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Unbearable Blackness

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Black Men, Black Feminism

Abstract

This chapter explores the ethics and politics of violence as a question for black feminism, in the special light cast by the ongoing movement for black lives. It suggests that the problem of state-sanctioned violence against black men and boys can and should be recast as a matter of reproductive justice under the leadership of black women and girls. It closes with a parable about black men’s engendering and undoing by black feminism.

O, speak obliquely, if at all, of History and its slaves.

—Tisa Bryant ( 2007 ), Unexplained Presence

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The phrase was coined by Alicia Garza , Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. In addition to the slogan’s ubiquitous presence at protests in downtown Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, “Black Lives Matter” was displayed on banners at venues in the greater St. Louis area both prestigious and popular, including Powell Symphony Hall during a performance of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and at Edward Jones Stadium during an NFL Monday Night Football broadcast of the St. Louis Rams. The slogan quickly went viral across social media and can be seen readily at protests nationally and internationally as well (Garza 2014).

  2. 2.

    This is, of course, Einstein’s famous phrase describing his critique of quantum mechanics in the interwar years of the early twentieth century. The idea of rethinking political action in light of developments in quantum physics, thereby updating figures of political theory drawn largely from the Newtonian paradigm, is being advanced most pertinently by da Silva (2013), but see also Hage and Kowal (2011).

  3. 3.

    This speech act is often dramatized by a mocking choreography of group surrender, wherein demonstrators collectively display their empty hands, palms open and overhead, to the police. Some go so far as to kneel down and interlace their fingers behind their heads. Before long, others will lie face down. Perhaps eventually they will handcuff themselves and line up against the wall, or along the sidewalk. In satirizing this paradigmatic encounter between black people and the police, the scene nonetheless presents an aporia: “Is it possible to consider, let alone imagine, the agency of the performative when the black performative is inextricably linked with the specter of contented subjection, the tortuous display of the captive body, and the ravishing of the body that is the condition of the other’s pleasure” (Hartman 1997, 52)?

  4. 4.

    I am informed on this point by the ongoing public dialogue between Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek as encapsulated in their coauthored text (2009). Badiou states there: “‘Inhuman’ must be understood as the affirmative conceptual element from within which one thinks the displacement of the human. And this displacement of the human always presupposes that one has accepted that the initial correlation is the link between the human and the inhuman, and not the perpetuation of the human as such” (82, emphasis in original). Žižek, in turn, elaborates on this link with a riff on the Kantian indefinite judgment, stating: “[Saying] ‘he is not human’ is not the same as [saying] ‘he is inhuman’—‘he is not human’ means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while ‘he is inhuman’ means … that he is neither human nor [non-human], but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as ‘humanity,’ is inherent to being-human” (21–2). On the notion of black power, a form of power that is black, rather than Black Power, a form of power for blacks, see Scott (2010), where he writes: “This power (which is also a way of speaking of freedom) is found at the point of the apparent erasure of ego-protections, at the point at which the constellation of tropes that we call identity, body, race, nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. ‘Power’ in this context thus assumes a form that seems repugnant or even nonsensical, for its conditions of appearance are defeat and violation” (9, emphasis in original).

  5. 5.

    Dionne Brand (2001) writes: “In the Diaspora, as in bad dreams, you are constantly overwhelmed by the persistence of the spectre of captivity” (29). For a brilliant discussion of the displacement of the human within the historical formation of black culture, see Keeling (2005).

  6. 6.

    The question is deeply reminiscent of the political and intellectual labors of Joy James, evident from her first major work, Resisting State Violence (1996) to her recent volume, Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader (2013).

  7. 7.

    On this score, see also Lomax (2014), Silliman et al. (2004), and Roberts (2002).

  8. 8.

    For a discussion of this comment in historical context, see Greenberg (2009), especially Part III.

  9. 9.

    For a critical discussion of African American participation in the “pro-life” and other rightwing movements, see, for instance, Dillard (2002) and Prisock (2003).

  10. 10.

    For a good critical discussion of Frederick Hoffman’s notorious 1897 “extinction thesis” regarding the fate of the American Negro, see Roberts (2009), especially Chap. 2. On the nineteenth-century movement to repatriate African-derived people in the United States, see Burin (2005).

  11. 11.

    The African American Policy Forum, a think tank founded by legal scholar and political commentator Kimberlé Crenshaw, partnered with the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia University and Soros Justice Fellow Andrea Ritchie in preparing and revising the report.

  12. 12.

    I thank Dr. Selamawit Terrefe for making this crucial point in conversation. I hope, in this light, to revisit an earlier analysis of the notorious career of Eldridge Cleaver, former Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and radical political exile turned conservative Republican pundit, evangelical Christian and, still later, member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Sexton 2003).

  13. 13.

    The defense campaigns in these and many related cases have argued, in lieu of a right to kill one’s abuser per se (which opens the difficult question of what constitutes abuse as such and when such a condition is properly established), for revised and expanded legal notions of imminent danger and appropriate force. For more on the history and present of such legal defense work, and the political organizing that sustains them, see Kaba (2014) and the website of the national organizing project Survived and Punished: http://www.survivedandpunished.org/.

  14. 14.

    Spillers herself mused about something in this vein during her 2014 Koehn Lecture at the University of California, Irvine, “Some Speculations on Sentiment: Women and Revolutions” (presenting themes later reprised in her 2014 W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University). Amid a critical reading of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s acclaimed 1979 novel, Sally Hemings, Spillers described a pivotal moment of clarification for the eponymous enslaved protagonist regarding her master and eventual President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who, in lamenting his forlorn paternal legacy, has just disavowed the four sons shared by him and Hemings: “I don’t have four sons,” he states. “You have four sons” (Chase-Riboud 2009, 276). Spillers delighted in the fictional Hemings’ response, which I quote at length: “Silence. I had burned for him and I had birthed for him. Seven times I had descended into that valley from which neither his wife nor one of his daughters had returned. And my sons stood as testament and hostage to a body I could never call my own. I felt an explosion of insulted motherhood, all red and brown, like the leaves scattered on the lawn outside the window. His back was turned to me. My eyes sought the iron poker lying within my reach near the chimney. I wanted to strike that broad blue-sheathed back. I wanted to strike and strike again, with all my strength, to smash him. Oh God, I wanted to kill him, for now, after all these years, I understood what he had understood from the beginning, but had not had the courage to tell me” (276). Spillers subsequently concluded her lecture with this powerfully apposite comment: “What our writers have paid imaginative witness to is the fact that there is no human loneliness and alone-ness remotely comparable to that of the enslaved beyond the reach and scope of love and freedom. The day that the enslaved decides to act out the threat of death that hangs over her, by risking her life, is the first day of wisdom. And whether or not one survives is perhaps less important than the recognition that, unless one is free, love cannot and will not matter.”

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  1. Department of African American Studies, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Jared Sexton

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Sexton, J. (2018). Unbearable Blackness. In: Black Men, Black Feminism. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74126-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74126-0_3

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