from a black artist to an agent in a time of obama, africom, oprah, renisha mcbride, and mass incarceration

Before I can write
fiction
based on
what I've seen,
ima need to write essays
about what I already have seen
I sit down
to write a story
that could
have been
and I get distracted
by the cloud
of memories
of what was
My past
perfect keeps pummelling
my subjunctive.
Cuz a whole lot
of what I've seen
don't make no
damn sense


Copyright 2013 by Omar Ricks

What Is "Black Privilege"?

by Omar Ricks and Gregory Caldwell

We sometimes hear people asking, "If there's white privilege, isn't there also black privilege?"

Here is the short answer: NO. There's no such thing as "black privilege" in an antiblack world. Don't believe anybody who tells you there is. 

Privilege is some kind of benefit you get for belonging. So, when you look at the world, what would "black privilege" even mean anyway? Getting killed by the police every 28 hours? Getting incarcerated disproportionately for the same crimes that everybody else commits? Being the one group that no one wants to live around or hire? You might see a few Black individuals who are privileged, but it's not because they are Black. Again, there's no such thing as "black privilege."

That's really all there is to it. Our saying it isn't what makes it true; the world makes it true. We're just reporting on what the world already does and what most people in the world already know.

Okay. Why go into this any further if it's that simple?
It bears further explanation. A few of the folks asking seem genuinely sincere about Black freedom struggle and so we want to do what we can to help clear this up. There are also a lot of people who are not devoted to Black freedom who bring up the term "black privilege" to throw people off course.

Also, a lot of concessions white people have made to Black freedom struggle have sapped the energy of Black radicalism by appearing to bestow some kind of privilege or even power on Black folks. Anytime you see Black folks getting excited because some event has made us feel like "We Have Overcome" or "Yes We Did"-- for example, the election of a Black president-- you're seeing Black people thinking that we now have been given some kind of real privilege.

We need to be crystal clear on this: There is no privilege that Black people get for being Black.

Black people who voted elected Obama because they situated their votes with the coalition of unions, white liberals, and Latinos that make up the Democratic Party. If you remember, most Black people supported Hillary Clinton, until the white voters of the Iowa Caucuses picked Obama.

Even if we were given some kind of privilege or it were voted into existence for us, it would be dependent on the privilege that white people have to withdraw that same privilege. So it would still rely on white privilege. I hope that we won't drink the Kool-Aid and forget this.

So, what do you mean "there's no such thing as "black privilege"?
First we need to understand something about the concept of white privilege: white privilege exists because Black privilege does not.

Writing in the 1990s, critical race theorists like Cheryl Harris (in an article called "Whiteness as Property") and Theodore Allen (in a book called The Invention of the White Race) developed the concept of white privilege to describe the ways that white people got benefits simply from being white, both during the time of slavery and today. Here's how Harris said it:

White identity and whiteness were sources of privilege and protection; their absence meant being the object of property. Slavery as a system of property facilitated the merger of white identity and property. Because the system of slavery was contingent on and conflated with racial identity, it became crucial to be 'white,' to be identified as white, to have the property of being white. Whiteness was the characteristic, the attribute, the property of free human beings. [Cheryl Harris. 1993. Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review 106(8): 1721] 

Before Harris and Allen, W.E.B. DuBois saw that, even though white and Black workers were poorly paid, they were still not equal. Du Bois said that's because whiteness all by itself conferred a kind of advantage, a "public and psychological wage," and that blackness conferred its own kind of demerit.

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.  

On the other hand, in the same way, the Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. [W.E.B. Du Bois (1935), Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (NY: Atheneum), 700-701]

They developed the concept of white privilege to describe the large-scale ways that whiteness gets actual financial, legal, social, and psychological benefits to the extent that blackness is denied those same benefits. It's not that white people get some privileges and Black people need to be included in those benefits. White privilege means that you get benefits for not being Black. If you're Black, you don't get privilege for it.

It's also not just a "psychological" thing that white people can simply purge from their minds without simultaneously changing the social structure. White antiracists, claiming to fight their own racism, often cite the above Du Bois quote, but they emphasize the term "psychological wage." Very few of them emphasize the word "public" that Du Bois also used. Du Bois said "public" five times in that passage, but he said "psychological" only once. White privilege comes from the total social and individual framework. It's not just in people's minds.

The fact remains that there is no such thing as "black privilege." There's no privilege that you get just because you're Black. The people who developed the concept knew this. If you're going to talk about racial privilege, you should know it too.

What about Oprah and Obama? Aren't they privileged?
Sure, they're privileged in at least one way: They have access to money and institutional resources. Also, some white people like or identify with them, primarily because they're so different from the rest of us Black folks. They don't have "black privilege." Oprah has rich privilege-- also known as wealth. Obama has the privilege of institutional access because he is president. "Black privilege" doesn't exist.

Of course there are many Black people who have some kind of privilege. But they have this for some other reason than simply because they are Black. Maybe they have money. Having money is like having a little bit of whiteness in your life. It can sometimes serve to buffer you against some of the negative effects of being Black in an antiblack world. But you can't buy your way out of blackness.

Some Black people have a little bit of whiteness in their lives in other ways besides money. They might have light skin/eyes, straight hair, "proper" pronunciation, a big vocabulary, a white partner, academic training and degrees, approval from white audiences/voters, etc. And people might given them some things based on having all of that-- like a job, admission to graduate school, sex, or the benefit of the doubt. But none of that is "black privilege." The privilege they get from having those things is not because they are Black. That's not how it works. Black folks who have privilege get it from somewhere outside of blackness, the whiter the better. Privilege is something that you get in spite of blackness. (Remember what Malcolm X said: "What do you call an educated Negro with a BA or an MA, with a BS or a PhD? You call him a nigger, because that is what the white man calls him. A nigger.")

