Negritude and Other Indomitable Qualities
A Hero’s Journey.
The Call
(Foreword)
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. Simple. So simple, in fact, we named the universe after it; one verse to proceed them all. Next, He created light, and seeing that it was good, He separated it from the darkness. The first day. As He separated the sky from the infinite pool of water below, the evening passed him yet again. A second day. He continues, diligent, effortless, and with wisdom and glory of which even an eternity cannot provide time enough to fathom.
Land He creates next, pooling the water together to separate it from the sky and the ground below. Then a fourth day brings stars and a sun and a moon to separate the day from the night. Again, the day passes. Creating every creature according to its kind, the fifth day brings about the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. But on the sixth day, after all the creatures of the land are born according to their kind, He does something radical. The God of all that is and will ever be, makes mankind in his image. Notice, however, there is no hierarchy of men. No separation of man from his kinship or a distinction according to their kind. Simply one mankind, all in the image of God.
Crossing the Threshold
(Otherhood)
Life as a black person is radically laborious, radically dangerous, and radically torturous. The existential joy of our rich heritage is undermined all too often by the visceral mortal peril that is the black experience. Make no mistake, I love my culture. I love my people. I proudly bear the torch for my lineage and the cross of my heritage. But I would be remiss if I did not question why? Why the black subject is made to feel such things? Why blackness is made to be the quality by which personhood is reasoned? The truth is race is a mask. A mask that hides the reality of poverty, crime, and culture. Both black and white subjects engage with race on a physical, emotional, and spiritual level. A real level. Yet it is what lies beneath this mask that we should address. If we are all to be liberated of this insidious ideology, it is what we must address.
Race, as we now understand it, amounts to much more than phenotypical difference. To us, “living as we do upside down,” race has become the measure of a man. That is to say, race is no longer the measure by which we categories the beautiful mahoganies, ebonies, and maples of our skin. It is no longer the measure by which hair curls and kinks or noses sit round and wide. Race has, under the negligent eye of a porcelain zeitgeist, become how we see one another. How we understand one another. How we value one another. It acts as the reference point by which we situate identity. In fact, if we were being honest, we’d note just how much race acts as a synecdoche for personhood and a metonym for any and all of America’s problems. As Stuart Hall claims, race is, “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.
Race only works “in places where ‘gross differences’ of morphology are correlated with ‘subtle differences’ of temperament, belief, and intention” (Hall 41). Thus, race acts as a sliding signifier. Wherever there is a difference in opinion or between value systems, race resides. Race is used to identify that which is different. That which is other. First the physical, but primarily the incorporeal.
The Road of Trials
(Being Different)
It’s funny, as a kid this was a reality before I even understood its complexity. Growing up I happened to be blessed with a generic academic aptitude; by that I mean, I was smart in a way that white people could appreciate. My test scores were incredibly high and I excelled in school. As is common practice in the United States, this meant I was to be bused across town to some similarly generic Magnet School. Much to my lack of surprise but nevertheless chagrin, I was then surrounded by white students. Students who had both of their parents around all the time, students who looked like their teachers, and students who had money I could only dream of. I was acutely aware of these differences and took it upon myself not to give a shit.
Ultimately, it was I that was surrounded by difference. Even before I understood the problem with property tax-funding schools and the evils of American education. Before I understood that when it came to students with faces like mine, they were destined by design. Destined to continue the cycle of poverty that post-de jure segregation ensured they’d fall into. One propagated by redlining and the manipulating of housing codes. And yet, white students still treated me like I was a parasite. Beyond calling me nigger and suggesting that somehow I wasn’t deserving of the spot I had earned, it was my lack of difference that frustrated them the most.
I don’t talk with a distinct accent. I never used what scholars foolishly called Ebonics or likewise problematically renamed African American Vernacular English. I listen to rap music, but then again, who doesn’t? I was not loud. I was not vulgar. And academically speaking, I was, if I do say so myself, rather insightful. I was, in almost every way possible, what an eager young racist would consider the most palatable black man imaginable. And not for them either. For me. That’s just who I was. Yet they would often ridicule me for not “being black.” Saying that I talked or acted white, all the while laughing at pictures of slaves in our history textbooks. What they were saying was: I wasn’t different enough. I was too similar to them to be black; my skin color restricting me to a category that had to be in opposition to them, yet I seemingly wasn’t. Although if I had been a stereotype, they would’ve been just as despicable. Race was thus, even to children as young as we were, simply the measure of difference. The gargantuan gap between us and them.
