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Of course, black women know why intuitively. Patricia Hill Collins once called on the idea of controlling images, those stereotypes that are so powerful they flatten all empirical status differences among a group of people to reduce them to the most docile, incompetent subjects in a social structure.6 Those are the memes of the fat black woman, gesticulating with the text “I’m a strong black woman I don’t need no man” that circulate throughout our digital media culture. Controlling images have fallen a bit out of favor in the feminist literature, sometimes thought to be a taken-for-granted relic of older theory. But that is only if we confine our analysis to popular culture, where negative stereotypes do seem pedestrian. When we broaden our field of analysis to the political economy of incompetence—who is and who is not structurally viable as an agentic being across the domains of social life—controlling images regain some of their explanatory power.
Controlling images were never just about the object of study—popular culture memes or characters from movies and television shows—but about the process of reproducing structural inequalities in our everyday lives. Social psychologists study how we acknowledge and reproduce status groups like “man,” “woman,” “black,” “white,” “Asian,” “poor,” “rich,” “novice,” and “expert” in routine interactions. These are statuses of people that we recognize as meaningful categories. When we interact with someone, a few things happen. We size up the person we are engaging with, scanning for any risks to our own social status. You don’t want to be the person who mistakes the company president for the janitor, for example. We also scan others’ perception of us. This is how all kinds of impromptu moments of cooperation make our day go smoothly. It’s the guy who sees you struggling to get something on the bus and coordinates the four people around you to help you get on. Or it’s the three women in a fast food line who all grab for a baby’s bottle just before it hits the floor. We cooperate in micromoments and in longer settings like the waiting room of a doctor’s office. And, when we are cooperating with strangers or near strangers, we are using all kinds of ideas about status to make the interaction work to our benefit.
Let’s take a small detour to get something out of the way. The prevalent perception of black women as unruly bodies and incompetent caretakers overrules even the most dominant stereotype about us, namely that we are superhuman. The image of black women as physically strong without any emotions vulnerable enough to warrant consideration is one of the greatest cultural exports from the racist, sexist U.S. hierarchy. We are undisciplined yet steadfastly committed to the care of others. At one time we were good nannies until global anti-blackness made the world’s immigrant brown women cheaper to import. Even as black women caregivers became less desirable as actual emotional labor-for-hire, we have remained firmly lodged in the cultural imagination as “superwomen.” It might seem that the culture’s perennial strong woman would also be competent. But incompetent and superhero do not actually conflict in the context of essential notions about gender, race, class, and hierarchy.
Black women are superheroes when we conform to others’ expectations of us. When we are sassy but not smart; successful but not happy; competitive but not actualized—then, we have some inherent wisdom. That wisdom’s value is only validated by our culture when it serves someone or something else. We must inspire or provide the emotional release of “calling out” someone afflicted by the guilt of their unearned privilege. When we perform some existential service to men, to capital, to political power, to white women, and even to other “people of color” who are marginally closer to white than they are to black, then we are superwomen.7 We are fulfilling our purpose in the natural order of things. When, instead, black women are strong in service of themselves, that same strength, wisdom, and wit become evidence of our incompetence.
The structural incompetence of black women is how we were made into property makers without any rights to property during slavery; into Patrick Moynihan’s ghosts of black family deviance in the 1960s; and today into icons whose embodiment of authentic emotion is transmuted into digital memes meant to show you’re woke in the 2000s. As objectified superhumans, we are valuable. As humans, we are incompetent.
Back to how status works. The big categories that work in almost any context are diffuse status characteristics. Our beliefs about those categories are so rich, deep, historical, omnipresent, and shared by others whose esteem we value that they show up in almost any social interaction. Those are the categories on which organizations like schools and hospitals base their bureaucratic assumptions. Who is a doctor? Man, white, maybe Asian (East not South and god knows rarely Southeast). Who is a nursing assistant? Woman, brown, black. Of course, values come with those assumptions. Doctors are good. Man, white, maybe Asian (East not South and god knows rarely Southeast) is also good. And so forth and so on. The great promise of social progress is that we can each earn other status descriptors like “expert” or “medical professional.” You go to school. You deny yourself a little fun here and there. You sacrifice. You conform. And people out there recognizing your specific status characteristics is supposed to be the reward. In interactions someone might assume a woman cannot do math, but learn that she is an engineer. The question is, which status characteristic will win out?
More often than not the hierarchy of diffuse status characteristics overpowers any status characteristics that we earn. Patricia Hill Collins’s matrix of domination, the intersecting planes of privilege and domination, still matters.8 If we read that oeuvre more deeply, attuned to the ways that capital and neoliberalism have inculcated greater incompetence for more and more people, we find that what black feminists promised all along was true: to know the most present marginalized oppressions is to know the future.
