But I wonder—as I did in that meeting—about the paradigms of responsivity that make these contributions meaningful, and—more to the point—what they exclude from our collective gaze. How are we responding to white privilege, white normativity, and racism? The imaginary of racial justice and its juridical implications in a sphere of rights posits a directionality … a “there” in future time we are supposed to reach. To climb this pyramid, and claw our way to the top of modernity’s pointy summit in a gesture of arrival, is the suggested route of resolution. The driving ethos is equal access—access for the many races. Access to prestige, to educational opportunities, to career fulfilment, to fair representation. A level playing field. Open doors to white, brown, and black alike. And racial identity—often circumscribed in the caul of accusation and distanced away from the “other”—is the beating heart of this imaginary.
I have said that my journey of decolonization took me to a pan-Africanism and an Afrocentrism that insisted on seeing the world through the unique contexts of the “African.” I even wrote a book called We Will Tell Our Own Story! with the much-respected scholar of Afrocentrism and elder Molefi Asante. Inside me, however, the call to African centrality felt like a call to arms, a call to proliferate many other centers in defiance of the previous monocentrality of Euro-American thought. To crouch behind sandbags we had erected to keep the creeping hordes of the white others away. Postmodernism seemed sympathetic to this political project of reengineering history and of calling attention to the processes of elision that underlined the institutionalization of physical and social sciences as white knowledges. I began to fill my bedroom wall with lists of things black people had done—the things written out of history or muted by the status quo, like the silent p in psychology. From dustpans to potato chips to the carbon filament and traffic lights—and even the internet, which might not have been possible were it not for the calculations of one Philip Emeagwali, an Igbo man like your grandfather, which allowed microcomputers to communicate with each other simultaneously within what he called the Hyperball International Network of computers15—the items black women and men inventors created became my coordinates to a black heaven.
But, as I may have said, I noticed the constant need to assert my place, to hold up an objectionable finger in gatherings—where I found I was (once again) the only black person present—just to point out Africans “had done it first.” And like a coconut forced open with sweat and toil only to serve a few drops of its tender fluids, asserting black identity felt like doing so much only to get so little.
Not that I was against confrontation. Even now, I understand that there are situations where confrontation is already built into the dynamic of things, where anger must be allowed its troubling passage as one must allow the mysterious night masquerade to dance and scream its frightful secrets in the tight corridors of the village. Confrontation, anger, and pain have their place. But in asserting my voice, in being naturally suspicious of the white subtext in the sentence of the everyday, in being prickly about what “that white woman” or “some other white person” really meant when she suggested that audiences listened to me because I was “exotic”—a young black man that sounded articulate, or why that immigration officer held me at his booth for far longer than the other travelers had been held, I slowly came to the realization that even victimhood could be oppressive. Power shows up in ironic ways. In fetishizing my blackness, I was perhaps “guilty” of some kind of conservation of victimhood and polishing of enemy figures.
What began to give way was my firm grip on identity. There had to be something beyond the stark proliferation of gated communities of racialized bodies, each staking a claim for itself in the flatness and scarcity of modern life. There had to be a different notion outside these lines bloodied fingers and half-broken fingernails had anxiously scratched into the earth to demarcate “them” from “us”—a line white people were barred from crossing, and which most blacks seemed content to preserve.
Bill Maher, white liberal American comic and host of the political talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, learned the hard way about “crossing lines” as he bandied words with his guest, U.S. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, while filming on set in May 2017. Midway through their conversation, Maher, in response to a phrase from the senator that had the words “work the fields” in it, responded by saying he was a “house nigger.” A collective groan reverberated across the United States: the joke, most said, was not only in bad taste but was an affront to black people. How dare a white man—even one who had had black female friends—utter the word nigger? The backlash was swift as black celebrities called for Maher’s head to appease the gods of the line—the same line breached by Maher’s presumptuous bravado, the wrath of which even his liberal cred and brand of political incorrectness could not save him from.
When legendary hip-hop artist and actor Ice Cube appeared to film a subsequent Real Time segment, Bill knew what was coming to him. “So I know you are here to promote an album,” he said. “I know you also want to talk about my transgression. What do you want to do first?” Ice Cube, probably the fitting figure for the angry black male, laid into him almost as soon as he had the chance to start talking.
“I love your show, you got a great show,” Ice Cube noted. “But you be bucking up against that line a little bit,” he added, just before upbraiding him for sounding like a “redneck trucker” once in a while.
“I have two questions: what made you think it was cool to say that?” Ice Cube asked. Maher noted that he had given it no thought; it was a comedic reaction in the moment, one that was begging to be made given the ready premise Sasse had inadvertently set up with his own “work the fields” phrase. Ice Cube accepted Maher’s apology, but proceeded to try to get to the “psyche” of the matter. “There’s a lot of guys out there who cross the line ’cause they a little too familiar … it’s a word that has been used against us; it’s like a knife, man,” he said. “It’s been used as a weapon against us, by white people, and we are not going to let that happen again, by nobody.”
