The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH – Vol.2, ISSUE#2, MARCH-MAY/2010
Established unjust power consistently pivots around attempts at murdering the Real, not out of any rational expectation of success associated with such a daunting task, but rather for the unmitigated cultivation of spectacle which unfolds through the funeral of its corresponding sign. As such, “this is the story of a crime – the murder of reality. . . But the fact is that the crime is never perfect, for the world betrays itself by appearances . . .” (1) The sign of the deliberate grafting of inferiority on human beings of African descent, or the word ‘nigger’, has been declared dead and buried by the Black wing of the hyperbourgeoisie through the integrated institutional auspices of an actual ‘funeral’ hosted by the NAACP. (2) This sign corresponds to the Real of racist dehumanization, economic exploitation, spiritual alienation and global injustice. Through this self-congratulatory ‘abolishing’ of the word ‘nigger’, the Real becomes severed from its correspondence with the sign and results in an ontological anonymity which assists a global hegemony of advanced neo-liberal capitalism in rendering the socio-historical domination of Black people into a more complete and even banal oppression.
Already superbly acclimated to the mendacity of structural-inert oppression as experienced in an advanced neo-liberal capitalist society and in self-serving complicity with established power, the Black hyperbourgeosie, (3) whose assimilationist ideology “is meant to further their own class aims, and the aspirations of the masses only incidentally”; (4) are engaged in carrying out a postracial discursive cultural makeover of the socio-historical foundations of the specific racist oppression of human ‘being’. This is done by translating genuine outrage at the dehumanization of Black people and their continued domination by western imperialist power into an urgent concern for language and semiotics.
This epistemological parlor trick, by reducing all forms of rational human concern about racist oppression to a matter of mere linguistic triviality meant to solely address and assuage our emotional well being, creates an idealistic situation which circumvents actual confrontation of injustice when engaging in social discourse, specifically whenever said injustice discursively manifests itself in racial terms or racist tones. This has the much desired ideological effect of promoting critical silence regarding the actual phenomenon of racist injustice against human ‘being’ as a standard of legitimacy in public opinion.
The word ‘nigger’ is an insult. Yet this insult, this word, this symbol, has no causal relation to our socio-historical oppression or to the continued subjugation we experience as human beings of African descent within the lived context of western imperialist globalization. It is a word which is insulting because it is meant to remind us of our ‘objecthood’, our being-in-itself, to put us in our sub-human place by robbing us of our relentless transcendence, that intrinsic aspect and irreducible core of human subjectivity. The word ‘nigger’ is a semiotic remnant of a certain ‘fixed’ severity of ‘objectified’ lived experience, which was imposed upon human beings of African descent through the crucible of slavery. (5) This much maligned word ‘nigger’ however, cannot be completely grasped without understanding it’s much more respectable version, ‘negro’.
As Wright reminds us, the “word ‘Negro,’ the term by which, orally or in print, we black folk in the United States are usually designated, is not really a name at all nor a description, but a psychological island whose objective form is the most unanimous fiat in all American history; a fiat buttressed by popular and national tradition, and written down in many state and city statutes, a fiat which artificially and arbitrarily defines, regulates, and limits in scope of meaning the vital contours of our lives, and the lives of our children and our children’s children.” (6)
To be a ‘nigger’ or a ‘negro’ are exactly the same, in that they both signify being “sealed” into a “crushing objecthood”. “‘Dirty nigger!’ or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’ I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with a desire to attain the source of the world and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” (7) And yet in general social discourse the word ‘negro’ is significantly less controversial and regarded as nowhere near as vulgar or offensive a term as ‘nigger’.