In fact, all privilege derives ultimately from the fact that all or most Black people don't have access to it.

White privilege, on the other hand, comes solely from being white. That's all. It is enough just to be white. You don't need money or jewelry or cars or degrees or skills or talent or knowledge of any kind. You just need to be white. The whiter the better.

What if I give up my white privilege?
Remember, white people can't "give up" their white privilege. White privilege doesn't actually exist separately from whiteness itself. You get white privilege from being white. Whiteness is its own currency. And it is backed up by force. Force guarantees that whiteness has value and, simultaneously, that blackness is absent of value.

You know how they used to be said that every dollar bill floating around was basically the same as a piece of gold in Fort Knox? (Well, since the 1970s, they really don't say that anymore, but they used to say it.) Well, in the same way, every white person you see walking around is basically a nuclear warhead or a police officer's service weapon. The white state guarantees the value of white people's lives using the deadliest weapons at its disposal. That's what it takes to get privilege. That's where it comes from. And just because you, white "ally"-- in a college-age fit of noblesse oblige-- say that you want to give all that away doesn't mean that the apparatuses and the momentum of over 500 years will reverse course and make exceptions for you.

[Remember that scene in Spike Lee's Bamboozled where the NYPD shoots down Big Blak Afrika (Mos Def/Yasiin Bey) and the Black members of his crew in a hale of bullets, and the only one standing when the smoke clears is the one white boy who was part of that crew? It's like that. The bullets are already out of the gun, they aren't aimed at you, and they cannot be reversed.]

Black people got nothing like that kind of treatment for being Black. And the only thing that will change this is a revolution that ends the world and abolishes the framework of privilege as we know it. But we'll talk about that elsewhere.

So does it matter that some Black people do have particular forms of privilege like wealth and institutional access? Even if there's no such thing as "black privilege," doesn't Oprah's wealth or Obama's institutional access mean that Black people aren't all equal to each other in the eyes of this racist society?
YES. Oprah's money means that she can afford the best lawyers, doctors, accountants, and personal security and will never seriously have to worry about the things that Trayvon Martin and Anna Brown and other Black folks do. It matters that Obama, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas could call in airstrikes or prevent certain economic policies or laws from taking effect. It matters because these Black folks are aligned with the status quo and acting directly on its behalf. They are therefore not in the same position as other Black people because of the resources that they possess.

But don't conflate what these Black people have in white institutions with some kind of Black privilege or power. What these Black folks have is kind of like Stephen, Samuel L. Jackson's character in Django Unchained. Stephen influenced his master (Leonardo diCaprio) by quoting his master's father. So, even though he could influence his master, his master still had all the power. Black folks like Obama and Clarence Thomas have influence derived from white people, specifically from white people's institutions, laws, precedents, and practices. Influence is not power.

So those of us Black folks who have privilege are full of shit if we claim that we are different from Black people without privilege. Remember when Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates called urban Black youths "Martians" and said he couldn't identify with them? The Cambridge police officers who arrested Gates on his own front porch for allegedly breaking into his own house probably helped dispel his illusion.

On the other hand, the structure doesn't come after all Black folk in the same way. Socioeconomic class among Black folks matters and so does the way we position ourselves toward the police. Remember back in May when the FBI announced a renewed manhunt for Assata Shakur? A lot of people got carried away with the "I am Assata" thing. I, as a Black person, cannot claim that the hunt for Assata is a hunt for me. The police are not after me--a college-educated Black man-- in the way they are after Assata or the way they went after Larry Davis or Robert Charles. I'm deluding myself if I think otherwise.

So there is a balance. We have to acknowledge that there are significant differences (mostly rooted in socioeconomic class) between the way the structure treats some Black people and the way it treats other Black people. But even that is not "black privilege." Tomorrow, it could all change (like it changed for Henry Louis Gates) and we could be arrested or put on a list for terroristic threat or conspiracy just because we wrote this. Some Black people do have privileges that other Black people don't, and those privileges are significant. But we do not have "black privilege." There is no such thing as "black privilege."

What about "playing the race card"? White people can't do that, and Black people can. Isn't that a form of "black privilege"?
Some people point out that, in this post-civil rights era, many white people don't like to think of themselves as racist. Some Black people can make it look like you're racist if you don't go along with them. Some people call this "playing the race card" (although this is a bullshit term that minimizes claims of racism that are valid more often than not). This is still not "Black privilege." It's a form of white privilege. Let us explain why.

The goal of "playing the race card" is to solicit the guilt of whites or the censure of white businesses or the white state. It only works in a time and place in which white people as a whole don't like to think of themselves as racist. In places and times in which white people don't give a damn if Black people call them racist, the "race card" is worthless, no matter how valid the claim of racism.

If something hinges on how white people feel from one day to another or between one place and another, it can't be called "privilege." White privilege is white privilege everywhere. It doesn't require a whole bunch of qualifiers, conditions, and fine print. Any privilege Black people have in an antiblack world always depends on white people's money, votes, or approval.

But what about money? Money is money. My money is green and somebody of a different color could just as easily have it. So isn't money its own kind of privilege?
No. Even the value of money is a function of whiteness. Remember, white super-elites determine what gets counted as money in the first place. Even the capacity to fix exchange rates is set by banks in the USA and Europe, not by the African nations whose resources the USA, Europe, and others plunder. So producing more Black millionaires doesn't create "black privilege."

