise. There is no more room for safe spaces. We have received our last trigger warning.
It is time instead to turn to our family, our friends, our white allies who have sworn repeatedly they “understand” our struggle. It’s time to demand much more of them than we have. Insist on more than promised solidarity, more than merely raising their voices beside us in street screams that our lives matter. We have shortchanged ourselves and the potential for social justice by confusing our demands of white allies out of anger and frustration. If we emphatically exclaim it is not the job of the oppressed to educate the oppressors, we cannot then decry outright the efforts of those who struggle to reach their white counterparts, even as they appropriate black American cultural methodologies of hip-hop and street art to do so. Those well-meaning but oft-misguided attempts can both reflect and offer critique of the system in which we are all ensnared. Structural racism in neoliberal capital is such that it can only be undone by pressure from within and without. When we separate ourselves along lines of racial categories forced upon us by the colonizers of yore, or stand divided based on whose revolutionary rhetoric/methods is more radical, we are all of us weak.
In her much-lauded speech on how the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house, Audre Lorde said “difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.” As such, our fight must first turn inward, look to the fallacious logic written into the politics of our own identity-based communities. Black men must route out patriarchy wherever it exists within their ranks. White feminists must acknowledge the lack of intersectionality in their approach. Queer communities must embrace the queer of color critique and address the glaring transphobia that has settled like a fine grime across queer politics. Similarly, trans people must actively contend with the problematics of gendered, classed and racialized privilege written into the ability of some to transition to global applause, while others are murdered for daring the same. All of us must consider how rarely we engage with concerns over the continued genocide of Native peoples. All of us must address the ways in which we dehumanize and ignore huge swaths of people with disabilities, giving little thought to connections between the normalizing of able-bodied ideals and the deconstruction/pathologizing of black, brown, queer and female-gendered bodies. Most urgently, if you are white-presenting (whether you personally identity as that or not), recognize the social capital that has always afforded you, then embrace the opportunity it provides to stand against the very forces that produce such white privilege. Use your access to any privileged space, whether material or ideological, to advocate on behalf of those who are undermined in or absent from those spaces.
To our white “allies”: Do not huddle around the warmth of free-trade lattes in your local cafe and cry white tears for us. We have no use for your platitudes, your acknowledgements of how upsetting this must be. We don’t want your words, we care only for your actions. Take off the cloak of liberal presumptuousness that coddles you, put away your self-congratulation and sip the last of your craft beer. Your hipster credentials will not stop bullets from taking the lives of your one black friend. Revolution does not come from existing in an echo chamber of all your high-minded ideals. It means nothing to me that you have read bell hooks and have an Angela Davis poster, that you know better than to touch my hair and can confidently espouse the irrationality and ahistoric racism of the All Lives Matter “movement.” Don’t tell us — we already know.
Rather, do the uncomfortable work of explaining such ideas to those who find them unfamiliar or off-putting. Tell your friends who consider themselves to be post-racial about the history of mass incarceration as an extension of American slavery. Speak up in the office meetings where your male colleagues speak over the women, instead of offering whispered condolences to your female colleagues later. Step outside the certainty of your like-minded comfort zones and bear the discomfiture of saying unpopular things among those perhaps less-educated than you, perhaps more socially privileged. It is well past time for every one of us to use whatever privileges we individually have to affect whatever changes we can in our communities.
The idea that “until we are all free, we are none of us free” has been a constant refrain in American civil rights work. This is the mantra that must buoy us in the dark days ahead, where every aspect of the world’s social fabric will be tested. No American can afford to forget that your freedom is a fallacy unless it is used to increase the freedom of Others.
Tara-Lynne Pixley is a media studies and visual culture scholar whose research focuses on raced and gendered ideologies prevalent in American news discourse, particularly that of documentary imagery. She is currently a Knight Visiting Fellow with the Nieman Journalism Foundation of Harvard.