This is indicative of the tremendous normalizing power of a western imperialist continuum, which at its core, maintains and legitimizes the inferiority of human beings of African descent within the context of its sanctioned discourse, while at the same time allowing Black people to experience a socially controlled and self-gratifying liberalism which comes from much applauded efforts to condemn any unofficial, illegitimate ‘rude’ variants of the exact same sign of dehumanization. That both originate from the same western imperialist continuum is stridently and consciously overlooked as a gratuitous and reformist demonstration of goodwill by those who seek to curry favor with established power. It would appear that the best place to hide key indicators of imposed Black inferiority is actually in the plain sight of social legitimacy. Indeed, “the genealogy of racism in the West is inseparable from the classificatory category of race in natural history.” (8)
In this regard, the work of Locke and DuBois during the Harlem Renaissance holds an important significance for their role in dialectically influencing a fundamental turn in the discursive efforts at constitutive self-determination by human beings of African descent. “The mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.” (9)
Precisely by “shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem”, Locke goes beyond previous socio-ontological boundaries which centered around a pragmatic assimilationist “psychology of imitation” that merely reconstituted western bourgeois standards within a Black subjectivity thoroughly wedded to American nationalist chauvinism out of genuine concern for basic human survival. As such, “achieving” this “spiritual emancipation” by the Lockean ‘New Negro’ ultimately confronted modernity with refreshingly new aesthetic potentialities against which the American socio-cultural terrain had no defense. “Subtly the conditions that are molding a New Negro are also molding a new American attitude.” (10) Thus the Harlem Renaissance consisted of a reverse double fold in which the survivalist assimilation of western bourgeois standards by Black subjectivity doubled back upon American cultural norms through aesthetics originating in lived Black experience which ultimately reversed the flow of socio-ontological influence. “What do we want? What is the thing we are after? As it was phrased last night it had a certain truth: We want to be Americans, full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens. But is that all? Do we simply want to be Americans? Once in a while through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is. We who are dark can see America in a way white Americans can not. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals?” (11)
As human ‘being’ overdetermined-from-without by western imperialist oppression and racist dehumanization; any dialectical growth of Black subjectivity becomes inseparable from emancipatory praxis. Paradoxically, fighting for an American armed forces which preserved and strengthened western imperialism on a global scale during World War I, drastically heightened the radical potentialities for armed struggle and resistance against that self-same western imperialism as it manifest itself locally in racist tyranny and injustice within the context of the American nation-state. DuBois understood this even more clearly than Locke; “Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of Hell in our own land. We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.” (12)
However, as these emancipatory potentialities began bearing fruit in the lived experience of Black people, an unadulterated savagery of lynching and organized political mob violence, which was already a murderous historical constant of our ‘being-in-the-world’, was even further unleashed upon our communities and grew fiercer in direct proportion to our everyday assertions of freedom as an ascendant humanity. This climaxed in the pervasive suppression and bloody struggle for human liberation as exemplified during, but in no ways limited to, that infamous Red summer of 1919 which set the tone for the Harlem Renaissance as a socio-ontological confrontation of the false universality of western bourgeois subjectivity through Black aesthetic revolt and cultural affirmation of human ‘being’.
With soldiers returning from direct military involvement on behalf of the American nation-state during World War I, human beings of African descent once again placed tremendous expectations of human solidarity upon an American populace still ignorant about, or in actual denial of, our shared humanity. And much like the aftermath of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, these socio-historical expectations were betrayed by both ruling power elite and toiling American masses under a united front of ‘white’ subjectivity which actually neutralized the supposed revolutionary political determinism of antagonistic economic class interests. “And while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers.” (13)
The proletariat, who is relied on by the capitalist ruling power elite to enforce western imperialist power by dogmatic adherence to the social constructed fiction of ‘race’, is also simultaneously counted upon by Marxist, socialist and communist revolutionary theory to act as an emancipatory force of world-historical importance because of some mythic revolutionary determinism inherent in one’s economic class. And yet, in the aftermath of World War I, this working class, rather than storming the Bastilles of established power, resumed the racist praxis of the murder of Man; as hordes of rational animals and savage masses accosted men like William Little who was lynched for not taking off his United States Army uniform. (14)
As such, the Harlem Renaissance was justifiably “radical in tone yet not in purpose”, (15) for this ‘New Negro’ subjectivity challenged prevailing Marxist dogma which made no allowances for the possibility of any other legitimate revolutionary subjectivity outside the ‘white-as-universal’ working class. That much needed epistemological ‘stretching’ of Marxist categories, which was so integral to both Fanonist and Sartrean existential liberationist projects, (16) had yet to take place.
