by Leila Taylor
One of my favorite explanations for the existence of ghosts is the trace. Some events are so powerful in their violence or anger that it leaves behind a remnant of that death, like the debossed imprint left through the pages when you press too hard with the pen. The ghost hasn’t come back to visit us in the present, rather we are seeing a glimpse of past. I like to think that instead of the spirit invading our space, we have temporarily gained access to theirs. Like the shadows of Hiroshima, it takes an atomic level of anger and pain and fear to leave behind such substantial vestiges, something powerful enough to leave a handprint in a cake, to crawl through the bathroom cabinet.
AMERICAN MONSTER
because white men can’t
police their imagination
black people are dying
— Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
Being an Other in America, teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you.
— Margo Jefferson, Negroland
In the “Juneteenth” episode of the television show Atlanta, Earn and his girlfriend Vanessa go to a fancy Juneteeth party at her friend Monique’s mansion. June 19, 1865 marks the date slavery officially ended in Texas, a full two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. It has become a holiday of sorts to celebrate being free at last. Monique’s husband Craig is white and an avid collector of all things Black, including his wife. His office is decorated with photographs of Black luminaries, African sculptures and his own Malcolm X-inspired fan art. Craig offers Earn a Hennessy to replace his Forty Acres, and a Moscow Mule cocktail and asks him if he’s ever been to Africa. He’s appalled when Earn answers in the negative:
Craig: You gotta go! Man, it’s your motherland! Where are your ancestors from? Congo? Ivory Coast? Southeastern Bantu region?
Earn: I don’t know, this spooky thing called “slavery” happened, and my entire ethnic identity was erased, so…
There is a lot I like about this glimpse into the bougie Black upper-class; a Black woman using her white husband for his money, the husband using his wife for her Blackness, Craig’s cringe-worthy confidence in his understanding of Black culture and his financially privileged suggestion that Earn just “go” to Africa. But what I like most about this scene is Donald Glover’s use of the word “spooky.” Spooky implies an eerie, ghostly feeling, something weird and undefined. Spooky is an ethereal unease that is difficult to place, an unformed and obscured aura of something that is not quite right. The answer to the question, “Where are your people from?” is complicated, and spooky is a complicated word.
The word “spook” comes from the Dutch “spooc,” meaning “ghost” or “apparition”. In the 1940s spook became a word for a spy — a clandestine, sneaky person whose life is in the shadows. About the same time spook also became a derogatory word for Black people. The Tuskegee Airmen, the group of Black Air Force fighter pilots and bombers during World War II, were even referred to disparagingly as the Spookwaffe. The word evokes images of the bug-eyed coon, a childlike, cowardly simpleton prone to superstition. The word carries either a cartoonish innocence or bitingly racist connotations, and Earn’s snarky use of it is fitting. Dehumanization is a creepy endeavor. While slavery existed in Africa before European intervention, the trade in the Americas required an ideological shift in the perceptions of humanity, an entirely different classification of being deeper than punitive or economic reasoning. We tend to stop at the sheer horror of it and breeze past the elaborate work it took to make the phantasm of race a reality and the illusions that required its upkeep.
The Three-Fifth Compromise was spooky. In order to ensure that southern states had more seats in the House of Representatives, it was proposed in 1787 that the total number of slaves in a state would be considered three-fifths the total number of white people. Five white people equaled three Black people. The bland mathematical rational of it creates an equation of metaphysical fuzzy math that is creepier the more you consider it. Did those extra two Black people never exist? Are they phantom people who are almost there but not quite? Or can you take two-fifths of a person away from them and if so where would you lose it? An arm and a leg? Could you slice bits away starting from the feet up? Perhaps you could remove something more indicative of humanity instead of body parts. Could you take away a sense of smell and long-term memory? Maybe speech and the ability to draw? The formula requires not only the ability to see a person as a non-person (or rather to not see people at all, but as a population), but to un-see. Economic and politically strategic contortions aside, it suggests a creepy theoretical disappearing of people and a willingness to psychically evaporate the body that cleans your floor, cooks your food, works your fields, and bares your children. Like Ellison’s invisible man, the three-fifths man walks here among us, yet not all here, not all whole.