As I watched the clip, I tried to bring myself to imagine the pains of growing up in a black neighborhood, in “the projects” constantly surveilled by white policemen who saw black bodies as threatening. I tried to imagine the anger immortalized in the lyrics from one of Ice Cube’s popular tracks, where he and other members of the rap group NWA write:
A young nigga got it bad cause I’m brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority16
I tried to hold close the trauma of watching one’s family lynched by fully faced white men who knew that the law was on their side and their extrajudicial killings would sink back into the texture of things. How could one not be angry when white men passed around the body parts of their hollowed-out victims, and smiled for the cameras as they held those parts like souvenirs? The word nigger scorches Negro backs in the heat of its fury, lands on one’s face like auburn spit through gritted teeth, and turns the ghosts of those memories—whose spectral bodies still bear the marks of that painful label.
I could identify with Ice Cube. I may not have agreed with his position, but I could honor the scowl beneath his remarks on Real Time—for, make no mistake about it, white people did name black people. I am no hip-hop lyricist, but in feeling with Ice Cube, in churning those transgressive memories of bodies elided, I imagine that early white slave owners, colonialists, and even present day authority figures say:
I name you nigger. I name you black.
I serve you this dish with a side of repulsion and disgust.
The black I name you is not the innocent absence of light, the tide of night in its ebb and flow, but an abominable vacancy, the depthless stretch of your bodily ineptitude and moral profligacy.
I name you monster, you blight on the glorious order of salvation—perverse and evil in your imaginations. I reduce your many hues to the one color of your sin, Dark Continent.
I name you wretch. And the burden of my days will be to yield to the benevolence I shall exercise in finding ways to save you from yourself. To redeem you into the original score your cacophonous sounds have fallen short of.
I am sorry, dear, if this doesn’t sit with the terroir of your times—all this hate and agony and wounds. But I suspect that whatever world you live in can only be a bit more mature to the extent it has learned how to honor even hate, how to hold space for its passing, how to hold the urgency of its yearning without dumbing it down under the Band-Aids of forced positivity—a point that brings me to the other half of those hastily contrived lyrics of mine, the black response:
You know that thing you did with us? Naming us and all that jazz? Well, I do it to you too. So, here: I name you white. I call you out. I name your pale-pinkness, your aversion to colors, your fragility in the face of difference.
You brand my body with your empire; I name you plague.
You cut me off from the ground and hoisted me in unwilling branches—my limp body suspended in midair a figure for your own longing to fly. Your own longing to escape these rufous curls of earthly matters. But you are no angel, so I name you deluded.
This word you force on me to own me, nigger, let this word be our own shibboleth, but a constant reminder of your twisted benevolence. You will never cross this line. You will always remember your guilt, and speak with deferred words that will not come. For you yourself, in your pale-faced whiteness, will never arrive.
And these words, if faithful to the universe of interracial relations Ice Cube inhabits to some degree, show how blackness is a phenomenon of white arrangements. Much in the same way postmodernism derives its angst from modern foundationalism, blackness is a white construct only made possible by the industrial conditions that assigned dark bodies on a ladder of proximity to power. Blackness is a spatiotemporal allocation of bodies within the logic of modern ascendancy. It is forcing the posthuman polymorphism of bodies into the single teleological track of “American hierarchy.” The line Cube warns Maher and Maher’s audience never to cross, the line that preserves black power and the integrity of our identity—guarded by the reverse engineering of the word nigger and forged in trauma and pain—is the same line that locks us in, keeps us immured to a threshold that delineates possible power to the exclusion of other places of power.
To the degree that white supremacy valorizes, organizes, and directs attention—in an orchestra of bodies and stories—toward the summit of the pyramid, it denies other places of power. It denies the agency of the world around us, the enchantment that sews all things into a quilt of co-becoming. The structure that allocates identity and fixes it in place also befogs the ongoingness of these “identities,” blinding the eye from noticing how spread-out we are, how the many colors we take on bend with the play and openings and closures of topographical shifts, climactic changes, and biological matterings. To speak of blackness as if it were an essence or whiteness as if it were a fixed other is to ironically extend the reach of white normativity.
Ice Cube, in conversation with Maher, notes that black people can use the same word that white people are absolutely barred from using. He suggests that the context doesn’t matter—so long as you are white, you are prohibited from using the n-word. Of course, this essentializes whiteness to estrange it from blackness, which is in turn a move of “white power.”