Lived Black subjectivity exists at the ontological margins of modernity and draws its radical legitimation from our existence on the swords edge of human ‘being’ as both inside and outside a western imperialist continuum. However, the socio-historical tremors of such unprecedented dynamic simultaneity were only beginning to be felt and seen. For it would not be until future generations truly reaped an emancipatory harvest from the socio-ontological seeds of aesthetic rebellion implicit in the Harlem Renaissance, that this dialectic wager by Locke and DuBois could even be truly appreciated and understood. “We black folk may help for we have within us a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be; . . . with new determination for all mankind.” (17)
The great majority of American proletariat masses, however, were much more concerned with maintaining their ‘white-as-universal subjectivity’ of privilege in alliance with established unjust power, than exercising any potential human solidarity with Black people in popular emancipatory revolt.
Modernity, as organized, imposed and underwritten by western imperialist power, and to which Marxism is socio-historically indebted, (18) merely reinforces subhumanity in Black people as an a priori biological fact. As such, the Harlem Renaissance, as a genuine aesthetic-ontological revolt of lived Black subjectivity, introduced a discontinuity within a western imperialist continuum for which Marxism was also very much ill prepared, namely because the socio-historical implications of such a “spiritual emancipation” as initiated by a people who already constitute a fundamental ontological ‘problem’ (19) of modernity, radically outflanked “in tone” any previously rigid materialist eschatological narratives of socio-historical change which were slowly but surely becoming exposed as incapable of constituting the necessary human subjectivity to carry out a truly revolutionary “purpose”.
Although definitely encouraging a retreat from the radicalism of its day, the Harlem Renaissance was more of an ontological redirection, an aesthetic rebellion and cultural reconstitution of human ‘being’ which, if not by intent then by effect, refused to barter away that relentless transcendence which serves as the foundation of human endeavor (including revolutionary action), for yet another discursive variant of that self-same ‘white-as-universal’ subjectivity which originates from a western imperialist continuum and provides no new lived context which might have dissuaded that horde of 10,000 rational animals in Tulsa, Oklahoma who brutalized our ascendant humanity through violent mob terror aided by actual air raids which resulted in completely destroying the Black section of town known as ‘Little Africa’ or ‘Black Wallstreet’ in 1921. (20)
Locke began The New Negro with an acute discursive reconstitution of Black subjectivity which then prepared the way for DuBois, who had the last word in that very same text, to globally situate this new Black subjectivity in a more concrete socio-historical context. “Modern imperialism and modern industrialism are one and the same system; root and branch of the same tree. The race problem is the other side of the labor problem; and the black man’s burden is the white man’s burden. . . . remembering always that empire is the heavy hand of capital abroad. . . . This almost naïve setting of the darker races beyond the pale of democracy and of modern humanity . . . involves two things – acquiescence of the darker peoples and agreement between capital and labor in white democracies.” (21) This global situation remains consistent to this day and is rife with radical potentialities for direct confrontation of established unjust power, as evident during the massive socio-historical upheavals and unrest of the post-WWII era continuing on up until the 60s and 70s era.
Thus Locke and DuBois engaged in a dialectical gambit of the highest stakes, a gambit which temporarily suspended the socio-political justification of radical praxis on aesthetic-cultural grounds until such engagement necessarily encompassed not only the economic exploitation of capitalism but also the racist dehumanization inherent in modernity itself, a dehumanization which ontologically clouds even the redemptive claims of Marxist eschatology. (22)
Through this Black aesthetic confrontation of modernity, a vast cultural reservoir of constitutive self-determination was unlocked which would eventually prove vital in socio-ontologically freeing radical Black subjectivity from becoming ‘fixed’ and ultimately trapped in yet another form of ‘objecthood’ or ‘being-in-itself’ which the prevailing and decidedly vulgar materialist perspective inherent in modern subjectivity before the Harlem Renaissance required. “In order to eliminate subjectivity, the materialist declares that he is an object, that is, the subject matter of science. But once he has eliminated subjectivity in favor of the object, instead of seeing himself as a thing among other things buffeted about by the physical universe, he makes himself an objective beholder and claims to contemplate nature as it is, in the absolute.” (23)
Western imperialism, whether expressed in advanced neo-liberal capitalism, military bureaucratic communism or naked fascism, cannot be effectively confronted or overcome through adherence to a set of deterministic presuppositions which are derived solely from the sanctioned internal value systems of a western imperialist continuum. The “racial mythology that accompanied capitalist industrial formation and provided its social structures engendered no truly profound alternatives. The social, ideological , and political oppositions generated within Western societies have proven unequal to the task” (24) of genuine human liberation.
