by Leila Taylor
Wave Hill is a beautiful public garden in the Bronx overlooking the Hudson River. I’d never been there before and took an unnecessarily annoying route involving a walk through the residential streets of Riverdale, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in New York City. It has a mostly white population and one of the lowest crime rates in the city. I was alone and unsure of how long it would take me to get to the garden, and as I walked past the large houses I picked up my pace thinking, “I need to get out of here before someone calls the cops on me.” I have a prestigious job in a creative field, I dress like a Puritan and I have two master’s degrees. None of that mattered. If Henry Louis Gates Jr can get arrested for breaking into his own house, what chance do I have?
In America, twenty-three states have “stand your ground” laws. The law, brought to the forefront by the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, states that a person has the right to defend themselves or others against threats, or perceived threats, to the point of lethal force regardless of whether safely retreating from the situation might have been possible. Perceived is the key word here. How can one prove or disprove a perception? How can you prove if you are scared or not? I have yet to see a case of a Black person “standing their ground.” You never hear reports of a Black person shooting a non-Black person out of fear for their life — and it begs the question of who is allowed to be reasonably afraid of whom. The fear of Blackness is so embedded in the fabric of the country, but it’s a fear founded on an imagined threat, hundreds of years of mythology that has never been debunked, and this dialectic between the terrorist and the terrified feeds upon itself. To quote Sara Ahmed:
[Fear] brings them together and moves them apart through the shudders that are felt on the skin, on the surface that surfaces through the encounter. The shivering of the black body is misread as a form of rage, and only then as the “ground” of white fear. In other words, the other is only felt to be fearsome through a misreading, a misreading that is returned by the other through its response of fear…
Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror movie Get Out opens with a specific kind of dread, one that is familiar both in the world of horror and in the real world of Black lives. A young Black man is walking alone at night on an empty residential street talking to someone on his phone, lost in this “creepy, confusing ass suburb.” A car slowly begins to follow him, and he immediately hunches his shoulders and lowers his head in a submissive posture. “OK,” he tells himself under his breath. “Just keep walking. Don’t do anything stupid. Not today, not me.” His manner isn’t so much that of fear, but of frustration, the exhaustion of someone tired of this shit. He anticipates harassment and even violence, as do we, the audience. Before Eric Garner died in a chokehold, before he said “I can’t breathe,” when the police first stopped him he said, “Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it.”
Night of the Living Dead, dir. George A. Romero, 1968
George A. Romero might have inducted the zombie into the annals of horror movie monsters forever, but in Night of the Living Dead (1968), what was far more unbelievable (and radical) is that the lead, the hero, the man in control of the situation, is Black. He spends the film telling white people what they should do, calming them down, he even slaps a hysterical white lady in the face. Trapped inside an isolated house in the country, the white folks are either catatonic, weak, or selfish. Ben (Duane Jones) is smart, decisive, and brave in his heroic efforts to save the lives of these strangers, but having survived a night of an invading horde of the walking dead, having protected a group of white men and women from being eaten alive, as he walks out of the house in the light of day, the police immediately shoot him, assuming he is a zombie.
The end is shot in a montage of still, black-and-white photos and resembles a documentary more than a horror film. They stab his body with a hook to more easily drag him to a pile to burn with the rest of the monsters. While the zombies may have been relentless in their pursuit of human flesh for food, they are innocent in their blind instinct. The police shoot first and don’t bother asking questions later. Despite exhibiting none of the tell-tale signs of zombification — the slow gait, the moans, the dead eyes and decaying flesh — the police see a Black figure and automatically see danger. Before Jordan Peele won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the Golden Globes, in a condescending tone-deaf act, nominated his film for Best Musical or Comedy. Peele’s response: “Get Out is a documentary.”
