Mind Over Matter: Why Hating People is Still Cool (and Other White Bulls**t)
The Gambit
(white begins, sacrificing pawns to set up an attack)
As a person of color, I shudder at the way white America continues to hate. Their hate is a rich one, full of its own doctrines, written in its own sacred books. Their hate is religious and devout. Imaginative and sadistic. Lustful and loathsome. Their hate, like all hate, is the enemy of life. Not just black or brown lives either. Their hate is total, an enemy of all life. To put it simply, the question has never been whether or not black lives matter. They do. Nor has it been whether or not black deaths matter. Because they do. And even if, in our hubris, we were to claim they are somehow not socially or politically relevant, they matter to someone. To a mother or a father or a sister or a brother or a lover or even a child. Their lives, as well as their untimely deaths, matter. The question is, therefore, why wouldn’t they matter?
As the media continues to tell us how much support grows for the Black Lives Matter movement, it is impossible not to see how much hate grows as well. Both the sharp increase in support and the rise in discordant discourse point to a two-fold problem: how we understand race and how we understand ourselves in a racialized world. That is to say, race as a concept in our cultural imagination is inherently designed to foster oppression. Moreover, how we understand our role in society, through ideological and repressive state apparatuses, does the same. We are thus, by design, destined to care about race. Whether or not we side with the oppressor or the oppressed is simply a matter of indoctrination. Indoctrination that has the potential to cause a rapid change in support of black Americans, or, an increase in the hate towards them.
J’adoube
(black adjusts its pieces, for clarity of course)
Race, as we understand it, amounts to much more than phenotypical difference. In fact, if further unpacked we can understand how race acts a synecdoche for personhood and a metonym for any and all of America’s problems. Race is, as Stuart Hall claims, “one of those major or master concepts (the masculine form is deliberate) that organize the great classificatory systems of difference that operate in human societies. Race, in this sense, is the centerpiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences” (32–33). And if race is the chosen measure by which difference is most retally categorized, that turns people of color into The Other (the capital form is deliberate). Race only works “in places where ‘gross differences’ of morphology are correlated with ‘subtle differences’ of temperament, belief, and intention” (Hall 41). A place where a visual difference is used to make judgments about who and how someone is. A place like the United States. And it is that difference, rather than what the word ‘race’ literally means, that is of concern.
Through this lens, the idea of race not as skin color but as the basis of social hierarchy in America, we can understand the role the state has on continue its myth. Althusserian theory tells us that in addition to the repressive state apparatus Marx describes, which seeks to produce social classes by way of violence, ideological state apparatuses likewise wreak havoc by way of ideology (Althusser 19). And this is evident almost everywhere, linking primarily to race. Not only are black people beaten and killed by police at alarming rates, but media is quick to portray the black subject as unintelligent, loud, reckless, violent, and worthless. Both state apparatuses work in tandem to slaughter black Americans and justify doing so. As Althusser purports, things like the press and political parties are seen as apart from the state, yet they too can propagate problematic ideologies (15). Maybe even more so than violence against the oppressed other. Therefore, the influence of ideological, as well as repressive, state apparatuses on the American psyche can not be overstated.
Similar to the notion that in an oppressive society, “to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity” (Freire 45), Fanon’s work dissects this in detail. The paradigm of oppression is such that, “man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in order to be recognized by him” (Fanon 216). Herein lies the divisiveness of #BlackLivesMatter. All their lives white men, women, and children are taught to see black people as others. Taught to understand black identity as dangerous and criminal. As what they are superior to. And blackness becomes a metonym for a culture they feel superior to. “Black films” or “black music” versus normal films or regular music for instance. How then could black lives matter if, even outside of overt racism, white people are ideologized to hate? To oppose? To oppress? Furthermore, if the repressive state apparatus continues to be violent towards the black Americans, they are doing so not just because of racism but to foster it. Althusser suggests the aforementioned apparatuses exist to create a mentality of class and labor. So if the class system in the U.S. is based on race, then the violent apparatus of the state that targets black people… teaches white people to target them too.
