Frank Wilderson, the author of Afro-Pessimism, states that the default position of Blacks in the West (and elsewhere, one might add) is that of “slave.” To buttress his argument further he references Orlando Patterson’s 1982 text Slavery and Social Death, in which he argues that slavery is more than simply black men and women with shackles on their necks, arms and legs: slavery is social death, a state of being in which the person in question is in fact a non-person in the social context of slavery. For even if you are not chopping sugar cane stalks, picking cotton or serving mint juleps to Ole Massa, you are still a slave.
Slavery is more than just work without pay. Social death corresponds precisely to Frantz Fanon’s definition of the colonized being as being in a state of “absolute depersonalization.” The Algerians of French Algeria — or, to be more precise, the Arabs of French Algeria — could hardly be defined as “slaves” in the classical sense, yet the plight to which the Arab had been reduced to under French colonialism was severe enough for Fanon to pronounce the Algerian as a man suffering from just that — absolute depersonalization. In a twist of irony the Algerian Arab of Colonial France shared his own colonizer’s reprehensible views of sub-Saharan Africans as being “niggers” or “monkeys.” The Algerian did not learn his anti-Black racism from the French: French negrophobia merely revitalized and reinforced his own, to the extent that even a young Fanon could write unequivocally about North Africans as “despising” men of color. The sub-Saharan African, the Black, the Negro was the main recipient in both the Christian and Muslim worlds (and often Israel) of society’s violence:
Social death has three constituent elements: One is gratuitous violence, which means that the body of the slave is open to the violence of all others. Whether he or she receives that violence or not, he or she exists in a state of structural or open vulnerability. This vulnerability is not contingent upon his or her transgressing some type of law, as in going on strike with the worker. The other point is that the slave is natally alienated, which is to say that the temporality of one’s life that is manifest in filial and afilial relations — the capacity to have families and the capacity to have associative relations — may exist very well in your head. You might say, “I have a father, I have a mother,” but, in point of fact, the world does not recognize or incorporate your filial relations into its understanding of family. And the reason that the world can do this goes back to point number one: because you exist in a regime of violence which is gratuitous, open, and you are openly vulnerable to everyone else, not a regime of violence that is contingent upon you being a transgressed worker or transgressing woman or someone like that. And the third point is general dishonor, which is to say, you are dishonored in your very being — and I think that this is the nature of Blackness with everyone else. You’re dishonored prior to your performance of dishonored actions.
This last sentence explains perfectly why Michael Brown’s adolescent hijinks in a convenience store earned him the appellation of “thug” (and his death) while James Holmes’ butchering dozens of people in a movie theatre (not to mention booby-trapping his own flat) led to him being pitied. Michael Brown was a Negro, the occupant of the lowest social echelon in America’s Caucasian kakistocracy where skin color and ethnicity, not financial status, are the ultimate determinants of one’s worth in American society.
In spite of more “respectable” terms that have been invented in recent decades to describe Africans in America, “Negro” remains the precise social definition of Blacks as they function in real time in a white supremacist society. It must be so because the very structure of “our” society dictates that in order for an African to survive in it, this African — whether male or female, young or old, rich or poor, light or dark-skinned, foreign or native-born, straight, gay, bi, transgender or otherwise — must function precisely within the socio-historical-cultural perimeters set by those who are in charge of this nation. Those perimeters are what define The Negro. Those who run this country, of course, are steeped in the doctrines of a racist Christendom which stretches back over 1,500 years.
Yet just what does one mean when one says, “The Negro?” How do you describe “Negro?”
In order to understand what a “Negro” is, we need to go back to Europe. Before the advent of Modern Europe the Negro as we understand it did not exist, at least not in the concrete form we understand “Negro” today. We need to look at what it really means to be a “Negro” in a non-racial (and in fact, non-American) context. Let us turn, for instance, to Italian commedia dell’arte and take a look at the role of the zanni.
The earliest literary evidence portrays Zanni as a servant of Pantalonae.[1] Of all of the ‘commedia’ archetypes, Zanni’s survival instinct is the strongest. Zanni is also always hungry which leads to a vision of Utopia where “everything is comestible, reminiscent of the followers of gluttony in carnival processions”.[Note 2] A Zanni also has an animistic view of the world in that he senses a spirit in everything, so it could be eaten. Zanni is ignorant, loutish, and has no self-awareness. The simple act of thinking does not seem to be natural to Zanni. He is a very faithful individual who prefers to live in the present day e.g. with stoic and samadhi presence. Zanni never looks for a place to sleep it just seems to happen to him often in situations where it shouldn’t, like a drunkard. Lastly, all of his reactions are completely emotional.[9]He is also a waiter for pantalone. (from Wikipedia)
An important thing to keep in mind about the Zanni character is that he was distinctly modeled on lower class Venetians of the 1600s and 1700s: peasants, migrant workers, immigrants, servants, porters, valets. I chose this character out of the American historical context because it brings into sharp relief precisely the kind of social role which is demanded of the African American. In discussing the obvious “unbearable lightness” of living as an African American in the United States, it was important to highlight the zanni of commedia dell’arte. Why? Because the description of the stock-character Zanni fits the description of The Negro virtually down to the last drop of water in the sink. He is overemotional, oversexed, impulsive, ignorant, clownish, lazy, greedy…and wouldn’t you know it, he sees a spirit in everything.
