#Occupy Post-Blackness?

"negro sunshine"--Glenn Ligon

Occupy Post-Blackness?

by Wahneema Lubiano | special to NewBlackman

As some of the contributors articulated in Toure’s Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, others in numerous pieces of scholarship produced over the past decades, and still others in public discussion in various places, Blackness is both a form of chosen identity and, at the same time, is an imposition from the larger social order.  Under some circumstances that imposition has coercive power and pressure behind it; we don’t live solely within the terms of our own imaginations, not even in our own drama around that identity.  That external imposition often interrupts our identity reveries and speaks a pathology narrative about us and does so sometimes with and sometimes without our own consent.  It is that understanding of the imposition of coercive history in the present moment that makes “post-blackness” inadequate as a rubric for accurately describing the effects of structural racism, of white supremacy in the present.  And Toure takes note of that fact in his book. 

But “post-blackness” is also situational—or, as Michael Eric Dyson asserts in the introduction: “. . . Blackness bends to the tongue it tumbles from at any given moment of time” (xii).  And it is in this regard that I’m interested to some great extent in specific situational elements of the phrase’s use: its use as a means to describe a moment in cultural, artistic, or emotional self-understanding – yes, there indeed I can see its usefulness and it is that usefulness that I’m addressing when I’m quoted in the book talking about why Dave Chapelle’s show prompted me away from any simple dismissal of the phrase when Toure first brought it up in our conversation.  I thought that the phrase was a useful way to describe what I saw as a kind of pre-figurative existence in Chapelle’s work—he was performing possibilities of art—of humor and wit—that were not completely captured by the imposition of social blackness both across our history and in the present moment.

Yet, the phrase itself is redolent of past decades of anxiety about black art, black cultural production—an anxiety exemplified in the 1926 fight, in the pages of The Nation magazine, between Langston Hughes (“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”) and George Schuyler (“The Negro Art Hokum”) around the burden of representation (as Stuart Hall has described it) for Negro artists.  “Post-blackness” is a rubric that reminds me that cultural producers are continually caught in the dilemma in the West of a pressure to define themselves, to distinguish themselves, as mythic individuals—that’s the ur-narrative of U.S. individuality writ large; so, of course, artists, other cultural producers, cultural critics, and we ourselves continually produce narratives of “generational shift”—it’s a handy way to make individual space, to posit a conversational imperative, and have that imperative recognized. And it doesn’t much matter, when that posture is assumed, that space claimed, whether it is a new moment in fact or a seemingly new moment—the gesture is meant to establish a possibility here and now.  I find those repeated moments sociologically rich and interesting.

But while I don’t want to cast aspersions on that gesture, I do want to move onto something else that came up as we explored the gesture of Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon, something that I’d love to talk about more, if people care to, and it’s this: the social utility, the currency, of post-blackness. Let me make what I’m saying more concrete.

When Toure asked me about the most racist thing that ever happened to me, my first response (along with many of the other contributors he quoted) was to say that structural racism enacted itself in such a way that I wasn’t personally confronted with the most racist things that had ever happened to me.  But Toure pushed back on this; he pushed me to think about my earlier and younger understandings of racism: the moment prior to my arrival at an analysis of structural racism.  He wanted me to speak about something that hurt way back when.  So, I told a story from my high school years and a bad encounter with a guidance counselor bigot because that story gave me a chance to talk about Howard University; being a student at Howard was a moment of a kind of pre-figurative post-blackness for me.  The most powerful take-away of that story was not the incident with the guidance counselor.  What transformed my life was my discovery of a rich and complex existence within the terms of blackness (a situated blackness) at Howard University.  I found ordinary life at Howard. (That was the saving grace.)

My imagination’s earned currency of post-blackness in turn contributed to a moment of real tension at the end of my interview with Toure when we were talking about Barack Obama, and he asked “How do we create more Barack Obamas?”  In my response, I remember telling Toure that while Obama is certainly exceptional in that sense that he’s the U.S. head of state, he is also ordinary; he is the matter-of-fact product of his class origins and his elite education.  I know thousands of people who are proudly Black and intellectual, as Toure described him, but Obama’s existence, like theirs, like ours, was largely a matter of chance and the specifics of history.  An elite education produces a Barack Obama or any number of other specific kinds of black—or other—intellectuals. 