I’ve never celebrated Juneteenth. Like Guy Fawkes Day, it seems to me like an opportunity to represent a kind of enlightened signaling that is less about celebrating what the holiday means, and more about showing that you know the holiday exists. It doesn’t mean much to me because Juneteenth celebrates the end of something that didn’t really end (or more accurately, it’s celebrating something we almost had). If emancipation hadn’t slid so easily into sharecropping, if the gains of Reconstruction weren’t so quickly lost, if reparations had been issued and official apologies from the Nation given at the time, perhaps I’d want to party with a Frozen Freedom Margarita or a Plantation Master Poison. But to me, it’s a hollow holiday celebrating some numinous void that emancipation was supposed to fill, but never did. It’s a day of absence. Even more so, there is the lingering unease that it’s not quite over, that slavery didn’t end, but just keeps shape shifting. It is a weird and creepy fog that has yet to lift.
Gothic narratives were (and still are) a means of working through the discomfort of a changing world through the safety of fiction: fears of industrialization, the speed of scientific discovery, the uncertainty of secularism, epidemics and disease, immigrants and cultural others, nuclear annihilation, climate change… every real social fear has its metaphorical monster. The Kantian negative pleasure of these stories allows us to face these fears, to feel the shudder safe in the knowledge that it will all be over in ninety minutes or so.
Blackness in America has not only never been comfortable, but is a constant source of discomfort. Blackness is often used as a metaphor for any number of social ills: poverty, crime, violence, drug use, promiscuity, broken families, ignorance… to be Black is to be the fear, to be the thing that goes bump in the night hiding under the bed. It is one thing to use literature and film to process social anxieties, but what do you do when you are the social anxiety? What do you do when the villagers with torches and pitchforks are coming after you?
Reasonable Dogs
I went to a small hippie preschool in Amherst where my mother was working on her PhD at the University of Massachusetts. Chinua Achebe lived next door. Nikki Giovanni was a friend of the family. The Cosby’s kids (the real ones) went to the same school as my brother and sister. It seemed like if you were brainy and Black in the Seventies, Amherst was the place to be. One day at school I was playing outside when I saw someone in the distance with a large black dog. A little white girl standing next to me said that I shouldn’t go near it because “the dog didn’t like Black people” and would attack me if I got too close. She said this with a snide superiority — not as a warning for my safety, but as proof of my inherent corruption, a threat so palpable that even animals could sense it. I was about five or six at the time, and got my first taste of that unique blend of shame, anger, and fear that comes with disenfranchisement. I believed her enough to be wary of dogs for years after, unsure which ones were cool and which ones were racist. It took me a while to realize that I had no reason to be afraid of the dog, because that little girl, her parents, the owner of the racist dog — they were afraid of me.
America is unreasonably comfortable with being afraid, to the point of d
oomsday prepping, gun-clinging pride. The use of fear as a political tactic has been a consistent part of the American story from The Birth of a Nation to President Donald Trump’s absurd vision of a wall between us and Mexico. The strategic use of the fear of Black and brown people infiltrating and contaminating whiteness, cleverly positions the oppressor as being the oppressed, the violator as the victim. It’s quite a trick. The use of terror as a technology of repression is one wrought with contradictions because it requires the powerful to seem weak. What would those at the top of the food chain have to tremble about? The non-person: the wild animal, the creature, the monster, the mysterious other.
I have mixed feelings about the term “other” as the generic empty box at the bottom of that list. It’s a boring word for something that is usually anything but boring. But, on the other hand, “other” doesn’t try to define what it doesn’t understand, and I respect that. White supremacy is reliant on Blackness as unknowable, unfathomable, and strange. If America had a national monster, a symbol like baseball or the bald eagle, it would not be a creature with scales or fur or fangs, but a substance that grows and morphs, expands and retracts, spreads and retreats, like The Blob. Or better yet, something parasitic that mimics whatever happens to be next to it like The Thing. America’s boogeyman changes depending on the latest threat, be they Black or Muslim or Latino or gay or trans. Be it feminism or democratic socialism. Our American Blob can shape-shift at a moment’s notice.
