Complexity, Emergence, and the Black Identity
The past couple years have been good for us blacks in the entertainment media, not the news no the news has been horrible. But with Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, and Cardi B dropping amazing albums, the release of Moonlight, GET OUT, and “Blek Penthah” in film, and Blackish, Insecure, and The Chi on TV it’s actually quite pleasant to be “rooting for everybody black” as Issa Rae is. Except it’s not always.
Since I’ve been studying complexity economics recently, it occurred to me that the field offers an interesting way of looking at how identity and culture form.
Representation Matters Because Black Folk Are Complex
There is at least one piece in everyone of those categories that doesn’t resonate with me all that much. Cardi B is great in her own right, but her Invasion Of Privacy doesn’t speak to me the way Solange’s A Seat At The Table does. The introspection and personal commentary of love and struggle told through jazz infused minimalism eclipses the post-modern hip hop rags to riches victory lap of reality show star, but that’s just me. And it is imperative that I acknowledge it is JUST MY OPINION. Whether the truth of what Cardi B had to survive resonates with me or not has no bearing on whether or not her story is important or worth being told. When black voices are limited to archetypal characterizations so too is black possibility. The black experience is broad and deep enough to hold both the Solange story and the Cardi B one, (not that they are even all that different upon close analysis) in the same way that the black identity is broad and deep enough to produce listeners that understand and enjoy both.
Representation is not about internal percentile increases in relation to proportions of the general population. It is about expanding the capacity of our communities, institutions, and society at large to acknowledge and appreciate dynamic modes of value creation. This fundamental understanding of integration is what makes racial division seem inherent. Conformity of the individual compromises their integrity and makes the system(s) reliant on individual activity like democracy and meritocracy insecure. Complex systems that can not only produce new forms of wealth but avail new possibilities for higher capacity systems to emerge.
Since every black person is not merely black the way their racial identity intersects with other elements of their identity produce new cultural movements as seen with the Black Panther. Were it not for the involvement of elite public intellectuals Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxanne Gay reboot of the classic comic book with so much nuance and care the film may otherwise have been simple a regular comic movie with black people in it. Instead of something that brought Marvel fans to theaters in droves bigger than Loki’s army while also inspiring the support of the black consumer. It’s doesn’t have to be groundbreaking to be record breaking, but Black Panther proves that it is possible to do all things well. From the noise comes harmony.
Diversity Of Voices Reduces Othering Of Blackness
If you ask 50 black people what it is to be black, you’ll get 50 answers. Some of them will overlap and some of them will seem so different that you’ll wonder if the people are having he same conversation. In addition to this much of what is characteristically “Black” could be used to describe other cultures or identities. There may be little, if any, distinct material that blackness lays claim to uniquely. There is still some unifying context, undertone, or essentiality that allows us to identify blackness when we see, hear, or experience it. I describe the faculty of blackness not as anything fixed at all but a quality that emerges from the intersection of characteristics and qualities, some biological, others cultural, and some experiential. From this emergence the black identity is not expressed like gender or cultural identity but is something contiguous with every other part of our selves.
What was once simply separate from mainstream America or whatever other Anglo-Colonialist gaze begins to reify itself, not in relation to its distance from what is seen as norm but as it’s own reference point. In biology we see this when cells reproduce forming their own nucleus. Distinctions are made between comedy and black comedy with Black-ish, where blackness is still othered and limited. The distinction falls away with Insecure, a show that is decidedly black but it’s content is not centered around the importance of whatever difference the quality of blackness implies from something else. It is a show about young women trying to make it in a world and find love and work, she happens to be black.
As the multiplicity of voices increases environments become richer. Fans of Kendrick Lamar are not exclusively black particularly because his music not only emerges from blackness and it representative of it to that extent but also transcends blackness and touches on more universal themes and aesthetics that draw other listeners in who are less concerned with black culture, but are nonetheless benefactors and beneficiaries of it. We are not one thing, but all things, in time.
The Science Beneath It All
I didn’t come up with this idea. It’s math. It’s science. For the longest time thinkers have been trying to understand the inner workings of life, consciousness, and matter to bring some degree of order to concepts that would otherwise seem random. Evolutionary biologists know how life springs forth, but they don’t really know why it did so. Economists definitely know how markets work, and some may postulate why, but they’re never really certain about mid range speculation. Ironically, it is these very hard sciences that I’ve used to underlay these very soft and emotional social concepts. On some level, I supposed it is irresponsible. On another level I use these linguistic metaphors to try and correlate cultural phenomena with something tangible. Blackness is neither bound by description, nor a sum of its parts. It takes new ways of thinking about old problems to find new solutions.
The longer we hold on to the idea that racial identity is a fixed notion the longer it can be weaponized and used as a limitation. Rather than try to isolate what specific characteristics make up racial identity, we might want to think of it as a system build upon other common parts; physical traits, lineage, cultural practice, and others that are distinct, but not exclusive to Black. So while someone who isn’t black can “act black” whatever kind of performance they are delivering at the time is only a context specific expression of blackness.
Blackness itself is a complex system. It holds the capacity to be ever expansive, and yet maintains dynamic structural elements that enable it to be identified. This system is much more of a dao, or a “way”, that perceives and codes information, but also translates and for the sake of communication. Blackness, like life, simply persists. What’s special about everything I’ve described about this phenomena of complexity is that it holds for other ethnic groups as well. None of our identities are fixed states, but living cognitive systems that can help or hinder us depending on how we understand and engage with them.
#wakandaforever