(That last description ought to stop some of us in our tracks. What exactly do we, as Black people, mean when we say that we are “spiritual”? Is this simply an artful way of deflecting from the very real and very pervasive anti-intellectualism in contemporary Black culture?)
And above all, the Negro is lacking in self-awareness; he’s obsessed with primitive, basic “survival” and doesn’t have time for all that “intellectual shit.” The Negro runs from books like a vampire running from the crack of dawn. “The best way to hide something from a nigger,” goes an old American saying, “is to put it in a book.” Everything is physical to the Negro, so you have non-Africans (speaking of Negroes, since they steadfastly know nothing of Africans) saying with straight faces that Negroes are “physical geniuses.”
They are also appallingly simple-minded and supremely narrow in outlook and ambition. In Melville’s Benito Cereno, Captain Delano, upon encountering the San Dominick ship at Concepcion, notes that something is quite obviously off about the entire appearance of the slave ship. The slaves are strangely unruly and undisciplined. Babo, Benito Cereno’s African valet, is in fact holding Cereno as a hostage; Babo and Cereno are merely pantomiming the expected role of white master and black slave. The pantomime is as thin as rice paper; anyone with an acute eye can tell that things are definitely not what they seem. However, even after seeing several of these red flags and even after Babo literally threatens to cut Cereno’s throat, Captain Delano tenaciously clings to his fantasy:
“Most negroes are natural valets and hairdressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castinets, and flourishing them apparently with equal satisfaction,” springing from “the docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind.”
In other words, Delano wants desperately to believe in the reality of “The Negro” long after it becomes apparent that this uncivilized “Negro” –in this particular scenario, anyway — does not exist.
At this juncture it may seem odd to segue into a discussion about kitsch, particularly how Milan Kundera defines it: but as we shall see, it is critical in our understanding as to why even today, in the 21st century, far too many people worldwide cling to their fantasy of the Negro.
Kundera initially defined kitsch in terms of communist oppression and communist regimes’ refusal to deal with any human reality outside of Marxist-Leninist propaganda. However, as Kundera himself has suggested, the aesthetics of every single political ideology in the world lean heavily in the direction of kitsch. ‘‘(Kitsch is) the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection,” Kundera writes in “Sixty-Three Words.”
Behind all European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being. The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s — — has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch…Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable to human existence.
Precisely. To Americans, the “beautifying lie” is pure whiteness itself: not the “ethnic” kind of aquiline noses and olive skins, but blonde hair, blue eyes and rosy complexions. It’s baseball, apple pie, Ronald Reagan and Mickey Mouse. Nothing else can explain why there is such a thing as a Disney Corporation — a global, multi-billion dollar industry dedicated to the promotion of a kitsch-universe where no one dare shits, let alone sucks cock. Jean Baudrillard wasn’t entirely right when he suggested that Disney World was more real than the actual reality that Americans lived. Nor was he entirely wrong. “Disney kitsch,” writes David Barker, “is the American Dream with half the story left out.” At the end of the day one has to remind oneself just what the cornerstone of this global Disney Empire is: a ridiculous mouse with an idiotic falsetto voice and white minstrel gloves, and with features — like most cartoon characters of the late 1920s — more than suggestive of Sambo.
There is obviously an element of narcissism involved in the creation and sustaining of our collective national (and, by logical extension, Western) kitsch. It is social, political, cultural, intellectual, economic, and religious, you name it. However, I am not suggesting in any sense that international recognition of Africans is on par with the recognition of excrement! Just the opposite: Western humanist kitsch, grounded in Abrahamic thought, cannot accept the humanity of the African as he, or she, is. In the minds of far, far too many people — including Africans themselves — Africans are disgraced creatures, damned souls associated with everything irrational, everything dirty, everything cheap and flimsy, with slums, with poverty, with disease, ignorance, violence, perversion — not because Africans actually are shit, but because contemporary non-African systems of comprehending reality can’t see Africans other than through a stereotyped lens: the African, just as he or she is, is shit for non-Africans — the “shit of the earth,” as Chester Himes crudely put it in his autobiography The Quality of Hurt.