Cover Art: John Jennings
Though a general issue, a distinct theme or mood for this issue of THE BLACK SCHOLAR can be captured by the introductory essay, “Backlash Blues,” by TBS Editor-In-Chief, Louis Chude-Sokei. It is a theme of anxiety and no small amount of mourning, which is present in W.F. Santiago-Valles “Tribute to Cedric Robinson,” about someone whose passing this year was a blow for an entire cadre of scholars, activists, and critics for whom his utterly daring and original ideas about colonialism, race, capitalism, indeed racial capitalism, arguably defined much of the current generation of Black Studies.
Yet, as Santiago-Valles reminds us, Robinson’s work was geared towards a “History of the Future.” It is in that spirit of futurity that we feature a roundtable on “Race, Pornography, and Desire,” which is a truly cutting-edge conversation with a group of Black women scholars daring to engage pornography and race/racism from a Black Feminist and Queer set of positions and perhaps most dauntingly, from the ever fraught yet radically open space of pleasure.
The living history of Robinson’s future is present in Françoise N. Hamlin’s essay, “Courting The Senses: Experiential Learning and Civil Rights Movement Pedagogy.” This piece is remarkable for it’s arguing not just for the embodiment of history or the need for an embodied historical experience, but to explore just how reliving and re-experiencing material history is an essential part of teaching race and unlearning racism.
Now one might radically disagree with the notorious Rachel Dolezal’s “embodiment” of Black experiences or racial history. Marquis Bey and Theodora Sakellarides engage Dolezal’s “blackness” and work through its layers. Given that her memoir is soon to reintroduce her to the world, this essay is timely ammunition.
Anxiety and mourning, come to think of it, are ways of describing the music of the legendary Thelonious Monk. It is our great pleasure to publish, “The Monk Variations” by renowned poet, editor, and writer, Anthony Walton, author of the collection Cricket Weather, and of the Whiting Award winning memoir, Mississippi: An American Journey. Walton, like Monk, knows how to create with anxiety, how to play and survive the blues. Both he and the great pianist know also what mourning can be: a time to rebuild.
Read Editor’s Note: Backlash Blues and Race, Pornography, and Desire: A TBS Roundtable for free.
Read A Conversation with Ariane Cruz, By Kirin Wachter-Grene on our blog.
Subscribe to volume 46 (2016) through 2017, only while supplies last. Customer must specify it’s volume 46, and not 47, that they are interested in purchasing.
Subscribe to volume 47 now! Projected content for the year:
The post originally appeared on The Feminist Wire.
Two days after President Obama pardoned the White House turkey and one day after Americans sat down at tables across the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving—a holiday premised on the Euro-American genocide of Native Americans—the state announced, in a letter from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, that on December 5th it will close access to all lands north of the Cannonball River, including the site of the Oceti Sakowin camps, which at present house demonstrators who have gathered to protest (to halt) construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline.
In his November 25th letter to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Colonel John W. Henderson explains:
This decision is necessary to protect the general public from the violent confrontations between [protesters] and law enforcement officials that have occurred in this area, and to prevent death, illness, or serious injury to inhabitants of encampments due to the harsh North Dakota winter conditions. The necessary emergency, medical, and fire response services, law enforcement, or sustainable facilities to protect people from these conditions on this property cannot be provided. I do not take this action lightly, but have decided that it is required due to the concern for public safety and the fact that much of this land is leased to private persons for grazing and/or haying purposes as part of the Corps’ land management practices. To be clear, this means that no member of the general public, to include Dakota Access pipeline [protesters], can be on these Corps’ lands.
Notice the sleight of hand in this statement: rather than condemn law enforcement—local police, unsatisfied with subjecting [protesters] to run-of-the-mill technologies of death like guns and batons, use water cannons at Standing Rock to intensify “harsh North Dakota winter conditions” (i.e., to incite “death, illness, [and] serious injury”)—the state for which Henderson is a mouthpiece charges residents of the Oceti Sakowin camps, the very victims of “[violent] confrontations” with obstructing the governmentality by which the modern state might make them live, for example, through “emergency, medical, and fire response services.” The state further asserts in this letter its (manifest) destiny to exercise sovereign authority over the land, that is, to discipline and dominate land on behalf of capitalist interests (i.e., “private property”), as a way to induce life for its “general public.”