By privileging human ‘being-in-itself’, as a mere ‘object’ within a materialist eschatology of deterministic revolution, revolt becomes exclusively enclosed within the paradigms of modernity and suffocates any emancipatory potentialities that human ‘being-for-itself’ might awaken, therefore ensuring that any genuine socio-historical expression of human liberation has no ontological breath from which to sustain itself.
In the preface to the latest edition of The New Negro, Arnold Rampersad correctly states that Locke’s text helped Harlem turn its back more firmly on radical social movements. However, Rampersad’s adherence to such conventional wisdom reveals how much he is typically and completely blind to the ontological necessity and dialectical nature of such a move. Already having experienced the brutal ‘objectifying’ attempts at reducing our human ‘being’ into matter through chattel slavery, lived Black subjectivity sustains the ontological necessities of an ascendant humanity and necessarily rejects ‘objecthood’ in all its manifestations. ‘Objecthood’, even when cloaked in an emancipatory narrative of impending revolution, is still nothing more than ‘being-in-itself’ overdetermined-from-without.
Black subjectivity-as-ascendant humanity, lived, self-reflexive and critical, continues to serve as a vast reservoir of revolt for generation after generation of African Americans in our continuous struggle and relentless confrontation with western imperialist domination. “This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others. It is prefigured both in the objectives and methods of conflict.” (25)
Seizing upon this moment of constitutive self-determination, Lockean ‘New Negro’ cultural resistance against racist dehumanization, spiritually empowered and aesthetically functioned as a cultural pluralist fulcrum which would subsequently assist in furthering a tremendous upsurge in historical anthropology, socio-political archaeology and cultural genealogy aimed at recovering the human legacy of Black people which had been first necessarily obscured, deformed and erased by a racist discourse of structural-inert power only to be reshaped and molded to fit the hegemonic contours of western imperialism. (26)
These efforts by Locke and DuBois however, no matter how socially effective in culturally preserving lived Black subjectivity, ultimately ran the risk of necessarily limiting any immediate emancipatory political aims by having made the “frequent mistake” of trying “to find cultural expressions for and to give new values to native culture within the framework of colonial domination.” (27) Indeed, it would not be until the pen of Wright and the voice of Malcolm X that “new values” and imperatives would come about as enunciated and actualized in continuous resistance against the structural-inert “framework” of western imperialist domination.
Subjectivity constructed over centuries at the behest of oppressive dehumanizing violence must be overcome by a new subjectivity constructed through emancipatory human insurrection against that oppression. This resistance becomes constitutive self-determining praxis and simultaneously validates potentialities for new paradigms of human ‘being’ and human liberation. “The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former values and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people’s culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man.” (28)
Against Black hyperbourgeois sentimentality, the word ‘nigger’ does not need to be buried, for it will disappear on its own, following, if not during, but never preceding, the disappearance of the dehumanization and oppression it was discursively constructed to socio-ontologically cement upon human beings of African descent.
Indeed, what seems like a source of unlimited humor to some, as we have all heard such racist-lite commentary which ridicules the constantly changing subjectivity of human beings of African descent in America (Nigger – Negro – Colored – Black – African-American) within the rapid span of a few generations, is in actuality a very serious discursive effort by an oppressed people whose ultimate aim is human emancipation. Our recovery of human authenticity, as ‘being-for-itself’, has been a constant and unyielding existential liberationist narrative of continuing relevance to our socio-historical situation within an advanced neo-liberal capitalist society. Overdetermined-from-without, we relentlessly find ourselves facing and transcending a situation which ontologically limits ‘who we are’ while epistemologically chaining ‘what we are’ to false standards of human ‘being’.