In a 2006 skit from the Chappelle’s Show entitled, “The Monsters” (a spoof of 1960s TV show The Munsters), a Black werewolf (Dave Chappelle), a Black mummy (Donnell Rawlings), and a Black Frankenstein’s monster (Charlie Murphy) live together in a suburban home. The Black Frankenstein’s monster goes to work in a corporate office, eagerly anticipating a promotion, but instead his boss warns him that the other employees have complained about his violent bursts of anger. With a classic creature-feature roar he raises his fists in the air in fury then punches a hole straight through his boss’s desk. He confronts his mostly white co-workers (while waving an arm he ripped off a colleague) and proclaims:
Listen up! You racist backstabbers. Ya’ll know I’m the hardest worker in the division. I’m tired of tip-toeing around this office so you racists can be comfortable. You scared of Black people? That’s your problem. My color shouldn’t even be an issue. When you look at me all you should see is a man. Not a Black man.
While the white workers cower in fear, a Black woman shuts down his speech with a smirk and says, “Nigga, you a Frankenstein.” He can be as righteous as possible, but he’s still a monster. The title of this episode of “The Monsters” is “The System Was Not Designed for Us.”
There is a difference between terror and horror, and it’s one of the brain and the body. Devendra Varma describes it as the “awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.” Terror is the dread of the unknown, the anticipation, the mind filling in the gaps of what isn’t there. Terror “leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate.”1 Terror is spooky, horror is gross. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre gained the reputation of being one of the goriest horror movies ever made, but there is almost no actual violence shown. We never see someone get massacred with a chainsaw. Terror is the fear of what we think could happen, not what is really happening, and we project our own personal nightmares onto the screen regardless of what may or may not be right in front of us. Terror is pure affect and needs no evidence.
Tactical Fear
“Objective reasonableness” is an ominously banal statement, a phrase that suggests actions based on logic and proof, a cool and clinical justification for irrational and excessive violence. When a law enforcement officer engages in an act of excessive force, the rules of objective reasonableness state that when faced with a similar situation, a reasonable person would act the same way.2 It is an excuse which creates solidarity among brethren against the chosen other. The law of objective reasonableness depends on a universal understanding and acceptance that non-Black people are reasonable and Black people are scary.
In November 2014, an unidentified man called 911, reporting that a Black man was brandishing a gun in a park in Cleveland, Ohio. The caller said, “The guy keeps pulling it out of his pants. It’s probably fake, but you know what, it’s scaring the shit out of me.” In the video, the Black man is by himself, walking around near a gazebo. He appears to be ambling about, in his own thoughts, twirling the gun around and pulling it in and out of his pants like a six-shooting cowboy in a Western. Police arrived at the scene, pulled up next to him, and within seconds they shot him twice in the chest. He died the next day. The “scary man” was twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. The caller was right — it was a toy gun.
In reporting the incident, Officer Timothy Loehmann describes Tamir as being about twenty. I’ve seen his picture, and if there was ever an image of baby-faced-ness it would be Tamir. In the video he doesn’t look wild or menacing, he just looks bored. The reason Loehmann gave for his reaction was that he was “afraid for his life,” a slogan that has tripped off the tongue of those pointing smoking guns at Black backs for hundreds of years as an almost unquestionable legal defense. Even if Tamir’s gun was real, the option of de-escalation becomes moot — supposedly, the terror is so great, the threat so eminent, that logic and reason disappear and the instinct to react in defense surpasses the one thing that could have saved Tamir’s life: objectivity.