The violence at Standing Rock, about which Janaya Khan, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, aptly writes, “This is our fight, these are our people” (she adds, “We are relatives in this struggle”), is essentially an ecological violence. Its violence of the Anthropocene is an antiblack violence, enlisted in this particular moment at Standing Rock against indigenous interests but housed in the White (Master’s) house. Following Khan, this essay draws out the connections between the movement to make black lives matter and the movement to halt construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline. Indigenous rights, like black lives, don’t seem to matter (cannot possibly matter) in the context of the world of the Anthropocene—a world in which the twinning of white supremacist humanism and liberal capitalist ideologies makes indigenous rights irrelevant, just as it makes black lives fungible.
Consider the September 2, 2016 statement released by the national chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement, in which U.S.-based BLM organizers, who have actively made themselves present at Standing Rock since August, announced their solidarity with the “water protectors” doing the work for all of us along the banks of the Missouri River. Their statement reads,
[This] is a movement for all of us. A movement for the recognition that water is life … The water protectors who are protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline are engaged in a critical fight against big oil for our collective […] right to access water. To be clear, this is not a fight that is specific only to Native peoples—this is a fight for all of us and we must stand with our family at Standing Rock.
The call for those people who have shown up to agitate against the impoverishment of indigenous rights at Standing Rock to understand themselves as “water protectors” rather than as protestors, demonstrators, or allies does not cut at but rather amplifies circuits of solidarity between these two movements. Black Americans are especially susceptible to the kind of slow-motion genocide enacted by the ecological racism infringing on indigenous rights at Standing Rock. One need look no further than Michigan, where the state filed a motion on November 17, 2016 to relieve itself of the “unnecessary” and “insurmountable burden” of delivering clean water to the residents of Flint—where a majority-black body politic are purposefully and with impunity exposed to lead-contaminated water—to lift this veil, exposing the fate of black folks who, since their abduction from the shores of Africa, were (Audre Lorde teaches us) never meant to survive. Unsafe levels of lead have shown up, as well, in the drinking water fated to residents in black-majority cities like Detroit, Michigan; Washington, DC (where dangerous levels of lead were first detected in 2001, more than 15 years ago); Durham and Greenville, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; and in small towns across Louisiana, to list just a few sites of routine water contamination.
The Flint water crisis is thus not an exception but the rule that condemns black life to live in/as a kind of death, tasked with making room for itself in spite of insurmountable death-sentencing odds. Black people are not let to live but made to die in world that recognizes them as something other and different from human: bodies reduced to bits and pieces of flesh, with no real corporeal integrity, undeserving of those rights and protections (even, the recognition) typically guaranteed (i.e., by court and/or international mandate) to human-identified beings with presumably inalienable rights to life.
BLM organizers like Khan remind us that we must attune and orient ourselves towards the earth: the land, the water, indeed, the matter of the world, as opposed to the human civilization that feigns to control earth. Black social life recognizes itself as a kind of indigeneity—as a kind of living with the land, not in sovereign control over a land on which black persons do not have a right to stand in the first place, as Trayvon Martin’s murder and the murders of so many other black men, women, and especially children have taught us, but as a kind of co-existence with the land, as a commitment to freeing a land cultivated (violated) by institutions of settler colonialism and chattel slave labor.
As a kind of material corporeality—a black mass or substance—that is fundamentally divested of human subjectivity, black life cannot be made to matter against human-centric odds. Which is to say, indigenous rights, which champion a world-living in which indigenous persons are coeval with their earth, have always been paramount for the movement to make black lives matter. Black lives cannot matter without indigenous life-worlds mattering. More to the point, and if we recognize black social life as a kind of indigeneity, sharing more in common with earthly matter than with the metaphysical and metapolitical conditions fated to human beings, we might do well to recognize that indigenous rights have always been necessary—essential and indispensable—to this movement.
While the question of black life as a kind of indigenous right remains un-asked by popular media and perhaps even by indigenous activists and scholars (and as well, by their non-black allies) who rally against the Dakota Access Pipeline, it is a question that animates black folks who, like Janaya Khan, have shown up in spite of antiblack racism at Standing Rock to do the work of making indigenous rights matter—to do the work of making the rights of the earth matter, indeed, who have shown up to make themselves coeval with this earth: a matter that, like them, breathes and births and engenders life even as human society depletes it of every possible resource with which to do so.