In explicitly Sartrean language; we recognize that we constitute ourselves. We face our own relentless transcendence and consciously carry the weight our own responsibilities for it. We face ourselves as ascendant humanity.
This latest effort to rid the world of the word ‘nigger’, is indicative of an effectively functioning strategy of western imperialist dissimulation which allows for and even encourages one to focus on and critique unofficial ‘pop’ symbols of inferiority and injustice, so long as the actual structural-inert power relations from which such signs gain sustenance and continued socio-historical legitimacy, remain unchallenged.
Any effort at constituting the socio-historical condition of genuine racist dehumanization as a sign, and then effortlessly behaving as though the sign itself, the word ‘nigger’, is more real than the lived experience of oppression which gives it continued relevance by attempting to “abolish” it, is disingenuous. “The business of obscuring language is a mask which stands out the much greater business of plunder.” (29) Even using the word “abolish”, knowing full well the emancipatory connotations of such a word, and the discursive weight it carries in the Black community, is at best irresponsible and at worst an effort at deliberate mystification of actual oppression. “Burying” the word ‘nigger’, by holding an actual funeral, a circus like event replete with ‘civil rights’ simulacra of indignant sentimentality, merely indicates the degree to which the NAACP is out of touch with the genuine emancipatory needs of our ascendant humanity as Black people.
Less surprising is the fact that it was a nonsensical racist stream of consciousness rant, (31) from a struggling ‘white’ slapstick comedian, pitifully unequipped with the wit, candor, intellectual capacity and sense of humor to conduct a decent stand-up routine that set this whole process in motion. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with the docile reformist tactics and assimilationist worldview of the hyperbourgeoisie, that the NAACP came up with this conformist reactionary carnival as a response to the racist ravings of a corny ‘white’ comedian is either, in itself, sheer comedy, or an epic tragedy.
There is so much more racist degeneracy to Michael Richards rant than his vile use of the word ‘nigger’. He began by telling the audience member, who had been heckling him, to “Shut Up!” Faced with a Black man who did not follow established social norms and dared speak out of turn, he tried to silence him with a verbal command from his authoritative position on stage. Having failed in this initial discursive attempt to establish personal control over a lived example of that eternally unruly and ‘problematic’ Black subjectivity, Richards wasted no time in reminding the young Black man of the very real potentialities of ‘white’ mob violence which had been used to silence human beings of African descent in the not so distant past, or as he put it; “50 years ago we would have had you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass!”.
What Michael Richards says next is extremely revealing. “You can talk, you can talk, you can talk! You’re brave now motherfucker!” This implies that even when a Black man has a voice and the courage to speak out of his own volition, we are somehow still dependent on the benevolence of even the most powerless of ‘white’ people for our freedom. In this case, Richards’ devotion to a cultural nationalist ideology of American exceptionalism has ontologically blinded him from the socio-historical narrative of human liberation which has characterized and informed the lived experience of African American’s in our continuous resistance to western imperialist dehumanization.
Richards’ racist freestyle peaks in an attempt to dislocate and then dehumanize his Black antagonist in front of the rest of the audience with; “Throw his ass out, he’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! A nigger, look there’s a nigger!” In order to remove a Black man physically from his presence, he attempts, through reliance on racist discourse expressed in insulting language, to remove us from the human context itself. By finding ontological shelter in the normative gaze of western imperialist power as expressed in ‘white’ subjectivity, Richards seeks to remind us of our place, our ‘objecthood’, our inferiority, our sub-humanity which, based on his limited understanding of human ‘being’, is fixed and permanent.