The conversion from personhood to commodity was just the first step of the process of monsterization. What Frank B. Wilderson calls “social death,” is a process of social zombification. The Black body (not Black person, but body) is susceptible to violence without reason, degradation without ramification, and available for exploitation. The monster is despised and feared by the very nature of its monstrosity. The monster is dangerous and threatening and therefore can be tortured, killed, or maimed with impunity. It may sound like I’m equating monstrousness with Blackness. I’m not. What I am saying is that the process of dehumanization is a process of monster-making. But monsters have power.
In Bill Gunn’s 1973 film Ganja & Hess, we are introduced to anthropologist Dr Hess Green (also played by Duane Jones) in the backseat of a Rolls Royce, with his hand to his head as if he’s ill. In a voiceover his chauffeur says, “He’s an addict. He’s not a criminal. He’s a victim. He’s addicted to blood.” Dr Green had been stabbed by his assistant George Meda (Bill Gunn) with a dagger cursed by an ancient African tribe of blood drinkers, but don’t call Hess a vampire; he’s a man suffering from vampirism.
After transferring the curse to Dr Green, Meda commits suicide and his wife Ganja (Marlene Clark), is left widowed. Initially she’s horrified when she discovers her dead husband in the freezer and after some deliberation tells Hess a painful story from her childhood. After an epic snowball fight with a group of kids, her mother accuses her of being a slut for running around with a boy. Despite her insistence that she had done nothing wrong, her mother refused to believe her. Ganja says:
It was though I had a disease. I came down with Ganja, you know. And I think that day I decided that I was a disease and I was going to give her a full case of it. That whatever it was I was, she was gonna have it. That day I decided that I would provide for Ganja, always, do whatever had to be done, take whatever steps had to be taken, but always take care of Ganja.
After Ganja discovers that Hess is addicted to human blood, he asks her, “The fact that you think I’m psychotic doesn’t frighten you?” Ganja says with a smile and a shrug, “Aw man, everybody is some kind of freak.” She decides to marry him, and his money, and agrees to become a vampire like him and live forever. Hess, riddled with guilt, kills himself, but Ganja lives on fully embracing her immortality, her freakiness, her monstrosity, and her power.
Being the monster allows for a unique ability to see in the dark. The other has the clarity and awareness that fear obscures. To be the thing that strikes fear in the hearts of men is to know more than they do, to know them more than they know themselves. It’s dangerous, and to be sure, the villagers will always be at the ready with their torches, but the monster lives where you are afraid to go, it watches you while you sleep, hides in the shadows where you can’t see, it poisons the master’s tea when they’re not looking. The monster knows what you did last summer. America has gotten away with murder for four hundred years, and it’s been sleeping with one eye open ever since.
BLACK IS THE COLOR OF MY TRUE LOVE’S HAIR
There is no “very black.” Only white people use this term. To blacks, “black” is black enough (and in most cases too black, since the majority of black people are not nearly so black as your black pocketbook). If a black person says, “John is very black,” he is referring to John’s politics, not his skin color.
— Fran Ross, Oreo
I didn’t know him, but he looked like someone who might have gone to our church: a Black man in his sixties or seventies, someone I would instinctively call �
��Sir.” He pointed at my t-shirt which read “Black Celebration 1986” in bold black, yellow, and red type. He nodded with an impressed smile, and I basked for a moment in the warm approval of my elders without knowing exactly why. He said, “Yes! We should celebrate.” I nodded and smiled with a meek, “Yeah.” “Is it a special event?” he asked. Confused, I answered, “I guess? I mean I’ve seen them before…” It was his turn to look confused and then it clicked. “Oh, it’s a band.” I turned around showing him the back with the Depeche Mode logo and the tour schedule. “Ahhh,” he nodded then asked, “Are they Black?” I could anticipate the disappointment and when I quietly answered, “No.” His face dropped a little and whatever Black-folk bond we shared at the moment dissolved as we realized we were not celebrating the same kind of Black. Suddenly the song felt offensive to me, yet another example of black as a metaphor for something awful, with its oxymoronic title: a toast to the end of “another black day,” because a black day is never a good day. As someone who has always been attracted to the dark side, as a night person who thrives after midnight, as someone who prefers the shadows to the spotlight, the negativity of black has always been a positive and my Blackness didn’t have anything to do with that.