In fact, check out Saidiya Hartman's book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and look at the chapter titled "Blood Cowries." Centuries ago, West African elites were selling other Africans into the European slave trade. European slaving companies paid for nearly one third of these slaves using the currency that African elites liked at that time: cowrie shells. That's right. Nearly one third of us Black folks who were sold into slavery in the Americas were paid for with cowrie shells that the Europeans dug up from the Indian Ocean and used as ballast in their ships. The African elites might have thought that Europeans would accept cowrie shells as currency in return. They were wrong. And once Europeans established control over their African colonies, they eventually demonetized the cowrie shell completely on the African continent. Europeans even determined what could count as currency on the African continent.

white woman with cowrie shell necklace

Well, I'm white and wracked with guilt and I want to do something about racism. So what if I use my white privilege to make something up called "black privilege"?
That's called affirmative action, and it's still white privilege. It's a set of policies that depends on white people's approval to keep going. It is by no means an "entitlement" that Black people can call a "privilege" of being Black. Now, we have no qualms about taking advantage of it; frankly, it's the very least that a nation can do for the descendants of its slaves and genocide victims. But it all hinges on how white people feel from one election season to another. It is therefore not an essential change in the status quo. White people's desire and whim, backed by their force, still makes the rules. It's their privilege, even if they use it, ever so briefly, on our behalf.

Quote 10/17/13

"What happens when, instead of becoming enraged and shocked every time a black person is killed in the United States, we recognize black death as a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy? What will happen then if instead of demanding justice we recognize (or at least consider) that the very notion of justice-indeed the gamut of political and cognitive elements that constitute formal, multiracial democratic practices and institutions-produces or requires black exclusion and death as normative?"
--Joy A. James and Joao Costa Vargas, "Refusing Blackness as Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs" (193)

October...Surprise? Commentators on the Federal Shutdown Miss the Point

Many commentators view the shutdown of the federal government with shocked outrage. Recently, Andrew Sullivan has been showing moderates the "racial and cultural panic" that lies at the heart of the opposition to Obamacare and the Obama presidency more generally.

I’m talking about the difference between opposition to a president’s agenda and a belief that he is somehow an impostor, illegitimate, and a usurper for reasons that seem, in the end, to come down to racial and cultural panic. Do I have to recount the endless accusations against Obama of such? No president has been subjected to endless litigation of his birth certificate or his religious faith (as if the latter mattered anyway). No president has been heckled in a State of the Union address with the words “You lie!” as Obama was....

...So I have long been puzzled not by legitimate opposition to various policies but by the frenzy of it. Call it the education of an English conservative in the long tortured history of American pseudo-conservatism.
In the end, I could only explain the foam-flecked frenzy of opposition to Clinton and Obama by the sense that the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s was the defining event for a certain generation, that the backlash to it was seen as a restoration of the right people running the country (i.e. no minorities with real clout), and that Clinton’s and even more Obama’s victories meant this narrative was revealed as an illusion. This is compounded by racial and cultural panic – against gays, immigrants, Muslims, Latinos etc – and cemented by a moronic, literalist, utterly politicized version of Christianity....It is inherently irrational. It knows somewhere deep down that it is headed for defeat. But it will take down as much of the country, economy and constitution as it can while doing so.
For this time, as they surely know, Reconstruction will not be on their terms. They have no agenda because the multi-racial, multi-cultural, moderate-right country they live in is a refutation of their core identity. So race and culture fuel this – perhaps not explicitly or even consciously for some, but surely powerfully for many. And we are reaching a perilous moment as their cultural marginalization intensifies and their political defeat nears. After that, the rage could become truly destabilizing, unless some kind of establishment Republican leadership can learn to lead again. America and the world need to batten down the hatches.

For Sullivan, racism and "cultural panic" have "compounded" a backlash that basically has been in the making since white opposition to the African American Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. In other words, what we are seeing is racist manipulation of rhetoric by political leaders of the Republican Party.

Like so many critics of the right wing's drive toward self destruction, Sullivan only speaks about the leaders, not the vast numbers of followers who elect them. The real question shouldn't just be how can these radical GOP leaders hijack the American system by adding in racism to their anti-Democrat rhetoric, but also why does the general racist sentiment that underwrites their behavior find such ready reception in the general American population?

Here's the thing: It isn't just the leaders who are leading. They know what plays in Peoria. They are taking their cues from white America's predisposition to think of Black people and anything associated with us with everything negative. One of the big mistakes that moderates, liberals, and progressives make is their assumption that the federal government shutdown represents a failure of America leadership. From the perspective of Black thought, it is the success of America, and, specifically, of American antiblackness. The problem is that most people commenting on the shutdown-- conservatives, moderates, liberals, and progressives-- don't want to listen to Black thought. If they did, they wouldn't be surprised and would plan accordingly, like John Brown and Marilyn Buck did.


John Brown, abolitionist, didn't just vocally oppose slavery and say it was wrong and anti-American. He attacked slaveholders. He and a group of Black and white freedom fighters were executed for attempting to start a slave rebellion in Harper's Ferry, Virginia.


Marilyn Buck, a member of the Weather Underground, put her life and freedom on the line to execute the daring escape of Assata Shakur from behind bars. She was let out of prison to die from cancer in 2010.