              

It is the constraint of capitalism that restricts those numbers.  My last sentence of that exchange was “And I think capitalism is a really bad idea.”  I remember that Toure responded with “Wow, we’ll really have to talk about that sometime.” 

              

This then might be a great time for all of us to talk about the currency of post-blackness within the terms of late capitalism in this moment of occupy everywhere.

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Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African & African American Studies at Duke University.  Lubiano is the editor of The House That Race Built:  Black Americans, US Terrain

'Left of Black' S2:E8 w/ E. Patrick Johnson and Honoreé Fanonne Jeffers

Left of Black S2:E8

w/ E. Patrick Johnson and Honoreé Fanonne Jeffers

October 31, 2011

Host  and Duke UniversityProfessor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype© by E. Patrick Johnson, author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South; an Oral History.  A Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, Johnson’s ethnographic work on this book evolved into a play called Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales.  Johnson shares his motivation to turn his book into a play, and also discusses how his journey through these projects helped him better come to terms with his own personal issues.  He shares his reactions to the different responses he’s gotten so far from to the stage performance.  Johnson, whose play premiered in Chicago’s About Face Theater and was recently staged at The Signature Theater in Arlington Virginia, also discusses the significance of the title.  

Later Neal is joined by Honoreé Fannone Jeffers, poet, commentator, satirist, blogger and professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.  Jeffers, author of several collections of poetry including The Gospel of Barbecue and Red Clay Suite, discusses her blog Phillis Remastered and her work-in-progress on the 18^th century poet Phillis Wheatley.  In a wide ranging conversation, Neal and Jeffers also discuss the legacy of Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ groundbreaking film NO! The Rape Documentary,  the Slut Walk protest & the concept of Post-Black. 

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for download @ iTunes U

What Happened to Post-Blackness? Touré, Michael Vick and the Politics of Cultural Racism

What Happened to Post-Blackness?

Touré, Michael Vick and the Politics of Cultural Racism

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

In the current issue of ESPN: The Magazine, Touré, author of the forthcoming Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, jumps into the discourse about race, Michael Vick, and his larger significance as we enter the 2011 football season.   In “What if Michael Vick were white?”, which includes the requisite and troubling picture of Vick “in whiteface” (“Touré says that picture is both inappropriate and undermines his entire premise”) Touré explores how different Vick’s life on and off the field might have been if he wasn’t black.   

While acknowledging the advantages of whiteness and the privileges that are generated because of the structures of American racism, Touré decides to focus on how a hypothetical racial transformation would change Vick’s life in other ways. “The problem with the ‘switch the subject's race to determine if it's racism’ test runs much deeper than that. It fails to take into account that switching someone's race changes his entire existence.,” notes Touré. Among others things, he asks “Would a white kid have been introduced to dogfighting at a young age and have it become normalized?”  The answer that Touré seems to come up with is no, seemingly arguing that his participation in dog fighting results from his upbringing “in the projects of Newport News, VA” without a father (he also argues that his ability to bankroll a dogfighting enterprise came about because of his class status that resulted from his NFL career, an opportunity that came about because he like “many young black men see sports as the only way out”).

Here, Touré plays into the dominant discourse that links blackness, a culture poverty and presumably hip-hop culture to dogfighting, thereby erasing the larger history of dogfighting.   According to Evans, Gauthier and Forsyth (1998) in “Dogfighting: Symbolic expression and validation of masculinity,” dogfighting “represents a symbolic attempts at attaining and maintaining honor and status, which in the (predominantly white, male, working-class) dogfighting subculture, are equated with masculine identity.”  Although the popularity of dogfighting has increased within urban communities, particularly amongst young African Americans, over the last fifteen years it remains a sport tied to and emanating from rural white America. 

It should not be surprising that six (South Dakota; Wyoming; West Virginia; Nevada; Texas; and Montana) of the seven states with the lowest rankings from the Humane Society are states with sizable white communities (New York is the other state).  Given that dogfighting is entrenched and normalized within a myriad of communities, particularly white working-class communities within rural America, it is both factually questionable and troubling to link dogfighting to the black community.