Over the years my closet has become blacker and blacker, to the point where it’s now something of a textured void: a row of black fabric of various shades, temperatures, weight, materials and textures. If I’m not wearing black then it is decidedly NOT black: white, because of its non-blackness, or chambray for its proletariat neutrality. There has to be a reason why I would not choose black, and that reason is rarely good enough. Grey is sometimes OK.
I may have a gothic heart, but I’m also a creative director in New York City and black has been established as symbolic of a kind of management of the arts — the human equivalent of the gallery’s white box. The all black outfit has the quality of an authoritative uniform of consistency and simplicity. If I could get away with it, I’d wear a Jesuit cassock every day.
Fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto said, “Black is modest and arrogant at the same time,” and it’s a description that feels uncomfortably suited to me. I think it’s impossible to wear all black all the time without a smidge of superiority. Black is staple of such authority it has become the standard by which all colors aspire to. The phrase “[something] is the new black” means to be the new classic, the new basic, the next necessary thing. The color black signals a kind of unaffected cool, a latent self-possession that is at once alluring and intimidating, something carefully considered and effortless at the same time. Blackness, for the same reasons, is codified as cool, signaling a hipness that since white people started going to jazz clubs in Harlem has been co-opted and commodified for non-Black consumption. Blackness on non-Black people signals a pretense of outsider rebellion and anti-establishment bravado.
Detroit Is the New Black, founder Rosalyn Karamoko, logo by Bellweather
Black contains multitudes… literally. As a pigment it is all colors all at once, but black is also the complete absence of all light. Black is nothingness, absence, a void, the abyss. It’s everything and nothing at the same time. Black is the color of omission — the black outlines of redacted classified documents, the strategically placed black bars covering nipples, the lost time of the blacked-out drunk. Black covers up, hides and deletes. Black courts suspicion.
Redacted text from Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III, March 2019
On the flip side, white is symbolic of a kind of moral purity and virgin innocence. If darkness is indicative of evil, light is its opposite — everyone knows that the White Hats are the good guys and the Black Hats are the bad guys. To be enlightened is to have knowledge, awareness, and clarity. It has spiritual connotations of reaching a more evolved level of consciousness. Dark is the absorption of everything, weighted down by sin, melancholy, and secrecy. To be “in the dark” is to be in a state of unknowing and ignorance.
Most pertinent to the gothic, black is a signal of death (in the West at least. In most of Asia, white is the symbol of mourning). The color of the Grim Reaper’s cloak, the great plague, and the color of the ravens and crows that come to pick bones dry. Black is the color of ninjas, cat burglars, and pirates. It is either a melancholic or maleficent chroma, or sometimes both simultaneously. Black is the color of mystery and shadows, and the children of the night only make music when the sun goes down.
The image of goth as a subculture is a palette of black clothes and white skin. Despite the brown and black influences that run through the cultural gothic spectrum (Mexican Día De Los Muertos, Afro-Caribbean hoodoo, and Ancient Egyptian symbols of the Dead), goth is perceived as Caucasian culturally and aesthetically. But I recall Egyptian ankhs and scarabs being just as popular an accessory as crucifixes and pentagrams. Goth borrows and samples from the ancient and the archaic regardless of religion, culture or ethnicity, but its reputation is that of a black on black wardrobe with a tubercular complexion.
The whiteness of goth is in its excess of paleness, the cool pallor of a life spent indoors or under overcast skies. The blinding vampiric white makes black so much blacker. It is a palette of extreme contrast with none of the meek dilution of pastels or the warm comfort of browns. The idea of white skin and whiteness is so meshed with the gothic that the translation from whiteness to Blackness is sometimes an awkward one.