Although the Black hyperbourgeois were ultimately embarrassed by Michael Richards’ racist verbal attacks, for most postmodern lumpenproletariat brothers and sisters, our embarrassment originates in the sheer inadequacy of that audience member’s response to the situation. It is extremely difficult listening to a Black man whine and plead, about how “that was uncalled for”, hoping for an acknowledgement of having been wronged by either the audience or by Richards himself, so as to alleviate that existential burden on his soul which only resistance and emancipatory struggle can assuage. His response though disappointing, is not surprising as a consequence of the triumphant and pervasive culture of assimilation into advanced neo-liberal capitalism which now dominates the norms and values of a despondent Black community. It’s not that Michael Richards should have ‘caught a bad one’, however the heckler’s response to being publicly berated was despondently passive, reflecting a depressing lack of radical agency which now parasitically feeds off lived Black subjectivity. This is true especially in our confrontations with antagonistic examples of racism, which though publicly, loudly and symbolically are frowned upon as psychological aberrations of a bygone age, are actually indicative of the existence of an ever lingering ‘white-as-universal subjectivity’ which remains structurally sanctioned by established power.
Michael Richards is not a member of the ruling power elite, he is the equivalent of a court jester forever existing at the compliant margins of the king’s court, and this distance from power is the ultimate source of his rant and his racism. For the ruling power elite, racism is a tool which camouflages structural-inert violence and maintains socio-historical oppression. For the average ‘individual self’ who is personally invested in ‘white’ subjectivity however, racism helps build a pragmatic alliance with established power and becomes a spiritual veil which masks a cancerous alienation from actual human ‘being’. Richards’ own powerlessness before the challenge to his stage presence at a comedy club by a heckler from the audience; became transformed through his own comedic ineptness, into his racial powerlessness before the challenge to his undisputed dominion over social norms by a Black man.
Unfortunately, the NAACP obviously takes pride in its own aptitude for absolute farce and socio-historical comedy, as it held a postmodern funeral for the word ‘nigger’ complete with an actual burial. (31) I’m sure Black people everywhere rejoiced with feelings of tremendous exaltation knowing that somewhere in Detroit Memorial Park Cementary there is a headstone with the word ‘nigger’ on it. More surreal than the funeral itself, were the words of some of the participants. Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick almost ‘kept it real’ when he suggested that we should be “burying all the things that go with the N-word.” However, instead of following up with a thorough critique of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization, he fearlessly incited the crowd to “bury the ’pimps’ and the ’hos’ that go with it.” Not to be outdone in hyperbourgeois hyperbolic ranting, the good Rev. Otis Moss III, in a moment of pure ahistorical genius, claimed that the word ‘nigger’ “was the greatest child that racism ever birthed”. Has bootlicking established power ever sounded so emancipatory?
Any movement of emancipatory praxis by Black people involves an authentic reconstitution of human ‘being’ which finds itself directly at odds with the structural-inert nature of oppressive power that grounds and binds the vested interests of a western imperialist continuum. As such, the only thing accomplished by this bogus funeral of the word ‘nigger’ was that more rhetorical ‘civil rights’ dust was kicked in the face of vast populations of Black people who are already buried alive under an advanced neo-liberal capitalist tombstone of assimilation.
The reality is that both words, ‘nigger’ and ‘negro’, signify a discursive echo of that dehumanizing socio-historical brutality which is guilty of the murder of Man; an ontological murder which birthed modernity and continually reaffirms its original authority and violent praxis in racist ideology as promulgated by a western imperialist continuum. And so it matters not, that in “our virtual world, the question of the Real, of the referent, of the subject and its object, can no longer even be posed” (32) by Man-as-western bourgeois subjectivity. Indeed, the redemption of human agency now finds itself rooted in the ontological soil of lived Black experience as a phenomenon which reveals the Real of our shared human condition in the face of globalized structural-inert injustice.
(1)Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, (Verso, 1999) p.1.
(2)Associated Press, Monday, July 9th, 2007.
(3)“. . . the Afro American middle class knows little of culture, art, politics and world events, so involved is it in seeking personal status as close as possible to the middle-class white world and its values.” Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution, (William Morrow & Company, 1968) p.61.
(4)Cruse, p.59.
(5)“Slavery in the United States is the granting of that power by which one man exercises and enforces a right of property on the body and soul of another. The condition of a slave is simply that of a brute beast. He is a piece of property – a marketable commodity, in the language of the law, to be bought and sold at the will and caprice of the master who claims him to be his property; he is spoken of, thought of, and treated as property.” Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies, (Library of America, 1994) p.400.