I'll tell ya this. Students of Black history aren't surprised by the fact that white folks will shut the whole works down just so Black people don't get shit. Even beginner students of Black history could tell you that. There are 8-year-olds who could tell you that white people in Greene County, Alabama, burned down their own judicial institutions and records rather than see Black farmers get justice from landowning white elites, that white people in New Hampshire pulled a school house off of its foundations and shot canon shells at the dorms rather than see black children attend, that white constituencies have shut down entire public school districts and shelled out for private schools rather than see Black children attend integrated public schools, and that white people in Michigan have said that not living next door to Black people is what makes a neighborhood decent. This is not a matter of public opinion and measurable attitudes alone because it stays remarkably consistent over time. It is more like what's called a structure of feeling of just not wanting Black people to have any say in how state power is utilized. Martin Gilens recently wrote a book showing that working class white people routinely vote against their own economic interests rather than see a social safety net expanded that might include Black people, most notably the so-called Reagan Democrats of the 1980 and 1984 US presidential elections. Shutting down the society so Black folks can't have something ain't a new phenomenon.


In 1835, Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, was dragged into a swamp by white farmers who didn't want Black students to attend the school with white students. Painting by Mikel Wells

So should we really be surprised that the vanguard of white supremacy will shut down a whole government rather than see a Black president's healthcare reform law go into effect--rather than see anything the Black people could benefit from? Hell fuck no.

In a Lacanian way of thinking, doing something beyond the point where it is healthy is the sign of a death drive. This is a compulsion to pursue a goal beyond the point where it is pleasurable or helpful to other goals. We all have it, to some extent, and it's not a mental illness per se. It's an indication that at some level we desire something more than we desire pleasure. It is a sign that we are capable of acting according to an ethics.

Sullivan can see this too. He says "it's headed for defeat" and "will take down" much of the nation until it is stopped. So he can see that it's a "lost cause" that white Americans nonetheless fight for. He might even use the term "lost cause" to trace it back to the ways white southerners narrativized their loss of the US Civil War to white northerners.

But that's what's so interesting about the extremity of this anti-Obama obstructionism and, before Obama, of the willingness to destroy civic institutions just so Black people can't have shit: The folks who do this stuff believe in their heart of hearts that they are doing the right thing. For them, it truly is an ethical drive. That means that, for whatever reasons, Black people are the index of absolute otherness. In the words of Fanon, to white folks, we Black folks signify "the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul" (Black Skin, White Masks 94). To them, we are not fully human. And acting according to that understanding is, at some level, ethical.

And that is the sick something that the Tea Partyites share with other white folks. In fact, whiteness itself is the realization, at many deep levels of the psyche and across various scales of social existence, that Black people are not human. That's what whiteness is. The fact that we Black folks are human and are sitting there saying we're human in infinite varieties of ways makes not a whiff of difference.

To be fair, not all white folks are outright oppositional to Obama or to Black humanity more generally. Some white people take our protestations of humanity and use it to feel good about themselves and their own struggles, often by policing us and telling us what we really meant to say when we said "I am Human." These people are called liberals or, more charitably, almost all of the left, who will co-opt the energies of our own Black ethical drive for freedom and use those energies to advance the interests of everybody else-- unions, white women, people of color, folks who love those of the same sex, etc.-- by calling themselves "the new Blacks" or overwriting the history of our freedom struggles with their own struggles. Sullivan does this by saying that the antiblack racism that Black folks know is at least 500 years old is really only about 50 years old, possibly 150 years old. He's reducing something that we know underwrites America itself to something that corresponds to how white people think about their own struggles.


And this is what's so half-assed about what Sullivan and lots of commentators about the federal government shutdown say. There is ample reason not to be surprised in the least that the obstructionism to Obama has shut down the federal government. The ruse of surprise is a manifestation of cowardice in the face of the plain facts of Black life. It is a failure to listen to what Black people have been saying for more than 500 years. The weakness of white liberals is that they pretend to be surprised by the shit that their cousins and uncles and mothers in the Tea Party are doing and have been doing to make Black life in America a living hell. But make no mistake: In about a month and some change, they'll all be sitting around the turkey (or the Tofurky vegetarian option) at Thanksgiving. And the knife on the table in between the Tea Party father who openly hates Black humanity and the "friend-of-the-negro" daughter who thinks Black people are just angry and misguided will be going in that turkey, not where it would be going if that daughter were unsurprised by her father's racist fascism and were committed to freedom.

Don't get me wrong. Obama's a weak-ass president who hasn't advanced Black people's interests. But as weak as the health care law and President Obama are to overcome this Amerikkan society's compulsive desire to murder Black people, what's missing from mainstream discourse about it all is an analysis of how antiblack racism fundamentally structures this entire American system that Sullivan speaks about.

No electoral politics will address that.

We will have to perform an attentive listening to what America is-- and always has been-- already telling us: that we were never meant to survive. And then we have to pick up whatever implement is nearest at hand and we have to tear this whole shit down and start over.

But when we Black folks, and the non-Black folks who are our true comrades, get out in the streets, don't be surprised. It's 500 years in the making.

"Let's Have a Revolution": Yummy and Tupac

CORRECTION: the name of the gang involved in the Robert Sandifer case was Gangster Disciples. The change is reflected below.

