Black Rage as Lucidity by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#2, MARCH-MAY/2018

Against a biological determinism that clinically translates existential responses of human ‘being’ confronting the objective violence and unaccountable oppression of Empire into a spiritually pacifying epistemology of neurological disorders and psychological pathologies, lived manifestations of Black Rage threaten to overwhelm the normative gaze with an unheralded discursive lucidity of socio-ontological Revolt. “When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he constitutes self.” [1]

As day turns to nightfall in Ferguson, Missouri, news spreads around the world of yet another grand jury, refusing to indict yet another neo-colonial police officer for the murder of yet another Black man. This time it’s a Ferguson grand jury refusing to issue an indictment against the police agent who murdered Michael Brown, finding no rational grounds or legal basis from which to proceed with criminal charges that might temporarily disturb the sovereign legitimacy of neo-colonial police violence against human ‘being’. A large indignant crowd of ascendant humanity gathers directly in front of the Ferguson Police Department. Michael Brown’s mother begins to speak about such profound tragedy, and is soon engulfed in sorrow.

“Everybody want me to be calm, do you know how dem bullets hit my son?” [2]

Now crying profusely, her husband makes his way up onto the platform and consoles her amidst proclamations of support from the crowd that ultimately evolve into enunciations like “f*ck the police” and “we gon’ get justice”, brimming with intersubjective resonance of even more waves of ‘protest-as-resistance’ against western imperialist power. Michael Brown’s stepfather then turns around in sheer and utter defiance of Empire and speaks.

“Burn this muthaf*cka down, burn this b*tch down!”

Black Rage as a piercing clarity of affective indignance of consciousness venturing towards voicing the incommunicable, discloses “an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born”, [3] thus spiritually galvanizing the exceptional antagonism of lived Black experience as a socio-ontological phenomenon without geohistorical precedent. [4] And yet, is not this exceptional antagonism that very measure by which the universality of the human condition interrogates the Real?

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press, 1961, 1963) p.21. Modified translation my own.

[2] Transcription based on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_39_MSAjmp0

[3] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (Grove Press, 1952, 1967) p.8.

[4] Frank B. Wilderson, in “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?”, Social Identities, Vol.9, #2, 2003, references historian Eugene Genovese who writes in Boston Review Oct/Nov 1993 that “The Black experience in this country has been a phenomenon without analog.” See also The Brotherwise Dispatch, Vol.2, Issue#1, Dec/2009-Feb/2010. However, such a statement by Genovese ultimately fails to grasp the global significance and Diasporic scope of lived Black experience by foreclosing the geohistorical singularity of its relevance within “this country”.