The Abyss
(Ideological Apparatuses)
Through this lens, the idea of race not as skin color but as the basis of social hierarchy, it’s all but natural to question the ways in which we’re all complicit. 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 instead wreak havoc by way of ideologies (Althusser 19). The state uses violence and the ideology it begets (and vice versa) to ensure a class system is maintained. And there’s no more clear an example than race. It is an ideology fostered by the state to both produce and guarantee the existence of a lower class. Trace race to its roots, its legal origin, and this is indisputable.
In a historical context, race was designed to make certain that those in power, landowning white men, remained in power. By promoting the myth of racial inferiority, our nation’s cardinal sin was justified; this, the ultimate con job, saw the tacit fantasy of pure capitalist interest made perfect. Not only was a large portion of wealth owned by the bourgeoisie, but the proletariat themselves were owned by the bourgeoisie. All the while, the true middle class, poor white farmers and those in charge of slaves on plantations they did not own, were bamboozled into thinking they too were part of the elite. This pacified and made complicit non-elite whites while black people remained unable to quit and were forced to work no less than their masters decided.
Furthermore, when poor white farmers and black slaves sought to unite against the economic elite, the Three-Fifths Compromise was used to tear asunder any chance at solidarity. The hierarchy was further instilled in our cultural imagination, with black people once again being made the unfortunate other. The victim of the American in and out-group mentality. Thus, the state has used race as an ideological apparatus to create a class on the backs of whom this country would be built. White people were decidedly complicit in buying into the ideological state apparatus that is race. An ideological state apparatus that could condone some of the most hideous atrocities ever committed by mankind.
Even at present, not only are black people beaten and killed by police at alarming rates, but the media is often rightfully criticized for being quick to portray the black subject as unintelligent, loud, reckless, violent, and worthless. State apparatuses, both repressive and ideological, work in tandem to slaughter black Americans and justify doing so. Even the passive, seemingly apolitical aspects of our lives promote the denigration of black America. From the educational to the legal, political, communication, or the cultural ideological apparatuses, blackness is made to be other and inferior. This ideology both aids and precipitates the repressive state-sanctioned police violence we often see aimed almost solely at minorities. Which only fosters an us-versus-them mentality. Further propagandizing us into the macabre cycle where violence enkindles hate and hate enkindles more violence.
The Revelation
(The Myth of Race)
Having laid race bare, perhaps the most important thing we can do is to understand the ways it affects all of us, black, white, or otherwise. Race, as it can be understood throughout history, is simply a discourse of difference. A difference, although in many ways fictitious, so deep it underscores not only the hierarchical structures by which our culture is built, but the way we understand ourselves intimately. The way we understand each other intimately. The nature of race is such that it is a mask. A mask designed to hide the truth. Keeping the classes intact and providing a scapegoat for white America. Removing this mask is, therefore, only made harder by the fact that the state itself propagates the way we understand race.
Both the economic and political elite have a vested interest in maintaining the myth of race as difference; this allows them to continue to profit off of and bamboozle lower-class Americans, black or white. False narratives about poverty, crime, and culture spill forth from the tongue of the aforementioned zeitgeist. Their cacophonic cries leaving all too many of us deaf, no longer able to hear the melodious voice of reason. Yet, it remains up to us “to discern a meaning in the beating of the drums.” So allow me first to start with poverty.
Transformation
(Poverty)
I have to address the simple fact that poverty lies outside of my personal experience. As a child, I was never extremely poor. But there were times we had less than others. Far less. I remember distinctly one Christmas season things got, as my mother used to say, “tight.” My three siblings and I were told we may not have a Christmas, at least not one with gifts. Something about the unbreakable spirit of children around Christmas time meant we took it in stride. We didn’t think twice about it or complain. We just understood. She was doing everything she possibly could to put food on the table. My mom, a brilliant professor and all but single mother, was doing her best. Not only did she have the tough task of being a black woman in higher education, but she was working several jobs just so we could eat. I remember too that same winter my father being out of the house, as he often was. If it wasn’t his trouble with the law landing him in jail from time to time, his vices would land him God knows where. If I recall correctly, which I may not as I try not to dwell on these times, he had ended up in a homeless shelter somewhere.
The story, if you’re curious, ended pretty well. Some folks at our church pooled together their own money and basically got everything that was on our wish lists. We woke up Christmas morning to find gifts under the tree. I was too old at that point to believe in Santa… but I swear for a moment it felt like legitimate Christmas magic. That, however, isn’t why I bring up this story. During that time I remember the food getting more and more scarce as the winter grew colder and colder. It felt like some story you hear someone use to joke about Soviet Russia. My mother, I could tell, was more and more worried. One night, late, I heard her crying in the front room. I walked in, unbeknownst to me, interrupting a prayer. I did my best to talk to her, and to reassure her that God would hear her lamentation. To tell her that it wasn’t her fault. That she was the best mother I could ever imagine. She was afraid most importantly that she had failed us. That somehow as hard as she worked, she had, in some way, become this stereotype of black motherhood. Someone who wasn’t doing enough to take care of their children. A “bad mom.”