Earlier that year, in August in Ferguson, Missouri, Officer Darren Wilson shot unarmed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown six times, supposedly in self-defense. In his testimony, he too said that he “feared for his life,” and described Brown as being like a “demon,” and that attempting to restrain him “felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.” Brown is framed as being not simply strong, but preternaturally strong, his Blackness giving him superhuman powers with the demonic strength of the possessed. Wilson testified that he had thought about using his mace or taser but could not reach them in time. He doesn’t say in time for what.3
How can you prove a reasonable amount of fear? What is the evidentiary proof? The implicit bias against Blackness is bred from hundreds of years of dogma pathologizing the “scary Black man” — men that are genetically predisposed to not only be Mandingo strong, but prone to rage, violence and an inability to temper their emotions. We’re conditioned to believe that a Black man is automatically a threat that needs to be taken down as swiftly as possible.
The tactical use of fear has entwined American law enforcement with white supremacy since slavery. Blacks were dangerous creatures — useful when tamed, but violent in the wild and capable of turning on their masters at any moment. The precursor to the police were the Night Rider patrols, an organized system of surveillance and control established to monitor slave activity in an attempt to quash insurrections and escape attempts. Despite what we’ve been led to believe, there were more slave rebellions than we might have thought — about two hundred alone before the Civil War. When faced with constant psychological torture with no end in sight, physical violence and death were not a good enough deterrent for rebellion. Like Margaret Garner knew, sometimes dead is better. Since the fear of corporeal suffering wasn’t enough, metaphysical terrorism might work.
Masters and overseers couldn’t be in more than one place at a time, but a ghost could be anywhere, always, an omnipotent spy unseen and unlimited by space and time.4 Slave owners spread rumors of witches, ghosts, and haunted places, encouraging superstitions and exploiting beliefs in the supernatural. Slaves, already in a state of anxiety and suspicion, were confronted by “ghosts” on horseback, the origins of the Ku Klux Klan’s white hooded robes. I don’t think Black folks really believed these were supernatural spirits on horseback, but in an environment of constant anxiety, this must have been a particularly bizarre mind-fuck.
The goal of terrorism is to force submission through fear, and the modern police force is a cousin of Ameri
ca’s original terrorist organization, the KKK. Law enforcement still uses fear as a method of control, but the reality of who is terrorizing whom gets blurry, especially when civilians join in. Racial profiling is no longer just a tool for those in uniform. Wielding power through fear seems paradoxical, but the ability to use 911 as a weapon is a privilege only non-Black and non-brown people seem to enjoy.
In April 2018, Jennifer Schulte (aka BBQ Becky) called the police on a group of Black people barbecuing in a park in Oakland, California. After harassing the picnickers for using charcoal briquettes in their grill, Schulte told the dispatch officer, “I’m really scared! You gotta come quick!” That same year Holly Hilton, the manager at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania called the police on two Black men waiting in the store for their friend to arrive. At Yale University, Sarah Braasch called the cops on a Black student working on her master’s degree in African Studies for napping in a common room while studying.
“Driving while Black,” a reference to the disproportionate number of Black drivers that are pulled over by police, has expanded to: Walking while Black, Standing while Black, Shopping while Black, BBQing while Black, Banking while Black, Napping while Black, Babysitting while Black… merely existing in public becomes a misdemeanor. While these instances may seem ridiculous, it’s just the latest in a long trajectory of state-sanctioned xenophobia combined with entitled bravado. It is the holier-than-thou pretense of concern for public safety that bothers me the most. It comes with the smug superiority of the tattle-tale, the confidence that comes from knowing that the law is on their side. But the fear of Blackness is an irrational one, and irrational fear plus power is dangerous.
Donisha Prendergast (granddaughter of Bob Marley) was checking out of an Airbnb with her friends when a white neighbor called the cops. She assumed they were robbing the house because Donisha didn’t wave back when she waved at them. I’ve never been stopped by the police. No one has ever pointed a gun at me and told me to put my hands up, but every time I read another article, watch another video, follow another Twitter thread, my heart rate goes up a little. I’ve stayed at Airbnbs in predominantly white neighborhoods, I’ve waited for a friend to show up before ordering a latte in a Starbucks, I’ve accidently nodded off in a public space while studying in college. I don’t know what it feels like to be told to get on the ground, but I do know what it feels like to hope to God I’m not scaring any white people.