The neoliberal, conscious of appearing free of racism, will redefine what “shit” means when referencing Africans. Oh, you see, the “shit” isn’t black people in general: they’re okay, they’re cool. It’s just a certain sort of poor, unrefined, unsexy, unexotic black male we don’t like, so they imply. Which kind, they are never specific since the general consensus is that “they,” the “Blacks,” are essentially “all alike.” The heterosexual black male is feared not because he is any more abusive and exploitative towards women than any other group of men (he isn’t), but because he is a criminal. Actually he’s not a criminal — the real statistics show that black male criminals relative to their population are extremely small in number.
No: the hetero black male (which includes straight-acting gay men) triggers those “sinful” fantasies white girls (and boys) have about Black men’s allegedly gigantic penises. The Negro has uncontrollable sexual urges; he’s too physical, too emotional for us. Imagining the heterosexual (and unreconstructed) Negro as an intellectual is akin to imagining Rodin’s The Thinker with a hard-on.
This is because in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim mind, anything sexual is inherently disgraceful, if not actually criminal. It is not hyperbolic to suggest this since the existence of anti-fornication laws in the United States (and virtually every Arab country in the world) shows clearly that sexual expression in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic mind (which, as we know today, doesn’t even have to believe in a single God: it can even be Maoist!) is considered essentially wrong/criminal. And since The Negro is a penis (in their minds), he is automatically considered on the level of filth as well as criminality. Lurid “interracial” porn sites, W.A.P., Lil Nas X on the one side and on the other, a squeaky-clean Barack Obama (whether in the Oval Office or not) — these are two ends of the same cloth.
In order for the African to be acceptable in Euro-kitsch’s eyes, the African must be scrubbed squeaky clean, reconstituted, reconstructed, in such a way that middle-class whites are no longer threatened by his presence — particularly in the American white-collar workplace. In his book “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks,” author Donald Bogle not only outlined precisely which anti-Black stereotypes long pervaded (and continue to pervade) Hollywood, he also — unwittingly, perhaps — defined precisely those Negro stock caricatures with which Black people tend to function best in American society as a whole. It’s no accident that those Black people working in white-collar, white-skinned “spaces” disproportionately tend to be women, and sadly a disproportionate number of these women view their own people through the same stereotyped lens as their white bosses and colleagues.
And if they are not compromised women, they are usually men whom our prudish and essentially homophobic society considers sexually and culturally compromised. Of course: a gay black male in a white workplace really is not welcomed because he may be a genius, or dresses well, or has a sterling personality.1 The old myth of the sanctity of White Womanhood is still dying a hard death even in the age of OnlyFans, PornHub and TikTok.
Dreadlocks and braids are threatening; so-called “relaxed” hair (a cheap euphemism for what used to be called a “process”) is not. Dark skin and “coarse” African features are threatening primarily when found on an African American but slightly less so when the possessor of these features is from Kenya or Gambia. (In Europe, the reverse is true, as the author has observed numerous times.)
All of which is generally true…within the workplace, that is. Outside the workplace, outside the “respectable” and “family oriented” and “mainstream” night-club (or, at least, those frequented by whites, regardless of respectability or lack thereof), it is a different story: now the Negro as hypersexual savage is welcomed. In fact, the more twisted, pathological and sick he is, generally speaking, the more welcome he will be since in the racist white mind, Negroness and sickness are one and the same: the more depersonalized, the sexier, the edgier, the cooler. The depersonalized Negro is embraced in the world of entertainment for a “cool” that white racists from both ends of the political spectrum imagine that he has. Each loves its own respective concept of the Negro; however to my eyes, I don’t see much of a difference between the uncouth street Negro the leftist loves and the old darky that the fascist prefers: both are zanni in blackface.
But there is yet another instance in which we can tolerate a Black male face: when that face is turned towards the pavement with a hole in its head, like Michael Brown: that way we can feel sorry for it, like perhaps a starving Congolese child: there must be something to justify putting his image in an ad, or on a public billboard.
I suspect the furor over George Floyd’s murder in 2020 had at least something to do with this. George Floyd went from being a porn star of the Mandingo type, to being a criminal, then a rapper, to being a notch on the belt of a racist maniac, and finally an international icon of resistance to fascism. All over the world people have rioted in his name. Guys looked up to and emulated men like him, while women found him irresistible sexually, for reasons that always seemed odd to me. They’re still odd, though perfectly understandable when you realize that the George Floyds and Michael Browns of America are not only emulated by men and pursued by women, they are also loathed and killed by those same men and women. He’s an icon for men, a dildo for women and a moving target for cops. He is embraced and lauded for all the wrong reasons.