If you are still curious, that worked out too. Some anonymous saint, that I’m almost certain was a legitimate Christmas angel, left a month’s worth of food on the doorstep for us. My mother became the chair of her department, and then a dean, and now she’s in a position to help others as much as she can. But it was that night that I think about often.
The narrative of white America that black men and women are somehow unfit to be parents, or worse, have children to get food stamps and abuse government aid is nothing short of supremely daft. Even if living cushy off of food stamps was possible, if the pain in my mother’s eyes proved nothing else to me, only in the rare case of a sociopath would someone decide to fail their children. The predisposition of black people to a culture of poverty, so foolishly outlined in the Moynihan Report, is a falsehood (Moynihan 47). It always was. Yet this ideology remains the lens through which the black community is seen. This serves no end other than to quickly blame the black community for their own poverty, rather than addressing the lack of opportunities and the elements of segregation socioeconomics that remain still unaddressed. The scholastic deficiencies thought to lead to poverty are even blamed on the black psyche, yet we know things like standardized tests were originally used in WWI to segregate units (Rosales).
Furthermore, Moynihan’s choosing to employ a patronizing patriarchal tone in his report, citing the matrilineal nature of the black community as the source of their poverty mindset, is further emblematic of how race is used to mask the extent to which white America has caused black people problems. In continuing the stereotypes of black men as lazy, it becomes harder for them to find employment. A cycle then arises here too. It is harder for black men to find work, which causes them to be perceived as lazy, which makes it harder for them to find work. All of this stemming from a lack of educational and job opportunities following the oppression of black sharecroppers even post-slavery.
Also, as Spillers’ work suggests, the myth of the welfare queen is equally problematic. 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 (79–80). Crimes they did not commit. This, in turn, gives America its all too easy and overburdened scapegoat: the black woman. Thus, to serve a capitalist end, race masks white culpability in the history of black socioeconomic hardship.
Atonement
(Crime)
Race masks more than the truth about poverty, however. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. The thirteenth amendment. Making it legal to enslave anyone who has been convicted of a crime. As of 2018, with the largest private prison population in the world, the U.S. currently has at least 128,063 inmates incarcerated in private prisons. That means 128,063 enslaved men and women (not counting prisoners of privatized immigrant detention) currently live in the U.S. All the while, “Cost savings claims associated with prison privatization are unfounded according to decades of research” (Gotsch and Basti 6).
To directly quote Richard Nixon’s former domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman,
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (Baum)
The War on Drugs outright targeted black people, linking harsher sentencing and mandatory minimums to crimes associates specifically with black Americans. This rapid expansion of the prison population then precipitated an overburdening of the public sector. And this overburdening led to, you guessed it, the birth of the for-profit private prison system at both the state and federal level (Gotsch and Basti 5). Effectively, for the wealthy elite, generating new black slaves. Slaves who remain unable to quit and must work no less than their masters decide.
I have to address the simple fact that prison, even peripherally, lies outside of my personal experience. As a child, I was never exposed to anyone who had been in prison, privatized or otherwise. But as I mentioned, my father did find himself in jail from time to time. I remember as a young man getting a call asking me to accept the charges incurred from the detention center. I remember looking at him through glass. To see your father in a cage does more damage to a young psyche than I care to admit. I don’t doubt it did similar damage to him. And I cannot deny that every person must pay for their crimes. In this life or the next. But trust me when I say, the targetted incarceration of black people is not meant to just hurt whoever is locked up. Its meant to kill their legacy. To bury their lineage. To make black people believe they belong in a cage. To create slaves.
Even after you get out, with that on your record, it’s hard to find good work. On the edge of adulthood, as a teenager, I even helped bail my dad out once. I think he just happened to be driving and his license had just expired. He was pulled over and arrested. He had finally gotten a steady job and the family decided it was best if we helped him so he wouldn’t lose it. But what if we hadn’t? And a cycle arises here too. If you get out and you can’t find work, that’ll keep you poor. Meaning, even if its to help feed your family or clothe your kids, you’ll likely commit crimes again. And when you’re caught, you’ll be put in jail. And when you get out again, it’ll be hard to find work. Thus, to serve a capitalist end, race masks how law enforcement and conviction practices target black Americans with the intent to enslave them.