M. Shadee Malaklou is Assistant Professor of Critical Identity Studies and a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, where she teaches an upper-division theory course on topics and themes pertinent to the Black Lives Matter movement. She received her PhD from the University of California, Irvine in Culture and Theory in June 2016 and is currently working on her first book project, about the relationship between sexuality, anti/blackness, and social and political constructions of time.
*Each virtual issue collates some of the best writing from our archives, updated with new introductions written by prestigious scholars of black studies, and will be free to read and download for a limited time.*
October of 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of The Black Panther Party (for Self Defense) in Oakland, California. Appropriately, many former and present members will converge there for commemoration, celebration and—no doubt—reflection. Considering that The Black Scholar (TBS) was founded three years later across the Bay in San Francisco, and in the throes of the same fervor that necessitated the BPP, many of our issues carried articles, essays, interviews and profiles by or about the group. Everyone from Bobby Seale to George Jackson to Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver appeared in the journal; and our commitment to its intellectual and political legacies continue to this day.
Our participation in the imminent commemoration, celebration, and reflection takes the shape of an invocation: after all, the spirit of The Black Panthers is more alive now than at any time since 1966. It is there in the innumerable groups and movements that have emerged in the wake of flashpoints such as Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, but more generally in the increasingly radical spirit of protest and the increasingly militant energies of activism today. Sadly, much of this protest and activism often seems only sporadically informed by its antecedents and precedents. We have therefore bundled here a brief legacy of The BPP in TBS in order to limn a trail. Because the battle for liberation is always a struggle for context, and context without evidence is at worst, posturing and at best, betrayal.
– Louis Chude-Sokei, Editor-in-Chief
Articles are free to view and download through December 2016 and can be found here.
In October of this year, Ariane Cruz’s first book The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (NYU) was released and is poised to alter conversations about race, sex, technology, and gender. On the eve of the publication of “Race, Desire, and Pornography: A TBS Roundtable” (Issue 46.4) in which Cruz joins Jennifer C. Nash, LaMonda Horton Stallings, and Amber Musser in a provocative conversation for The Black Scholar, she took time to discuss some of the most compelling aspects of her book, and considers why we are now ready to receive it.
KWG: Your book is groundbreaking in its in-depth engagement with under-studied, transgressive issues of race, sex, and power, and black feminist studies, critical race studies, and gender and sexuality studies are overdue for such in-depth engagement. We know (and you discuss in your book) the many historical reasons why such material has long been considered taboo and has therefore been ignored, censored, or condemned. Why then, culturally/politically speaking, is now the right time for your book to be published and critically received?
AC: I think that there are a number of current factors and circumstances around issues of violence, race, sexuality, and pleasure that carve a space for the book’s reading now. First, we are in a moment (and this is not a new or a “now” thing) of high visibility of anti-black violence—the techno-spectacle of corporeal state violence against the black body. I discuss this in the roundtable but I believe that one thing that this visibility has done is to also make visible the connections between anti-black violence and pleasure. That is, the audio-visual technologies that make this violence visible and audible to millions globally, might also make visible the simultaneity of pleasure and anti-black violence. The “unspeakable pleasures “of black abjection, the perverse contemporaneity of pleasure and pain, are very much central to my manuscript. As I gesture in my answer to another question, I am interested in the ways that we consume this violence and possibly consent to this violence—as victims, as perpetrators, as spectators, etc. As violence embodies new technologically-enabled shapes, sites, and sounds in visual culture, what are our affective relationships and reading practices with these texts?
Another thing I see as influencing the critical reception of my book is recent academic scholarship (particularly in the field of black feminist and queer of color theory), and a renewed interest in the question of pleasure as it intersects with race. For example, work from scholars like Mireille Miller-Young, Jennifer Nash, and my own has been attentive to black female pleasure in and of pornography in ways that not so much challenge or reject a black feminist scholarly tradition but extend it. And I think this scholarly interest in the question of pleasure in pornography is linked to larger academic interest around the question of pleasure in critical race theory and queer theory and the continued expansion in research on racialized sexualities more broadly (LaMonda Horton Stallings, Joan Morgan, Siobhan Brooks, Shane Lee, Lisa Thompson, Riley Snorton, Xavier Livermon, Amber Musser, and many others).