Middlegame
(black pins white, white’s option are now limited)
Additionally, it is important to note the ways in which white America is threatened by #BlackLivesMatter. First and foremost, if black lives were really thought to matter, the myth of the welfare queen would cease to exist. This, in turn, would strip America of its all too easy and overburdened scapegoat: the black woman. As black women are theorized to be both the literal and ideological source of the black other in society, white America seeks to pin their crimes on them (Spillers 79–80). Crimes they did not commit. Furthermore, so long as white Americans can continue to see black women as objects, they can continue to gorge themselves on pornotropic iconography. Creating the perfect microcosm in which they can do with a black body that which they see fit. Enacting a total and perfect vision of oppression, which supports the production of social classes by means of race and patriarchy. In addition to this intersectional aspect of the Black Lives Matter Movement, it is also interesting to look at how it challenges colonial ideologies.
Decolonial theory suggests that indigenous populations are understood in terms of, and colonialism exists thanks to, modernity, rationality, and coloniality. Indigenous groups that were seen as being in opposition to whiteness were believed to be inferior. In part due to the privileging of a Eurocentric view of history as linear and progressing, a privileging of rationality over spirituality, and access to power granted solely on proximity to the physical and cultural white ideal. In this way, even in a colonial context, classes are intrinsically defined; race is used to make one group less-than no matter what (Quijano 171–174). Thus, the state is able to maintain a labor force that they can outright abuse and a white proletariat appeased enough never to question them. However, if black lives were treated as though they mattered, this would throw into chaos the hierarchy that has forever kept white people from the bottom of the heap. White Americans reject #BlackLivesMatter because it puts in jeopardy the coloniality of power. Power derived from proximity to whiteness.
Therefore, the only reason why black lives wouldn’t matter is if you have bought in to the state-run apparatuses. If you truly believe what you are socialized to, never question who profits from your belief. The only reason black lives wouldn’t matter to you is if you’re clinging to the power afforded to you because you are white. Or if you wish to continue using your whiteness as a means by which to subjugate and oppress. Whether conscious or not. That is the source of division surrounding Black Lives Matter. Yet, the rapid change in political opinion in favor of the movement is equally of interest. And is equally about indoctrination and ideological apparatuses.
Discovered Check
(beginning of the endgame)
The sudden appreciation for black people, albeit seemingly positive, has as much to do with ideology as oppression. As more and more footage comes out that blatantly shows white officers acting outside the law, the system loses its authoritarian position at the center of the American panopticon. The ability to be invisible, to watch without being watched, allows the state to enact their apparatuses with impunity. But with the advent of mobile recording devices, what is done in the shadows is coming to light. Undisputable evidence is now becoming the media, becoming the ideological apparatus by which young people are understanding the world and their place in it. Furthermore, social media acts as an echo chamber, and whisper gallery, for the zeitgeist. Outside of those groups that exist on the dark web and the fringes of the surface web, social media is populated by young people with relatively contemporary views. This online nature, the hashtag in #BlackLivesMatter, helps indoctrinate a new generation into believing these videos of violence are morally wrong. In an odd way, social media acts as an intellectual apparatus, but rather than indoctrinating people into the state’s view, it does the opposite. Breaking down the traditional class structure and promoting solidarity by asking white Americans to challenge their ideology. Or, at the very least, come face to face with its counterargument.
Checkmate
(black wins)
White America remains content to play one of two roles; either Faust, seeking superiority, and privileging rationality over the loss of one’s soul, or worse, the role of God himself, appointing other men’s times to die while asking for blind faith and supreme devotion. As simple as it is, the regime of hate generated by an oppressive white system exists because of indoctrination. However, indoctrination is likewise the pedagogy of liberation. As some people hold fast to #AllLivesMatter, attempting to drown out the inevitable reclamation of power by the black community, #BlackLivesMatter continues to gain support. As with any chess match, once white moves, black counters. It is up to us to keep the ideology of liberation alive, thinking critically, and challenging any apparatus that seeks to control us and impose class upon us. And it is also up to us to challenge hate, in any form it may take. Using the apparatuses afforded to use to fight tirelessly against injustice. So again I ask you, not whether or not our lives matter, but why wouldn’t they?
WORK CITED
Hall, Stuart. The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Edited by Kobena Mercer, Harvard University Press, 2017.
Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. La Pensée, 1970.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of The Oppressed. Translated by Myra Ramos, Verlag Herder, 1970.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Pluto Press, 1986.
Spillers, Hortense J. Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81.
Quijano, Aníbal. COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY. Cultural Studies, 21:2–3, 2007, pp. 168–178.