"8-year-olds gettin' found with nine-mils..."
--Mos Def, "Mathematics

It's a reminder of how America fails black children on multiple levels. Late August and early September were the anniversaries of two 1994 murders of children by children-- Shavon Dean, 14, and  Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, 11-- in Chicago. Yummy, so called because of his love of snack food, was accused of murdering Dean, an innocent bystander, on August 28, 1994, during a shooting spree that Yummy reportedly did to join a street gang, the Gangster Disciples. Days later, on September 1, Yummy was himself found shot to death, execution style, beneath a Chicago viaduct. Two Gangster Disciplines who had reportedly been harboring Yummy, brothers Cragg Hardaway, 16, and Derrick Hardaway, 14, were later convicted of Yummy's murder.

Shavon Dean

Super Predators and Bell Curves
As many newspapers and magazines noted at the time, the tragedy of a web of murder with children as the only participants demanded attention. It would be a haunting prediction of the unparalleled levels of violence seen in Chicago in recent years. But, as Gregory Caldwell's unpublished dissertation manuscript discusses, the way the media framed Yummy as a pathological figure--someone who can't be saved and must be eradicated-- was, in itself, part of the process of how subjects like Yummy are formed.

Exemplifying the tone of the coverage, the Time magazine issue of September 19, 1994, ran the cover story “Murder in miniature“ with the face of 11-year-old Robert “Yummy” Sandifer staring out from the cover. The title read “The Short,Violent Life of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, So Young to Kill, SoYoung to Die.” The origin of the photograph is unclear, but it appears to be a mug shot. The corn row hair braiding, dark skin, and emotionally vacant face of the young Sandifer constructs a “miniature” version of the Black “gangsta” that had come to ubiquitously signify youthful Black masculinity by mid the 1990s.

For the writers at Time, “Yummy” was the latest in an ongoing mediated representation of the irredeemable Black, child or adult. Even in childhood, blackness marked “Yummy” as being beyond the power of humanity to (re)form. This is an argument that echoes the rhetoric of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their infamous assault on the intellectual capabilities of Blacks, The Bell Curve : Intelligence And Class Structure In American Life (Herrnstein and Murray), where they argue that black children lack the cognitive abilities of white children and therefore should be discouraged from reproduction. Being born bad, impossible to socialize, a born menace, Robert “Yummy” Sandifer and children like him posed a special threat to American civil society, according to right-wing social scientists and social critics. By 1995, John J. Dilulio Jr. had developed the thesis of the “Super Predator” in the Weekly Standard article “The Coming Of The Super-Predators”(Dilulio).  

Yummy was used by conservatives to cut the social safety net and replace it with the prison dragnet, and he was used by liberals to point out the need for their social interventions in Black communities. Yummy's short life became a symbol for the pathology of street gangs, but, as Caldwell's analysis says, before we make a symbol of an 11-year-old kid, we should ask what forces shaped him. It matters that Yummy had been abused from a very young age and was likely without adequate adult supervision his entire life. It matters that crack cocaine, a drug introduced to Black communities by agents working on behalf of the US government, had destroyed his family and community. Yummy's life could serve as a reminder to stop pathologizing Black children, to understand how children could be involved in a web of murder that took the innocent life of Shavon Dean, that set Yummy up to never really live the life of a child. Instead, his case goes unremarked. And obviously, the pathologizing continues. Black pathology is the grounding assumption of laws like "stand your ground" and the school-prison connection.

Caldwell shows that even the ways we speak or write about Black children are part of the forces that shape Black children. He reminds us that subjects like Yummy don't just come out of nowhere. They are shaped by specific sets of political, economic, geographic, legal, psychological, and social forces, including the very media that comments on them and makes them out to be "Super Predators" who are born "ready to die."

The Notorious BIG's first album was titled Ready to Die and featured an image of a Black baby in diapers.

Ready to Die
People are all-too ready to say that rap music isn't just a commentary on violence in the community but is part of a "culture of violence" that is largely to blame for that violence. But they are never ready to say that non-Black commentators on Black youths are part of America's culture of violence against Black people.

That's bullshit.

It assumes that Black people have power over the contexts we are shaped in. But if being an oppressed or persecuted group means anything, it means that such power is precisely what we do not have. Consider geography as just one example. We largely live in segregated neighborhoods and food deserts, but it's not because we only want to live around other Black folks just because. These neighborhoods are also largely places of deprivation where we are underserviced by local governments, medical institutions, the private sector, and, especially, schools. And we live there because we don't possess the power to determine who we live and raise our families near. Realtors, developers, planners, and legislators largely shape the geographies in which we negotiate our lives. We make the best out of the scraps we are given. But don't get it twisted: We are given the leftovers after the corporations and circulating desires of white gentrifiers and the police have staked their claims. We live in the narrow spaces that those other sets of white interests do not desire. And these spaces are largely bad for us. They are, in fact, killing us. Ghettos, in and of themselves, are acts of violence against the people who live in them. And Black children largely grow up and live out life in these spaces.

So, when we talk about the criminal activities of Black youths, we are also talking about the contexts in which they are shaped as subjects, contexts over which they have no power, contexts that are aimed at destroying them. And when we pathologize Black youths, we are assisting that genocidal context.

Yummy killed Shavon, and the murder of a Black child must be prevented if Black people are going to survive. When it happens, it must be called out and mourned. And if a community organizes itself around anything, it must organize around threats to the survival of its members. But part of that organizing entails correctly diagnosing the problem. If we focus on Yummy as the source of the problem, we pretend that a Black child is to blame for all the ills of the Black community that set his life on the course to kill another Black child in the first place. And to blame Black youths for the conditions in which they are formed, we would have to ignore the larger structural forces of antiblack racism that make Black communities the kinds of places that produce youths who can murder other Black youths at the age of 11. Not only that, but in blaming Yummy for how he was formed, we would have to become part of the problem of antiblackness. And that is the fundamental problem.

