The Brotherwise Dispatch, VOL.2, ISSUE#2, MARCH-MAY/2010
When the murder of reality occurs, it becomes apparent 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) The reality with which this sign corresponds, a reality of exploitation, alienation, oppression, dehumanization, racism and injustice has been, as such, severed from the sign itself, and allowed to remain invisible and undetectable through the structural-inert nature of continuous banal subservience, as exemplified in the lived experience of African Americans.
Already superbly acclimated to the structural-inert forms of mundane oppression as experienced in an advanced neo-liberal capitalist society, the Black hyperbourgeoisie(3), whose assimilationist philosophy “is meant to further their own class aims, and the aspirations of the masses only incidentally”(4); have laid discursive cultural siege to the historical foundations of our specific racist oppression as human beings of African descent. This is done by reducing outrage at the dehumanization of Black people and their continued exploitation by the ruling power elite, into an urgent concern for language and semiotics. This trick of reducing all forms of racist oppression to a matter of mere linguistic triviality, allows one to avoid confronting injustice when engaging in social discourse, specifically whenever said injustice manifests itself in racial terms or racist tones. This has the effect of promoting silence regarding the actual injustice of racism, 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 historical oppression or to the continued subjugation we experience as human beings of African descent within the lived context of western imperialism. It is a word which is insulting because it is meant to remind us of our ‘objecthood’, to put us in our ‘sub-human’ place by robbing us of our freedom, 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’.(6)
“‘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) To be a ‘nigger’ or a ‘negro’ are exactly the same, in that they both signify being “sealed” into a “crushing objecthood”. And yet in general social discourse the word ‘negro’ is significantly less controversial and regarded as nowhere near as vulgar 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 come from the same source is stridently and consciously overlooked as a gratuitous and reformist demonstration of goodwill by those who seek to curry favor with the ruling power elite. 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 Alain Locke holds important significance for his role in 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) This “old chrysalis” is not a problem of ‘civil rights’ but the problem of dehumanization, which though rife with socio-political implications is in-itself ultimately an ontological question.
When viewed within the context of western imperialist overdetermination-from-without, any dialectical growth of Black social identity becomes inseparable from human liberation praxis. As such, the achievement of this “spiritual emancipation” by the Lockean ‘New Negro’, although ultimately manifest in terms of a Black cultural confrontation of modernity, as exemplified by the Harlem Renaissance, is inseparable from the socio-political foundation of resistance to “the political repression of leftists and the bloody suppression of Black rebellion”(10) during the Red Summer of 1919.
At the turn of the 19th century, Black liberation discourse had, out of radical proximity and at times even through organizational necessity, adopted a more socialist vantage point and was very close to becoming subsumed in the dogmatic tomes of Marxist eschatology. Although initially seen as leading a retreat from the radicalism of his day, it was more of a redirection, a reconstitution even: by prioritizing “spiritual emancipation” over a rigid materialist narrative, Locke, if not by intent then by effect, refused to barter away that existential freedom which serves as the foundation of human endeavor (including revolutionary action), for another discursive variant of that same western imperialist continuum which still serves as a source of overdetermination-from-without for Black people.
This Lockean dialectical gambit, by postponing the inevitable political and historical clash between Black subjectivity and an oppressive American capitalist society, set in motion the necessary socio-cultural forces of constitutive self-determination which would eventually prove vital in preserving radical Black subjectivity from being ‘fixed’ and ultimately trapped in yet another form of ‘objecthood’ which a decidedly vulgar and rigid Marxist perspective requires. “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.”(11)
Western imperialism, whether expressed in advanced neo-liberal capitalism, military bureaucratic communism or naked fascism, cannot be effectively critiqued or overcome through adherence to a set of deterministic presuppositions which are solely derived from the sanctioned value systems of Western imperialism itself. 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”(12) of genuine human liberation. In other words, a way of human liberation which does not require an objective revolution-in-itself, but demands a subjective revolution-for-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, but is typically and completely blind as to the ontological necessity and dialectical nature of such a move. Already having been ‘objectified’ through chattel slavery, the existential liberationist drive inherent in 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 a powerful source of oppression-in-itself.
Up against this imposed 'objecthood', existential liberationist subjectivity, 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.”(13)
Seizing upon this moment of constitutive self-determination, Lockean ‘New Negro’ cultural resistance against racist dehumanization, spiritually empowered and intellectually 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, then reshaped and molded to fit the hegemonic contours of western imperialism.(14)
Locke’s efforts however, no matter how socially effective in culturally preserving lived Black subjectivity, were still politically limited 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.”(15) Instead, for Black people, new values must come about in continuous resistance against the framework of western imperialist domination.