Being structurally incompetent injects friction into every interaction, between people, and between people and organizations, and between organizations and ideologies. Frictionless living is the promise of neoliberal capital—that is, if you are on the winning side of power. But when black women in the United States are dying trying to give birth and their babies are dying trying to get born, not simply because of poverty but because the grotesque accumulation of capital in the West is predicated on our structural incompetence, then we can see the ends of hypercapitalism in daily life.
This moment of global inequality demands incompetent subjects. The status quo and ever-intensifying versions of it require incompetent consumers who will learn to want technological solutions to their political problems. Are you starving even though there is food? Here is an app to connect you with the charity that is filling that hole in our ragged social safety net. Are global profits being extracted by the financial class while driving down wages and quality of work, even for people with expensive college educations? Here is a website where you can purchase a credential that might help you get a new job, one where you will likely be in the same position again in eighteen months. Your structural incompetence generates ever more sophisticated consumption goods, goods that reinforce status games of who is deserving and who is not.
Did you use the app to get a job or to become an entrepreneur? Do you use social media like a customer or a producer? Are you surveilled by the state like poor people or do you surveil yourself like the middle class? These gradations of difference are meaningless if the question is which consumption status group has power over their political incompetence. All of them are incompetent; they only differ in how they can afford to lie to themselves about it.
What so many black women know is what I learned as I sat at the end of a hallway with a dead baby in my arms. The networks of capital, be they polities or organizations, work most efficiently when your lowest status characteristic is assumed. And once these gears are in motion, you can never be competent enough to save your own life.
That is how black feminism knows the future.
Know Your Whites
The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination. Even in the early yea
rs of the country, it was not the concept of race alone that operated to oppress Blacks and Indians; rather, it was the interaction between conceptions of race and property that played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination.
—Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property1
Barack Obama’s election was a catalyst for a level of voter suppression activities that had not been seen so clearly or disturbingly in decades.
—Carol A. Anderson, White Rage2
A year before it was real, the very idea of a President Barack Obama was ridiculous to me. I was and am southern, god bless. I am black. I come from black people who are southerners even when they were New Yorkers for a spell. We are the black American story of enslavement, rural migration, urban displacement, resistance, bootstrapping, mobility, and class fragility. In this milieu we, as a friend once described it, know our whites. To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically. It is to anticipate white people’s emotions and fears and grievances, because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul.
That is what I was working with when I went to my first Obama house party in 2007—a few generations’ worth of lived and inherited expertise in knowing our whites. Our whites are southern, like me. Even if they spent some time in places north and west, to become white in the South is to absorb some large part of its particular iteration of the U.S. racial hierarchy. The house party was being held in Myers Park, a lush, wealthy in-town enclave in Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte was my home. I knew Myers Park as a place and a cultural geography of the city’s racist histories. Myers Park is gorgeous. The streets are wide. The homes are stately without being garish. The residents are mere miles from the center of the city’s banking, employment, transportation, and entertainment hubs. As neighborhoods throughout Charlotte fell victim to blight during the housing crash of the 2000s, Myers Park remained stable, thriving even, with housing values continuing upward trends year over year.3
Myers Park is also, as one with even a cursory knowledge of how wealth works in the United States would know, the benefactor of years of racist covenant restrictions and redlining. Myers Park is beautiful because it has encoded its whiteness into the mundane market transactions that we rarely see: zoning, planning, investment, homeowners associations. White people in Myers Park, no matter where they are from at any time in their lives, are of Myers Park whether they acknowledge it or not.
I grew up knowing those whites. They mostly go to private school. When they don’t, they make the public high school (Myers Park High School, naturally) function like a private school.4 We call this opportunity hoarding, and it looks something like this: white parents use their economic privilege to purchase homes in communities that have benefited from generations of wealth privilege. That wealth privilege generates investment in streets, sidewalks, greenspace, traffic lights, clean air, proper waste treatment, and safe drinking water. When white families purchase in these neighborhoods they are also purchasing access to the local public school. That is because we assign students in the U.S. public school system, for the most part, by their home zip codes. Once enrolled in these schools by virtue of having the income to live in communities that are built on the stabilizing forces of generational wealth, these families generally prize “diversity.”
They are good people. They want all the children in their child’s school to thrive, but they want their child to thrive just a bit more than most. To help their child thrive, these parents use their proximity to local and civic leaders to lobby their personal preferences as politically expedient positions. They gently but insistently marshal resources like teacher time, curriculum access, and extracurricular participation for their children. They donate. They volunteer. They call. They email. They make this already well-funded public school work like a private school for their child: individualized attention, personalized resources, and cumulative advantage. The opportunities these parents hoard become zero-sum for parents who cannot do the same. The families that can hoard do, and the neighborhoods in which they live benefit.