Let's be clear: Blameworthiness is not a feature of childhood for any other group of people except Black people. We don't have to cling to the old notion that children are "innocent"-- whatever that means or ever meant. We just have to acknowledge that no other group is blamed for as many of the problems of life in modern society as Black youths are, even though no group is as powerless in modern society as Black youths are. Non-Black people who blame Black people for the problems we face-- and the Black people who echo them-- need to shut the fuck up because they are part of the problem. They've had their day. They've had hegemonic control over the media surrounding Black youths. You Google "Black youths" and most of what comes up will be about what they, the pathologizers, said about Black youths. And we are where we are largely because their commentary has been part and parcel of the apparatuses arrayed against us. In previous times, they have helped justify the 100-to-1 powder-to-crack cocaine enforcement disparities and mandatory minimums. Who knows what they'll think up next? I'm not even sure they think. Mostly, they just react from an affect of fearfulness toward Black people and Black youths specifically.

We, Black commentators who are students of Black freedom struggle, have to radically reshape our approach to describing the panoply of problems Black youths must confront before they are even born, problems over which they couldn't possibly have control. Caldwell reminds us that we have to develop an ethic for how we talk about Black life. That ethic must be part of our efforts to take back our communities.

"Stop Being Cowards and Let's Have a Revolution"

The larger media narrative routinely places Black youths as the cause of the problems they face. But within the Black community, there are forces at work attempting to reshape these narratives and encourage Black youths to enjoy childhood, educate themselves, and move to the next level the best way they can. There is a way to ethically talk about the problems Black youths face without pathologizing Black youths.

Tupac Shakur was interested in the story of Robert "Yummy" Sandifer. Shakur dedicated his song "Young Niggaz" to Sandifer "And all other lil' young niggas that's in a rush to be gangstas." Tupac hoped to discourage youths from running in the streets like Yummy did, but he did so without giving in to the larger media narrative of Black youth pathology. In 1995, Tupac also did a very significant and underappreciated interview while incarcerated at Clinton prison in New York state in which a large image of Yummy is prominently displayed behind him, seeming to gaze expectantly at Tupac and the viewer, a gaze that, as Caldwell suggests, looks like the "vacant," thousand-yard stare of an adult with post-traumatic stress disorder who is on the verge of exploding. In the interview, Tupac elaborates a larger political vision for how gangs and musicians could help the community: "Now, if we do wanna live the thug life and the gangster life and all of that, okay, so stop being cowards and let's have a revolution" (18:59).

Tupac Shakur with a photo of Robert "Yummy" Sandifer in the background

Tupac is revealing the need to connect our commentaries on Black life to the ethico-political movement to take control of our communities-- that is, to revolution, a real, fundamental change in the social order by any means necessary. "Don't support the phonies, support the real. You know what I'm saying? How can these people be talking about how they so real and they don't care about our communities?" (26:30). We need an ethics of describing Black life that is accountable to Black freedom struggle. Absent that accountability, we are part of the genocidal problem.

signs of incomplete gentrification

The dog poo bags piled up out of the garbage can scream "white people live here, " but the neglect by city services screams "Black people live here."

Assata the Unflinching

Dear President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder,

At the risk of running afoul of the PATRIOT act, we declare that we still love and respect Assata Shakur no matter what you say.

The FBI’s Aaron Ford, head of the Newark (NJ) division, announced the renewed manhunt for Assata.

Assata Shakur

Black people are in a new nadir, and Assata Shakur comes out of a tradition of committed revolutionaries who have resisted the forces that got us there. Assata is truly a political prisoner because, as Eugene Puryear says, “what changed in the recent days and weeks to now put her on the ‘Most Wanted Terrorists’ list? The FBI presented no evidence against her and revealed no terrorist plots. Assata’s real crime, FBI spokesman Aaron Ford said, was that from Cuba she continues to ‘maintain and promote her … ideology’ and ‘provides anti-U.S. government speeches espousing the Black Liberation Army message’—an ideology and message that the U.S. government has declared ‘terrorism.’” In other words, she is suddenly a “terrorist” because she has remained ideologically committed to Black freedom. 

Read more at Assata the Unflinching on The Feminist Wire...

a public service announcement from Professor Dred Scott to the true students of Black liberation

My Friends
Chains are long things.
From your sojourns of today
Until your battle plans of tomorrow
Please remember that blackness
           Travels without
Moving;
it                        crosses borders but
stays in slavery.

Ya got that?
fugitive
don't mean
free

  Plan accordingly.

Thank you.



(c) Omar Ricks 2013

Django: Disciplined and Enslaved

Oh boy. It must be Oscar season. Daily newspapers are publishing profile articles that show the difficult imaginative off-camera work that actors put into big-budget Hollywood productions. That means we can expect a menagerie of the fucked-up fantasies actors have to live out in order to get themselves into character. And in a season with at least two films pertaining to slavery, it would seem that people seeking Oscar buzz are saying too much. And ya know, sometimes I just like to sit back and listen to see what kind of shit comes out of their mouths.

Being Calvin Candie

"[T]he world has more than one way of keeping you a nigger, has evolved more than one way of skinning the cat..."--James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

Kerry Washington and Leonardo DiCaprio have been held up as models of actorly commitment to craft for their recent work in Django Unchained.