Any social identity constructed through the imposition of oppressive dehumanizing violence must be overcome through a new social identity constructed through emancipatory human insurrection against that oppression. This resistance becomes a constitutive self-determining praxis which lays a new foundation for an ascendant humanity. “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.”(16) This Fanonist perspective strikes at the very heart of matter: the word ‘nigger’ does not need to be buried for it will disappear on its own, following, not preceding, the disappearance of the dehumanization and oppression it was constructed to discursively 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 seemingly endless changing identity of human beings of African descent in America; having gone from 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 has been a constant and unyielding existential liberationist narrative of continuing relevance to our socio-political situation within an advanced neo-liberal capitalist society. Overdetermined-from-without, we relentlessly find ourselves facing a situation of who and what we are. In explicitly Sartrean language; we discover that we constitute ourselves. We face our own freedoms and our own responsibilities for it. We face ourselves as freedom.
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-political 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.”(17) 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 which took place with an almost surreal circuslike atmosphere, merely indicates the degree to which the NAACP is out of touch with the neo-colonial American ghetto, or more specifically, with the postmodern lumpenproletariat.
Less surprising is the fact that it was a nonsensical racist stream of consciousness rant(18), 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 was 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 attempt to establish personal control over an African American man, Richards wasted no time in reminding him of the very real potentialities of constituted 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 an American exceptionalist ideology has blinded him from the socio-historical narrative of human liberation which has characterized 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. Richards seeks to remind us of our place, 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 the postmodern lumpenproletariat, our embarrassment originates in the sheer inadequacy of the audience member’s response to the situation. It was extremely difficult listening to a Black man whine and plead for acknowledgement of having been wronged; “That was uncalled for.” 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 been dealt a decisive ‘beatdown’, but the heckler’s response to being publicly berated was inordinately passive, reflecting the depressing lack of radical agency which currently exists amongst the postmodern lumpenproletariat.
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 socio-political oppression. For the average ‘white’ person however, racism is a spiritual crutch 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-political comedy, as it held an actual funeral for the word ‘nigger’ complete with an actual burial.(19) I’m sure Black people everywhere feel a lot better now that we know 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. Then 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 critique of the hegemonic power of an advanced neo-liberal capitalist society, 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”. Somewhere at that very moment, an oppressor smiles smugly and confidently, knowing his continuing efforts have not been in vain.
Any existential movement, by Black people, involving an authentic recovery of human ‘being’, finds itself at odds with the structural-inert nature of oppressive power which grounds and binds the vested interests of western imperialism. The only thing accomplished by this bogus burial of the word ‘nigger’ was that more rhetorical dust was kicked up on vast populations of Black people who are already buried alive under the advanced neo-liberal capitalist tombstone of assimilation.
The reality is that both words ‘nigger’ and ‘negro’ are discursive echoes of that dehumanizing socio-historical brutality which culminates in the murder of Man and finds its original authority and voice in racist western imperialism. Tragically, in “our virtual world, the question of the Real, of the referent, of the subject and its object, can no longer even be posed.”(20)
(1)Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, (London, 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, (New York, 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, (New York, Library of America, 1994) p.400.
(6)“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. 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, (New York, Da Capo Press, 1941, 1997) pp.160-1.
(7)Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (New York, Grove Press, 1967) p.109.
(8)Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance, (New York, Westiminster, 1983) p.55.
(9)Alain Locke, The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Alain Locke, (New York, Touchstone, 1925, 1997) p.4.
(10)Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class & Nation in the Making of the New Negro, (Urbana&Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2003, 2008) p.vii. In this outstanding work, Foley brilliantly and critically examines the socio-political tensions which informed the historical conditions which allowed Locke’s vision of “the New Negro as cultural pluralist” to supercede the Marxist vision of “the New Negro as class-conscious warrior”.
(11)Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, (New York, 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.”
(12)Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1983, 2000) p.316.
(13)Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York, Grove Press, 1963) p.246.
(14)Check out Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, (Chicago, African American Images, 1933, 2000), J.A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color Vols.1&2, (New York, Touchstone, 1946, 1996). George G.M. James, Stolen Legacy, (New York, African American Images, 1954, 2001). Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, (Chicago, Lawrence Hill Books, 1967, 1974). John G. Jackson, Introduction to African Civilizations, (New York, Citadel Press, 1970, 1990). Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Vols.1&2, (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1987, 1991).
(15)Fanon p.244.
(16)Fanon, p.246.
(17)Fanon, p.189.
(18)I transcribed Michael Richard’s racist rant from a TMZ video clip I found on YOUTUBE.com.
(19)Associated Press, Monday, July 9th, 2007
(20)Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000) p.62.