The Return
(Culture)
Finally, race is used most hideously to mask our culture. Black culture. When Paulo Freire says of an oppressive society that, “to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity” (45), what he is saying is that the oppressors stake full claim on humanity. However, it is not simply that to be human then means to oppress. It is that to be human means to be the oppressor. In other words, in an oppressive society, the proximity to, if not full-on acceptance of, the oppressor’s culture is what situates personhood. Aníbal Quijano calls this the coloniality of power (171). An oppressive white state is designed so that the proximity to whiteness, both physically and culturally, is what grants an individual power.
The coloniality of power then gives us an explanation for why white America refuses to acknowledge black culture, yet continues to appropriate it. 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, something inferior to them. Blackness itself becomes a metonym for what they feel superior to. “Black films” or “black music” are set in opposition to normal films or regular music. Yet, when the scarce cultural cache of white America has run its course, white folks seek other cultures to plunder. So is their tradition. Typically, this means appropriating from whatever group is least willing to pipe up or is most vulnerable to attack. Unfortunately, based on all that has been discussed thus far, black culture is a prime target.
At worst, this system erases black culture entirely. At best, the system privileges white people who look black, or white artists that sound black, or even white people that act black. Elvis serves as a fine example. All of whom appropriate blackness because it is trendy to do so, while paradoxically eliminating black people from the equation. Claiming whatever they had stolen as their own and eliminating people of color from it entirely, if left unchecked, white folks would not quit and would appropriate as much as they decided to. And a cycle arises here as well. Black people create blackness. White people appropriate blackness. Then they eliminate the black subject from blackness. So black people create something else. Create, appropriate, eliminate, and so on. Thus, to serve a nefarious end, black culture is commodified by white America as the black creator is divorced from it.
The Gift of God
(Unmasking the Spectre)
Ultimately, race affects all of us. Although not mentioned prior, other races are not immune from the same tyranny or, in some cases, treachery. However, the sliding scale on which race sits is bookended by whiteness and blackness. That is to say, despite the intricacies and nuanced cases of other racial groups, if the ways in which race affects black people can be understood, the groundwork is laid for how we understand the totality of the racial spectrum. The nature of race is therefore that of a mask. Race is a word we use to identify differences. It is our measure of difference. But really, it simply obstructs our view of real issues. Real problems that are affecting the lives of people everywhere.
In the end, man created race and oppression. Simple. So simple, in fact, it’s how we understand the world; one difference to proceed them all. Demagogues hide injustice behind the mask of race to polarize the public. To avoid dealing with this injustice. Black culture is subpar until white ideas run out. The crime so eagerly frowned upon by the public is just what black people do, until you look deeper at the forces conspiring against us. Is poverty just the black mindset, or is it that narrative the takes the most responsibility away from white profiteers? As with any crook or thief, they can only be indicted once their mask is removed. In order to get real justice, we should seek first to come face to face with the evils that lie underneath race. If we are ever to get justice, we must come face to face with what lies underneath the mask of race. Maybe then can we break the cycles that have, from antiquity to antebellum, shackled us all.
WORK CITED
Scott-Heron, Gil. “Comment #1”. Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, 1970, track 4.
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.
Jones, Jordyn K. Mind Over Matter: Why Hating People is Still Cool (and Other White Bulls**t). Negritude and Other Indomitable Qualities, Medium, 9 June 2020, https://medium.com/pedagogy-of-black-dignity/mind-over-matter-why-hating-people-is-still-cool-and-other-white-bulls-t-701930947dba.
Baldwin, James. 1924–1987. If Beale Street Could Talk. New York: Dial Press, 1974.
Moynihan, Daniel. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. United States, Superintendent of Documents, U.S.GovernmentPrint.Office, 1982.
Rosales, John. “The Racist Beginnings of Standardized Testing.” NEA, NEA Today Magazine, 2018, Spring, www.nea.org/home/73288.htm.
Spillers, Hortense J. Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81.
United States Constitution. Art./Amend. XIII, Sec. 1
Gotsch, Kara and Basti, Vinay. “Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons.” The Sentencing Project, 2 Aug. 2018, www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-on-mass-incarceration-u-s-growth-in-private-prisons/.
Baum, Dan, et al. “[Report]: Legalize It All, by Dan Baum.” Harper’s Magazine, 31 Mar. 2016, harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of The Oppressed. Translated by Myra Ramos, Verlag Herder, 1970.
Quijano, Aníbal. COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY. Cultural Studies, 21:2–3, 2007, pp. 168–178.
Jones, Jordyn K. The Ballad of The Blackfish. Negritude and Other Indomitable Qualities, Medium, 22 July 2020, https://medium.com/pedagogy-of-black-dignity/the-ballad-of-a-blackfish-76c13b51539e