For a spell, Myers Park was at the heart of the nation’s public relations tour for post–Civil Rights era integration. The wealthy white families of the community had mostly supported busing their students into the historically black West Charlotte High School. They believed in diversity. Once there, a rising tide of investment in the resource-starved black high school seemed to benefit all … but the white students benefited most. The experiment in integration lasted but thirty years.
Myers Park is typical of a national pattern of how segregated lives and intertwined cross-racial fortunes play out. But, Myers Park performs resegregation differently than some other urban-suburban enclaves, if only for how very southern its residents are in articulating their privilege. The homes are large but not plantation-like. They are the kinds of old homes that toothy gentrifiers on HGTV remodeling shows say have “good bones.” I am almost certain “good bones” means “worth however much money this pit is about to suck from you because the neighborhood is reliably white,” but I digress. Myers Park is neighborly, even to strangers, before dark. It has manners. There are porches, even if few people sit on them, preferring, instead, the safety of the backyard. Social networks are cultivated at the local church—it is the South, after all—and cemented through business partnerships. Myers Park people donate, their money and their time, to good causes. And these perfectly civil people live in intentionally cultivated, nominally diverse, in-town panopticons that need no guard in the central watchtower but whiteness.
Charlotte, North Carolina, is full of middle-class blacks, activist black people of all classes, organized third- and fourth-generation Latinos. I could not believe the Obama house party was happening in Myers Park, of all places in the city. Today I cannot imagine it anywhere else.
The party was in one of the homes usually only accessible to someone like me when, twice a year, you can pay $15 or so for one of those charity parades of homes. I was early. When I rang the bell a young white woman, still wet from a shower, told me to come on in, but no one was yet there. I sat for almost half an hour as they finished preparing, acutely aware of my social faux pas. As people arrived, of all ages and walks of life, I was the only black person until almost an hour into the house party. That is when a brother carrying a bicycle arrived with his white girlfriend.
The hosts asked for donations without stuttering the way that I still do when I have to do “the ask.” It was taken for granted that you had come to spend money and had money to spend. Here, a full eight years before mobile credit card payments would penetrate my black hair salon or Saturday swap meets, the hosts took mobile payments using a website. The whites in this room were all in for Obama. They talked about him like old black people talk about Martin Luther King. They loved his biography. They embraced his political mantra. They were positive he could win.
Back at home, the black people I know were positive that white people were crazy to think that he could win. My mother told me as much: “White people are crazy,” The Vivian said. She, like me, knew her whites. I went home that night of the house party and told her that I had seen, not new whites, but white people doing what people do: coalescing around shared interests. Only, their interests converged with my own. They still had more money, more power than we had. They were as young as me, but lived in million-dollar estates. They would still negotiate the daily experience of racial segregation in their neighborhoods and schools and jobs, but they had, for countless reasons, chosen this black man as “their guy.” The question I could not parse for many years was why.
There is no need to rehash our national identity crisis at the election of the first African American (if not black American) U.S. president. Fox News scaled new heights of shrill paranoia. Then they buil
t a stair lift to the top for their predominantly white, elderly audience. African Americans did not believe the election had happened until a month before the end of Obama’s second, and final, term. Many black Americans, of all national origins but with shared political ideologies, struggled to find a way to critique the imperialist office without disparaging the man occupying it. Hispanic voters and Asian American voters were divided in their support by national origin, generational status, and income.5 But in almost every ethnic community there was a strong contingent seeking their own people’s story in Obama’s.
The times were not idyllic, but they were as close to multicultural as the U.S. public sphere has ever felt. Those are the eight years that writer Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the “Good Negro Government period.”6 Like the eight years of Black Reconstruction some 130 years prior to his first presidential contest—one that he would win handily—Obama’s Good Negro Government period was marked by black political competence and white fear. Political analyst Jamelle Bouie once said, during a joint interview we recorded for a radio program, that in the twilight of Obama’s final term it occurred to him that if this safely competent black man was not good enough for white America, then he would never be.7 It was heart-wrenching listening to Jamelle discover this fundamental truth of being black in America. And it was for me indeed a fundamental truth.
How could I explain the hope of that Myers Park house party and my core truth that whiteness necessitates black subjugation? This paradox—that is what it is, because these truths seem to occupy opposing sides but in reality are the same side of a Janus-faced coin—mirrored the national paradox: how could the same nation that elected Barack Obama immediately elect Donald Trump? The answer was not in Obama’s blackness. Blackness is not a paradox. Blackness is. It has to be for whiteness, at any point in time or space, to enact its ultimate expression: elasticity.