Black goth blogger Dana Dillipede asked in a post, “Does pale foundation mean one is ashamed of their skin color?” The general response from readers was for the most part “you-do-you-isms,” and much like the debates over natural versus straightened hair, in one corner some say it’s nothing more than a style preference and aesthetic choice. In the other corner, relaxed hair, weaves, and foundation a shade lighter than it should be means succumbing to hegemonic standards of white beauty and is symptomatic of self-hatred mired in colorism.
One Halloween, I attended an office costume party as a “person in a black-and-white movie” à la Pleasantville. My clothes from head to toe were various shades of grey, as was my make-up (grey foundation, grey eye shadow, grey lipstick…). I wore a black skirt with a white shirt and grey cardigan with my chunky black glasses and a black bob wig that covered up my naturally brown ears. I looked awesome if I do say so myself. A white co-worker came up to me and whispered, “That’s not very PC of you.” I replied with a confused “huh?” and she said, “Dressing up as a white person for Halloween!” Several thoughts went through my mind: does this person think I’m either insane or stupid enough go to an office party in a “white person” costume? Since when is grey a normal human skin tone? What else was reading “white” to her? Was it the cardigan? I decided to compromise and told her I was a zombie librarian. In the case of goth, it’s the intent that matters. Are you trying to look white or are you trying to look dead?
Punctuated Blackness, 2013, 8.5” x 14” (archival inkjet reproduction of woodblock print) All images courtesy of Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Installation Shot from No Instructions for Assembly, Activation VII, 2015 (photograph) All images courtesy of Kameelah Janan Rasheed
The Invention of Blackness
The word “melancholy” comes from the Greek “melan” meaning “black” and “kholē” meaning “bile.” It has its origins in the fifth-century Hippocratic theory of humorism, the belief that health could be dictated by a balance of humors flowing through the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Black bile was considered the “melancholic” humor and was attributed to moroseness, fear, and prolonged sadness. But unlike blood or phlegm, black bile has no basis in anything biological. It’s a substance of pure affect, not of mucus or plasma. Sadness created its own stuff. One particularly disgusting theory claimed black bile was the result of decomposing flesh released into the bloodstream resulting in a spectrum of ailments: headaches, vertigo, paralysis, epilepsy, diseases of the kidney and spleen. T
he “negative” emotions like introspection, sentimentality, excessive grief, loneliness, alienation, misanthropy, and cynicism were attributed to too much of the black stuff.1
Black is a color, a mood, and a state of being, and all of these attributes contribute to the construction of Black as a race. Black does not exist in nature, it had to be invented — black had to become Black (or negro or colored or darky or spade). Even the phrase “person of color” assumes an identity according to hue: something “not white.”
The invention of Blackness was a crucial marketing tool of chattel slavery. To justify the buying and selling of human beings, the enslaved had to be diametrically oppositional to the slavers, all the way on the other side of their cultural chroma. If the only thing separating one human from another is the tone of their skin, that tone must carry an excessive level of contrived meaning. The Age of Enlightenment saw the birth of both the gothic genre and the classification of race and while one delighted in chaos, the other craved order. One embraced the dark and the other reviled it.
In 1767, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus wrote Systema Naturae, in which he created a color-coded taxonomy of humanity. Each continent had a color and designated humor with conveniently specific attributes: Europeans were white, sanguine, and gentle; Native Americans were red, choleric, and obstinate; Asians were yellow, melancholy, and severe; Africans were black, phlegmatic, and negligent. In 1775, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach wrote De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind), which divided human beings into five races: Caucasian, Malaysian, Ethiopian, American, and Mongolian. He touted monogenism, the belief that all races came from a single origin (white), but that environment and poor diet would result in the degenerative darkening of the skin. Eighteenth-century surgeon Charles White thought that whites and Blacks were entirely different species. The assumption of whiteness as normalcy placed anything not white not only as inferior and unformed, but something all-together other, and America has never entirely debunked this fake science.