(6)Wright continues on. “This island, within whose confines we live, is anchored in the feelings of millions of people, and is situated in the midst of the sea of white faces we meet each day; and, by and large, as three hundred years of time has borne our nation into the twentieth century, its rocky boundaries have remained unyielding to the waves of our hope that dash against it.
The steep cliffs of this island are manifest, on the whole, in the conduct of whites toward us hour by hour, a conduct which tells us that we possess no rights commanding respect, that we have no claim to pursue happiness in our own fashion, that our progress toward civilization constitutes an insult, that our behavior must be kept firmly within an orbit branded as inferior, that we must be compelled to labor at the behest of others, that as a group we are owned by the whites, and that manliness on our part warrants instant reprisal.” Richard Wright, from 12 Million Black Voices included in Richard Wright Reader, edited by Ellen Wright & Michael Fabre, (Da Capo Press, 1941, 1997) pp.160-1.(7)Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (Grove Press, 1967) p.109.
(8)Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance, (Westiminster, 1983) p.55.
(9)Alain Locke, The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Alain Locke, (Touchstone, 1925, 1997) p.4.
(10)Locke, p.10.
(11)W.E.B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art”, The Crisis magazine, October 1926.
(12)DuBois, “Returning Soldiers”, The Crisis magazine, May 1919.
(13)DuBois continues “It is not sufficient answer to say that capital encourages this oppression and uses it for its own ends. This may have excused the ignorant and superstitious Russian peasants in the past and some of the poor whites of the South today. But the bulk of white labor is neither ignorant nor fanatical. It knows exactly what it is doing and means to do it. William Green and Matthew Wolf of the A.F. of L. have no excuse of illiteracy to veil their deliberate intention to keep Negroes and Mexicans and other elements of common labor, in a lower proletariat as subservient to their interests as theirs are to the interests of capital.” DuBois, “Marxism and the Negro Problem”, The Crisis magazine, May 1933.
(14)Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings, (Black Classic Press, 1962, 1988) p.118.
(15)Locke, The New Negro, p.11.
(16)Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press, 1961, 1963) and Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, (Verso, 1960, 2004).
(17)DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art”, The Crisis Magazine, October 1926 (emphasis mine).
(18)“At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quiet, comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly (since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it) and that it, in return, had no intention of disturbing and, above all, no power to modify, even one jot, since it rested entirely upon it.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (Vintage Books, 1970, 1994) p.261.
(19)DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (Dover Publications, 1903, 1994) p.1-7.
(20)Walter F. White, “The Eruption of Tulsa”, The Nation, June 29, 1921; CXII, 909-10.
(21)DuBois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out”, The New Negro, p.385-414.
(22)Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class & Nation in the Making of the New Negro, (University of Illinois Press, 2003, 2008) In this outstanding work, Foley brilliantly and critically examines the socio-historical tensions which informed the conditions that allowed Locke’s vision of “the New Negro as cultural pluralist” to supercede the Marxist vision of “the New Negro as class-conscious warrior”.
(23)Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, (Collier Books, 1955, 1967) p.202. Sartre continues “There is a play on the word objectivity, which sometimes means the passive quality of the object beheld and, at other times, the absolute value of a beholder stripped of subjective weaknesses. Thus, having transcended all subjectivity and identified himself with pure objective truth, the materialist travels about in a world of objects inhabited by human objects.”
(24)Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (University of North Carolina Press, 1983, 2000) p.316.
(25)Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press, 1963) p.246.
(26)Check out Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, (African American Images, 1933, 2000), J.A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color Vols.1&2, (Touchstone, 1946, 1996). George G.M. James, Stolen Legacy, (African American Images, 1954, 2001). Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, (Lawrence Hill Books, 1967, 1974). John G. Jackson, Introduction to African Civilizations, (Citadel Press, 1970, 1990). Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Vols.1&2, (Rutgers University Press, 1987, 1991).
(27)Fanon p.244.
(28)Fanon, p.246.
(29)Fanon, p.189.
(30)I transcribed Michael Richard’s racist rant from a TMZ video clip I found on YOUTUBE.com.
(31)Associated Press, Monday, July 9th, 2007.
(32)Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, (Columbia University Press, 2000) p.62.
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