For the moment, let's consider DiCaprio, who reportedly cut his hand while the camera was rolling and kept going with the take. Anyone who has studied introductory acting in the USA recognizes this as an example of something that the guru of American realistic acting, Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, would have called "living the part." It's almost exactly like a moment in Stanislavski's first English translation, An Actor Prepares, when the actor (accidentally) transforms his physical discomfort (the heat from the stage lights, the heaviness of his robes, etc.) and says his lines more truthfully than he did before. "Living the part" was, for Stanislavski, "the highest form of acting," the moment when the actor (the person playing the character) responds to real, genuinely felt impulses and transforms those impulses to do something that serves the goals of the character. It's not that DiCaprio's cut hand substituted for his work in developing the part, but it might have helped him go a little more ballistic and his willingness to just go with it might have helped him reach the ballistic pitch called for in the moment.

In this same vein, then, DiCaprio also let Samuel L. Jackson cuss at him to act more like a slave master because, as Jackson reportedly said about having to endure racism and the repetition of the epithet "nigger," "this is just another Tuesday for us." Jackson reportedly said this to DiCaprio to encourage him to really invest his energies in a role (Calvin Candie) that DiCaprio reportedly found abhorrent to play. Jackson was there for DiCaprio-- and, as film critic Armond White points out, for Quentin Tarentino-- in a way not so different from the way that his character, Stephen, was there for DiCaprio's: getting him to treat Black people like "niggers," and giving DiCaprio the license and support he needed. Imagine a world in which a Black person says to a white person, "Please, pleeease call me 'nigger!'"-- and remember, as Baldwin said, that this can happen in multiple ways-- and you've just thought of what a Black actor goes through on "just another Tuesday" working in a play or film telling the story of Black life and history in slavery. That is, in fact, considered a basic professional courtesy that a generous actor just does if she or he is acting opposite a white person who says things like "Buddy, I’m having a tough time with these words," as DiCaprio reportedly said. It's just what a "good actor" does. And, again, to push Armond White's point just a little further, it's also what a good house slave did. Be sure to notice, of course, that a cut hand is probably not a routine occurrence for DiCaprio, whereas being called "nigger" is such a defining aspect of Black life (circa 1858 and circa 2013) as to be "just another Tuesday" for Jackson.

And then there's Washington, who actually subjected herself to torture to such an extent that she feared for her sanity if the shoot had gone any longer than it did and, as it was, had to take the unusual move of bringing her family to the set just to get through the whole ordeal.

Now, I can't claim any insider knowledge of the Django set (although I invite actors and others to speak up about what goes on). But, speaking as a Black person who has worked professionally as an actor, I can say that Washington's willing subjection to beatings and other forms of torture in preparation for playing Broomhilda are examples of how the professional/artistic ethic of psychologically realist acting works. It is a mode of control that social theorists have called disciplining. We'll say more about that in a moment. Stay tuned...

The Only Good Actor Is a Disciplined Actor

"Being a body that desires to be seen, the black body lives on a fine line between Absence and orchestrated Presence. …Since its problem is that it exists, its efforts to justify its existence always miss their mark."— Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism

Now, I don't give a shit about the outcome of the Oscar race. What I do care about during Oscar season are these kinds of revealing off-camera profiles. Oscar season is a moment when corporate media outlets are spewing these kinds of profiles left and right. Why? Probably because the Oscars are a horse race. No, of course, actors are not horses. The work of actors is much more subjective to judge than simply observing whose nose crossed the finish line first. But observers of the Oscar race are invested in who wins to such a degree that they have little regard for the physical or psychological health or ethical integrity of those doing the work to get the win. People speak less guardedly when at the tracks, and, in the Oscar race, people divulge details about how actors work, showing that most actors do in fact work very hard. A common saying among actors goes, "The worst insult someone can give you is to tell you that you did a good job of acting." That's because acting is supposed to just look like being. If you look like you're acting, you probably need to keep doing (practicing) it until it looks seamlessly like being.

These backstage/off-screen profiles show how much doing goes into being without distracting from the illusion that what happens on screen is "real." Even the master illusionist Hollywood apparatus can afford to share little off-camera peeks at how it "makes the magic." Details that might otherwise be restricted to trade journals show up in the LA Times. Stoking interest in the horse race-- I mean Oscar race-- media outlets encourage us to think about actors as being more than just bodies. They appear as intellectual, learned, inspired, disciplined.

"Good actors" are "disciplined" actors, and for Black actors this rule is no exception. But--and this is a big but-- when you're expected to play a slave-- a nonbeing, a "nigger"-- the stakes of doing the things that help you create a being (a character) are quite different from the stakes that other actors face in building any other kind of character. After all, you are a nonbeing playing a nonbeing and expecting to be recognized as a professional for doing so-- by beings. Gaining that quasi-recognition involves subjecting yourself to modes of discipline because, otherwise, things might get out of control and you might get swallowed up by the role, or perhaps even go all Nat Turnery on that ass.

By "disciplining," I mean that, rather than explicitly punishing you, forcing you, or twisting your arm into doing something as extreme as Washington does, the protocols of professionalism routinely instruct Black actors to do this same type of thing as a model of what it is to be a "good actor." And you can't say anyone put a gun to your head and told you, "Let me whip you and lock you in a box, or else!" if you are the one who asked them "Will you please help me get into this role by calling me a 'nigger' with your mouth and your whip and your chains and your locks and your body language--on camera and off camera?" in the first place.