KWG: Absolutely, in both scholarly and pop cultural realms we are seeing increasing engagement with pleasure as it overlaps with race, often in ways that upset established critical stances and cultural taboos. What can readers look forward to in our “Race, Desire, and Pornography: A TBS Roundtable” that brings together you and some of the scholars you mention above: Jennifer C. Nash, Amber Musser, and LaMonda Horton Stallings? In what ways do your voices compliment and extend one another on these issues?
AC: I think that there is a lot of interesting overlap around issues of the discipline and policing of blackness and womanhood. Such issues not only affect the objects and subjects of our study (the racial, gender, sexual, and class politics of the production of knowledge), but also the various ways that we embody our work as scholars of pornography and the ways in which others view us as embodying this work. As scholars of pornography we are furthering a theory and practice of the erotic that builds on a Lordian tradition while simultaneously recognizing pornography’s “rightful” (for lack of a better word), yet of course vexed, place in this kind of legacy. And there is overlap in the ways we discuss the relationship between black sexuality and not only pleasure and violence, and but also power and the (im)possibility of liberation (a relationship which is highlighted in this current moment of visible black state violence and death).
KWG: I’m glad you mention the concept of liberation and its (im)possibility. Your guiding theoretical principal in this study is what you term “the politics of perversion” which you use to frame your readings. At times you seem to embrace this theory as liberatory, however, at other times, you are careful to trouble utopian and/or “therapeutic” considerations of BDSM. Do you understand the politics of perversion to be a utopian or liberatory theory of race and sex? Why/why not? And what, ultimately, can/does it offer us, particularly if it is not a liberatory framework?
AC: The politics of perversion is a tool, a kind of theoretical anchor to the manuscript, that I employ to disrupt, unsettle, and ultimately pervert black female sexuality, while turning its attention to the purportedly perverse in black female sexuality as sites where we may see the workings of black female sexuality and power. By pervert I mean enacting what I call a critical kink in our reading of race, gender, and sexuality to look beyond accepted and standard practices and to see the many bends in “straightnesss.” By perverse I mean sexuality that is purportedly abnormal, unacceptable, freakish or freaky. So to some extent I see it as in opposition and resistant to a politics of respectability but it simultaneously functions as a kind of strategy of sexuality that gestures the ways that black female sexuality in particular continues to negotiate the racial sexual legacies of history.
I am wary of presenting the politics of perversion as liberatory or as some kind of path toward some kind of freedom because I think that liberation is unrealized and at the very least uncertain. With the politics of perversion, it’s less a matter of liberation and more a matter of transformation. That is, I am invested in the ways that the politics of perversion can change our both our thinking (about the relationships between sex, race, bodies, pleasure, and power) but also our doing (everything from our scholarship, to our relationships, to our labor, to our fucking etc.). I see perversion as useful in illuminating sexuality’s vast deployment as a technique of power.
KWG: Thank you for clarifying how you’re theorizing perversion and what it might allow us to recognize/acknowledge. Along those same lines, can you say a bit more about how you’re theorizing consent for black women? And, more specifically, can you discuss the relationship these concepts have to the “fantasy/reality” binary that motivates BDSM? In other words, does consent, performed and obtained through “play” translate to “reality” for black women?
AC: Consent is both incredibly important and complicated. Reflecting the motto of the kink community, SSC (safe sane consensual), and its more recent acronym, RACK (risk aware consensual kink) many scholars have argued that consent operates as a principal feature of BDSM. Consent is a critical part of BDSM’s artful negotiation of the mercurial fantasy/reality “divide” that is so salient to black women’s performance of race play—facilitating a critical demarcation and delineating of one “world” (fantasy) from the other (reality). Like consent the fantasy/reality divide is critical but complex. This separation has, of course, long been challenged by opponents of BDSM. I am interested in the ways that blackness further complicates this split and the dynamics of consent itself. As I argue in the context of race play, the imagined split between fantasy and reality obscures the materialities of sexual fantasy and our own personal stakes in and responsibilities for both our sexual fantasies and practices. Race poses a fundamental challenge to the fantasy/reality divide that buttresses consent. In some ways, it makes it harder (if not impossible) for us to make this divide, though it can also make the need for such demarcation more pressing. That is, blackness illuminates the ways in which our reality and our fantasies are indissociable despite the often-heavy reliance on the threshold between fantasy and reality in (racial) BDSM.
