Are We Postracial Yet?
In the Q&A after a panel during the Virginia Museum of Fine Art symposium “Picturing the Black Racial Imaginary,” a woman in the audience took issue with the word “racial” in the title.
But if race is a social construct, I wonder for those of us who are flowing through the current of this river of humanity — should we, are we perpetuating the false narrative of continuing to inject the word “racial”? Should we sort of drop that, select another word and rise up to another narrative, or is that still — does that help segregate or does that help unify?
There were grumbles and mumbles from the audience and, I’m sure, eyerolls, which I couldn’t see because the lights were shining in my eyes. A number of my fellow panelists responded.
“I’m not giving up blackness. I’m not,” Imani Perry said. “The desire to move beyond in most instances feels to me a desire to evade the reality that [race] persists. And that I think is unethical.”
“[A]ctually embracing the thing that is supposed to be the marker of inferiority … is a sign… an indication in many ways of the very best of what humanity can do. People can create such extraordinary beauty and integrity underneath the boot of the most powerful civilizations of the world.”
Indeed. Like Dawoud Bey’s Elegy, both the anchor and touchstone for the weekend’s events at the VMFA.
I gather that like most Americans of a certain age, this audience member was taught that there are Americans and then there are hyphenated Americans or those needing modifiers — African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, etc. The social construction of Blackness was a centuries-long project launched by people of European descent in parallel with their construction of whiteness. Virginia was perhaps the most important, active and brutal laboratory and proving ground for the construction of race in America, beginning in the 17th century. [See: Hening’s Statutes, “a collection of all the laws of Virginia, from the first session of the legislature, in the year 1619.”] The white, male burgesses used law to steadily define Black people out of their humanity in order to control their bodies and commoditize their futures.
WHEREAS some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother, And that if any christian shall commit fornication with a negro man or woman, he or she so offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act. — Acts of the Virginia General Assembly, 1662
These white men created what Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative calls “narratives of racial difference,” which rendered Blacks as inherently dangerous and inferior and whites as pure, supreme, singularly human. The lesser orders of human (us) are necessarily defined and measured against the prototypical (white) citizen. Black folk are, therefore, by definition, “racial.”
Whether the audience member was being unethical or naïve, I don’t know — today, I’m willing to give her the benefit of my doubt — but the effect of such white ignorance (or denial) has always been harmful to the interests and health of Black and Brown folks.
I too had chewed on the title of the symposium, but it was the “imaginary” that was tripping me up as a journalist. Literary and art folk use the term as a noun to refer to a “set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole.” That’s a very big idea. Blogger Mike Christie offers an excellent, boiled-down definition: “a collective picture of an era derived from books, films, television.” That’s what the VMFA was talking about, I think.
But “imaginary,” an adjective here, to me connotes something different: untruth, fake news, invention — and not the George Washington Carver–Thomas Edison type. It suggests to me the unscience of eugenicist and Virginia state registrar Walter A. Plecker, who helped codify the Jim Crow hierarchy — Black folk at the bottom, of course — and policed it with the zeal of a true believer, which he was. It reminds me of a century of coverage by (white) papers of record such our city’s, the once pro-slavery, pro-Jim Crow Richmond Times-Dispatch, which routinely cast Black folks as buffoons, degenerates, “darkeys,” and, of course, worse. This was our nature, they wrote. Such “facts’’ were used to undermine African American claims to full citizenship and to justify disenfranchising 90 percent of eligible Black voters inthe first decade of the 20th century — and, of course, to diminish our humanity. Imaginary also called to mind the Alexandria Gazette’s applause and justifications for lynch mobs, like the one that murdered Joseph McCoy in “righteous anger” in 1897, calling him a “Negro ravisher” and “Negro brute.” Imagined facts obviated the need for a trial because McCoy’s Blackness automatically made him guilty.
Imaginary also evoked the destructive, antifactual dog-whistle politics of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and our governor, Glenn Youngkin, who attacks critical race theory and bans its teaching in his first executive order, calling it an “inherently divisive” concept. In fact, as undertaken by folks like Kimberlé Crenshaw, who named it — and those who practiced similar forms of analysis before it had that name — CRT is an evidence-based school of thought that places race at the center of discussions about American society, which is of course where it’s always been in reality. Just ask African Americans, Indigenous folk, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans.
My roots are in the Black racial factual as a journalist, citizen, and African American. “Black” here isn’t merely a modifier. It defines where I sit/stand in relation to the swirl of words and ideas historically represented as fact by white ideologues and opportunists. I build on the work, stand on the proverbial shoulders of the Black folks — from Benjamin Banneker to Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois — who have always provided correctives to white lies masked as scientific or God-proclaimed truth. Their facts were published in Black newspapers, books, and pamphlets, where they had authority. Only through attestation, bitter struggle, repetition we made the broader culture reckon with our facts. But we still must fight for them.
And then I remembered Edward P. Jones. Someone had given me a copy of the Known World, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with a slave-owning Black man at its center. I picked it up around the time it was published, started reading, and then dropped it like a live hand grenade. I couldn’t accept the central conceit: an African American owning other Black folk, and believing that this was the natural order of things. I did not know then enough to accept this credible form of the imaginary. Roughly a decade later, when I began exploring my own family’s history. I learned the facts that allowed me to return to Jones’s book. Some Black folk did own other African Americans, often their kin to remove them from the brutality of white ownership. These people were living in the known world, a nation that embraced slavery, and in which all who wished to survive had to contend with it in some way, either by escaping or wisely accommodating. I also learned of the half million enslaved people who liberated themselves before the end of the Civil War, like my great-grandparents. I learned of the nearly 200,000 Black men who served in the segregated US Army, like my great-grandfather, Mat, and less-segregated US Navy to emancipate the enslaved and defeat the Confederacy. And I came to understand that this complexity of our past was real and rich.
The Black racial imaginary, from Edward P. Jones to Dawoud Bey (and so many others), has fed and empowered my Black factual — and given me license to move beyond the literal toward the lyrical in my work. Bey’s work is rooted in the factual, the empirical in that he captures what is in front of his camera. But it is his knowledge of the past and his absorption of testimony from our forebears that guides where he aims his camera and how he makes his images.
I understand that Bey is evoking with his imagination and intellect what we cannot in the 21st century ever truly know: the brutal, debasing reality of chattel slavery and the true depth of Black resistance. But we can detect its traces and use our creativity to credibly and powerfully explore that past.