That's what "disciplining" means in Michel Foucault's sense of the word described in the book Discipline and Punish (1977):

[I]t  dissociates  power from  the  body;  on the  one  hand,  it  turns  it  into  an 'aptitude',  a  'capacity',  which  it  seeks  to  increase;  on the  other hand,  it  reverses the course of the energy,  the  power  that  might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, NY: Vintage, 1977, p. 138)

In other words, the disciplined worker no longer has to be beaten into doing something as in slavery; when "disciplining" is how power operates, the worker just does it so that she can be "good." She feels it adds something to her, say, a certain skill needed in acting, while at the same time it is subjecting her to the uses of powerful institutions, say, like Hollywood.

To speak of "good acting" is to speak regardless of whether it's "good" for you. And that's where Washington's concerns about her sanity become a way of talking about how our day-to-day lived experiences with disciplining mirror the contours of the antiblack paradigm we live in. I mean, why would Washington need to worry about her grip on reality if she didn't have anxiety about how close slavery is to modern-day black life?

In the backstage/off-camera context, this disciplining often bears more than a passing resemblance to slavery. For example, I once worked on a set of a cop show in Los Angeles. A gang of heavily armed off-duty cops (two white, one black) tortured my character and his partner, both of us Black Jamaican drug dealers, and forced them to drink each other’s urine out of the toilet. Between takes, as the producers decided what to do with us, I stood there and watched the three cop actors plus the white, Asian, and Latino grips, camera ops, and others (a few women but mostly men) pointing at my and my partner’s bodies. And then they did it all over again.

Of course, slave masters and overseers back in the day, like teachers, bosses, and prison guards today, knew the same thing Foucault knew: It is easier to use the slave who self-regulates and is intrinsically motivated to "be good" at something than one who has to be punished and forced into doing everything.

What Foucault didn't quite understand was how very adaptable slavery was. Antiblackness is so powerful that not only can it reconstitute slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment as sharecropping, convict leasing, wage slavery, and prison slavery; but it can even extend unique and under-appreciated modes of slavery into the coteries of the Black elites, so that even studied, disciplined, acclaimed actors who graduate from college, speak at the Democratic National Convention and star in an ABC series and drive Range Rovers and have Louis Vuitton clothes can be enjoyed like...well, any old slave. (Remember what Malcolm X said about a Black person with a Ph.D.?)

In Washington's case (as with that of Jackson and Foxx), self-regulation is subjection to torture. For Black actors, our on-camera lives as slaves bear much resemblance to our off-camera lives. That's not because we can't get over it or because everybody goes through the same thing; it's because that's still where we as Black people are-- still getting pushed out of jobs and neighborhoods to make room for white people; still getting sodomized, battered, and shot by those who are supposed to "protect and serve"; still getting blown away by civilian white people who deputize themselves to be our overseers, vigilantes who are getting protected by the police. Being well-spoken graduates of competitive higher learning institutions does not relieve us from the demands that the slave estate has for our bodies-- to brutalize, enjoy, experiment on, and destroy our bodies. Dressing in expensive clothing does not render us safe. Walk on the set; you're a slave. Walk off the set; you're still a slave. Asking someone to subject us to slave treatment almost seems redundant, except that we are expected to do it in the name of being "good actors." Torture and discipline, abjection and professionalism go hand in hand.

Actors are taught in acting classes and directed on sets to see behavior like Washington's not as masochistic but, rather, as something that demonstrates an admirable level of "commitment" to the craft. We are taught to aspire to it. And while I've never been instructed explicitly to do what she did, I've often been told, "You know, the really committed actors are able to get over the painful legacy of slavery, imperialism, and genocide and just do the work. Those are the ones who get jobs. Do you want a job?"

Reality Check

"My pride became my affliction. I found myself imprisoned in the stronghold I had built. The day came when I wished to break my silence and found that I could not speak: the actor could no longer be distinguished from his  role."--Leo Proudhammer in James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968)

Most Black actors playing slaves cannot fly their parents to the set and get themselves mentally back in balance. Many Black actors don't have their parents, or any people who help them get back on balance. Most Black actors will play a slave, then turn around, and hit the temp job or a night shift at the diner, if they even have jobs, where their bosses and coworkers routinely treat them...well, you know...like slaves. Much of Black life isn't really balanced. If it ain't one thing, it's another. All of which is to say that, if we think of slavery as a set of circumstances in which one is defined by an external marker (say, skin color and facial features) and in which one is available to uses that abuse the body and mind for the purposes of other people's gain and pleasure, for most Black people, it is difficult to distinguish day-to-day life from slavery. "This is just another Tuesday for us" indeed.

And that's why Washington's experience and Jackson's reported words, seemingly intended to reveal something about how much they sacrificed for the craft, end up showing something that is much more revealing-- something that perhaps all of us Black folks can relate to: that whether backstage/off-camera or onstage/on camera, the life of the Black actor, like the lives of most Black people, is still unshielded from the violence of slavery. You can replace whips with pink slips. It does not change the position of your Black ass in relation to all others.

So how is it that the reality of "living the part" means losing touch with "reality" for Washington but is "just another Tuesday" for Jackson? Maybe that's a project for a comparative biographer. Several of Washington's other roles display a toughness that really can't be faked, so it's not that she's somehow less able to take it than Jackson. And Jackson, of course, has had weak moments in his life. But maybe both are true. Maybe all of it is that same aporia, the old ambivalence, the unbearable blackness of nonbeing, the oxymoron of "Black life": "Just another Tuesday for us" is enough to drive you clean out of your mind.