Hence, I don’t think we can understand consent as the magical alchemy that it sometimes painted in within the context of BDSM (and elsewhere for that matter). Consent can obscure some types of violence and it is not a kind of universal, i.e consent does not have equal valence for everyone. As I have suggested with the fantasy/reality binary so urgent to consent, race profoundly nuances consent. In the book I am interested in how black female sexuality and the legacy of black female sexual violence complicates consent and its already complex dynamics of power. Historically black feminist BDSM opponents such as Audre Lorde and Alice Walker question whether black women can indeed consent to racialized sexual play; however, black women BDSMers suggest that this consent is not only possible but also pleasurable and affectively empowering. As black women BDSMers convey, consent can function to transform the quotidian physical and psychic pain of black abjection into the realm of rapture and affective agency within the “safe” playground of kink. Race play demands that we consider how black women’s legacies of racial sexual violence further complicate consent while shedding light on the multiple ways that we “consent” to violence. Christina Sharpe for example, brings attention to how desire and consent serve to encode the history of violent domination, or that which consent veils, and the fraught site of sexual consent for post-slavery subjects. Saidiya Hartman has also written about the consent and its simulation for the captive black body. Therefore, I see black female sexuality as kind of raising the theoretical stakes of both consent and its praxis. I am very much interested in questions such as: How is the labor of consent nuanced by race? And how does consent shed light the labor of race? By this I mean a host of things encompassing but not bound by/to the quotidian experiences of being in a black body in an anti-black world?
Finally, we must be cautious about adopting consent as our primary determinant of sexual freedom. Consent often buttresses normative sexualities and sexual hierarchies. For example Gayle Rubin has long revealed how consent fails to protect those at the bottom of the “erotic pyramid.” Consent fails to intervene in the criminalization (legal and social) of sexual minorities and “perverts” whose sexual acts, like sodomy or BDSM, cannot be understood as autonomous but rather further substantiation of a kind of inherent lechery (e.g. Regina v. Brown (1993), the so-called Spanner case). Sexual consent can, as Joseph Fischel more recently illuminates, function as a political tool of morality and state regulation, manipulation, policing, and violence that can actually impede sexual justice.
KWG: Thank you, Ariane, for pushing these conversations forward, and for helping to create critical space for those of us grappling with related, complex questions in our own art, activism, and academic work.
For a limited time, read “Race, Desire, and Pornography: A TBS Roundtable” for free.
Ariane Cruz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in African Diaspora Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. New York University Press published her book The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography in 2016. Her other publications appear in journals such as Camera Obscura, Hypatia, Women & Performance, and The Journal of American Studies and are forthcoming in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. Her writing also appears books like The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press at CUNY), Black Female Sexualities (Rutgers), The Philosophy of Pornography: Contemporary Perspectives (Roman & Littlefield), and Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (forthcoming with The University of Illinois Press). She is the recipient of various fellowships including the UC Berkeley Regents Intern Fellowship and Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Sexual Culture Dissertation Grant, the Penn State Africana Research Center Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Penn State Institute for Arts and Humanities Resident Scholars and Artists Fellowship. Her research interests lie at the intersections between black female sexuality and black visual culture.
Kirin Wachter-Grene is a fulltime Lecturer at New York University. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington with a focus in 19th-21st century African American literature and gender and sexuality studies. Currently, she is working on her manuscript Into the Scorpion Garden: Samuel R. Delany and Transgressive African American Literature that both argues for Delany’s importance to the history of African American literature and applies what she calls “Delanyian theory” to his African American literary contemporaries. She has articles and reviews published in African American Review, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, The International Journal of Diverse Identities, and InVisible Culture, and a book chapter on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower published in Apocalyptic Projections (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015).