As a rhetorical device, I might make the claim that prior to the colonial moment, there was no such thing as “blackness.” Except perhaps as an occasional description, “blackness” and its charged theo-psychological undertones of backwardness and biological monstrosity did not emerge except as a substitute category within an industrial order of limited allocations and privileged recipients. This is the same industrial order of the American homeland that situated whiteness as a
homogeneous identity offered to newly arrived European immigrants in lieu of their own peculiar peculiarities. The myth of white sameness [in turn anchored] African slaves and aboriginal savages [to] a fantasy of colored difference and a fiction of natural inferiority.17
Here, in these modern wastelands, blackness is perpetually hidden away behind the polished figures of its own trauma, behind sensitive walls. Locked in. Waiting. Accusatory. It sees the same vision of power that whiteness coaxes it to adopt: food security as access to shopping malls; prosperity as more dollar bills than one can spend; the self as an atomized individual that knows no community or treats community as the proximity of estranged bodies, not the strange we-ness that precedes I-ness; and the Future—that imaginary of techno-utopian supremacy—as the only possible timeline.
A shamanic perspective draws upon shapeshifting ontologies, cosmologies of dust and threadbare boundaries, and other visions of power-with-the-world. Within such a worldview, one cannot be “black” or “white.” Not for long. This is, however, not an ethos that is blind to colors or seeks to synthesize them into a general all-color neutrality. Instead, it is potentially an approach that emphasizes racial differences and peculiarities only to the degree that it stitches those identities within a quilt of mutual entanglement. Only to the extent that the “other” becomes the condition for the one’s existence, and vice versa. This entanglement ropes in not just human contributions to race but nonhuman contributions as well. In fact, one is not only black but green and blue and yellow-spotted and red-hued. That is because human bodies are the workings of both human and nonhuman agencies, or should we say “non/human” agencies. For example, the role of climate change intra-acting with melanin, and congealing in color-polymorphic bodies and phenotypic plasticity and new genetic adaptations, is just one instance of the way the environment has racializing effects,18 and why whiteness (or blackness) is not simply a state of mind, a moral choice, or social construction.
Our manners of explaining race hinge on tracing ancestry and examining historical matters in terms of the legacy of colonial infractions and the tragedy of contemporary occlusions. We tend to think of blackness as stable, making it the unit of analysis, holding it constant as factors around it change. That reading does not account for the breathtaking intra-activity of the world, where time itself is not a mere container for the goings-on “in” the world but part of its reiterativity. Being part of an ever-changing, ever fluid, open-ended material-discursive universe means the past is not fixed and is often resituated;19 that though the intergenerational trauma of racial violence marks our bodies and inhabits social structures, trauma is not to be summarily resolved but is often “practiced into relative stability”; and that the work of decolonization or of addressing these issues are not uniquely human—since race is more-than-human. In short, black bodies are not the products of black ancestries traced back, but the intra-acting negotiation of bodies and climate and economic power and theological categories and the modern will to purpose, direction, and power. In a manner of speaking, blackness (like “whiteness”), to be generative and prolific, needs to be “reimmersed” in the stream of mangled and co-emergent colors it was extricated from. We are not black or white: the interface between bodies and worlds is continuous and ceaselessly flowing so that race is not a property of individuals or something we are “in.” It is the world in its many doings. That of course is not to say race is a separate ontological category of its own, hardboiled into the scheme of things, and oblivious to fluid power dynamics and class constructions. Such demarcations are no longer tenable. I mean to say that being black or white is not just about social arrangements —even though that is an important point to make—it is also about movements in the world. It is material-discursive. And what race means, and how we make distinctions between being this or that, is ever-changing—due to human and non-human forces.
In short, Shiva—the god of dust—stands at the door and knocks. The ground is giving way. He melts through “the line” like it wasn’t even there, and he challenges our claims to identity. For healing to happen to both white and black, to address white supremacy, a
new ethos is demanded. A quantum leap from keeping the other at bay to noticing we are already the “others,” already entangled in palimpsests of trauma and possibility and co-becoming. New concepts disturb the rigidity of “identity” and help us see how already entangled we are. How prolific, promiscuous, porous, and potent our becoming is. And how this can inspire a different ethos of responsivity.
In many African cosmologies, a call-response dynamic is built into the ways we see the world.20 In Yoruba music, for instance, you are very likely to hear the singer only within the ecology of many other voices, who seem to attend to his or her singing, answer his questions, or emphasize a strain or lyric the singer seeks to expound upon. It is something different from the dependent relationship a band has with its lead singer. The act is premised on this in-betweenness, as is more apparent in juju music and highlife. Sometimes the background even comes to the foreground, switching places in a fluid rejection of static roles. Such is the rhythm that imbues our world.
It is not only present in music, but in how we dance (in dyads) and in how we communicate. I have often found myself more willing and more able to wax poetic when speaking before a crowd, when that crowd “hmm-hmms” or vocalizes presence in some way.21 Recently, I have begun incorporating the call “aló o”22 before I speak, asking the audience, European, Asian or otherwise, to respond by shouting “aló!”—oftentimes to comedic results. In retrospect, the many pastors that preached in the churches I attended, who would punctuate their sermons with “Can someone shout ‘Hallelujah’?” ad nauseam, knew in their bones that they were only permitted to speak to the degree the so-called audience also did. To speak is to speak-together-with.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 22