Touré moves on from his argument about a culture of poverty in an effort blame Vick’s family structure for his involvement in dog fighting  “Here's another question: If Vick grew up with the paternal support that white kids are more likely to have (72 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers compared with 29 percent of white children), would he have been involved in dogfighting?”  Having already taken this argument apart in regards to Colin Cowherd’s recycling of the Moynihan Report, let me recycle some of my own words:

The idea that 71% of black children grow up without fathers is at one level the result of a misunderstanding of facts and at another level the mere erasure of facts.  It would seem that Mr. Cowherd is invoking the often-cited statistics that 72% of African American children were born to unwed mothers, which is significantly higher than the national average of 40 %.  Yet, this statistic is misleading and misused as part of a historically defined white racial project.   First and foremost, child born into an unmarried family is not the same is growing up without a father.  In fact, only half of African American children live in single-family homes.  Yet, this again, only tells part of the story.   The selective invoking of these statistics, while emblematic of the hegemony of heterosexist patriarchy, says very little about whether or not a child grows up with two parents involved in their lives.  According to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a sizable portion of those children born to single mothers are born into families that can be defined as “marriage like.”  32% of unmarried parents are engaged in ‘visiting unions” (in a romantic relationship although living apart), with 50% of parents living together without being married.  In other words, the 72% says little about the presence of black fathers (or mothers for that matter).  Likewise, this number says very little about the levels of involvement of fathers (and mothers), but rather how because of the media, popular culture and political discourses, black fatherhood is constructed “as an oxymoron” all while black motherhood is defined as “inadequate” and “insufficient.” 

In other words, as illustrated Roberta L. Coles and Charles Green, The Myth of the Missing Black Father, “non-residence” is not the same as being absentee; it says nothing about involvement and the quality of parenting.  As such, the efforts to links the myths and stereotypes about black families to explain or speculate about Michael Vick’s past involvement (what is the statue of limitations of writing on this subject?) with dogfighting does little beyond reinforcing scapegoats and criminalizing discourses. 

The argument here that race matters in Michael Vick's life feels like a cover for rehashing old and tired theories about single mothers, culture of poverty, and hip-hop/urbanness as the root of many problems.  Of course race matters for not only Michael Vick but also everyone else residing in America.  This is America, arguments about post-racialness notwithstanding. 

Race mattered during the coverage of dogfighting and continues to matter for Vick in this very moment.   It also matters given history.  As Melissa Harris-Perry notes, race matters in relationship to Michael Vick (and the support he has received from the African American community) in part because of the larger history of white supremacist use of dogs against African Americans.

I sensed that same outrage in the responses of many black people who heard Tucker Carlson call for Vick's execution as punishment for his crimes. It was a contrast made more raw by the recent decision to give relatively light sentences to the men responsible for the death of Oscar Grant. Despite agreeing that Vick's acts were horrendous, somehow the Carlson's moral outrage seemed misplaced. It also seemed profoundly racialized. For example, Carlson did not call for the execution of BP executives despite their culpability in the devastation of Gulf wildlife. He did not denounce the Supreme Court for their decision in US v. Stevens (April 2010) which overturned a portion of the 1999 Act Punishing Depictions of Animal Cruelty. After all with this "crush" decision the Court seems to have validated a marketplace for exactly the kinds of crimes Vick was convicted of committing. For many observers, the decision to demonize Vick seems motivated by something more pernicious than concern for animal welfare. It seems to be about race.

Just as when Tucker Carlson said Vick should have been executed, or when commentators refer to him as thug, race matters; it matters in the demonization he experienced over the last 4 years.  It is evident in the debates that took place following his release from prison, especially given the lifetime punishment experienced by many African Americans (see Michelle Alexander) or the very different paths toward forgiveness available to Vick (and countless other black athletes) compared to their white counterparts.

Race and racism have impacted his life in a myriad of ways.  The continue significance of race matters in the ways in which this article plays upon and perpetuates cultural arguments that seemingly erase race, replacing it with flattened discussions of culture. The power of white privilege and the impacts of racism, segregation, and inequality are well documented, leaving me to wonder if the point of Touré’s piece is not that race matters but rather that culture matters.  And this is where we agree because culture is important here; a CULTURE of white supremacy does matter when thinking about Michael Vick or anything else for that matter.   

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Special thanks to Guthrie Ramsey, James Peterson, and Oliver Wang who all, in different ways, encouraged me to write a response. 

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.