Paradoxical Blackness
The legitimacy and absurdity of a “Black” identity
If being Black is only skin deep, then being Black means nothing at all.
Desk duty.
Another banal clock-counting day at the Lewisville Public Library. I was on my feet thumbing through a mess of patron reservations when a voice reached out from the other side of the shelf. His accent pointed to Africa. He asked me an easy reference question that would’ve sent him upstairs if it weren’t for his ulterior motive. From there we slid into a chummy conversation about culture before he broached his subject of curiosity.
“Why are Black people so lazy? If my people had the resources that your people had we’d take over everything!”
“Black people have everything they could ever need here! Why do so many of them want to be thugs?”
I was diplomatic, yet combative. Patient. I laid out what’s obvious for many, pointing to the history, the exclusion, the terrorism; How mainstream American consciousness has generally lied about Black people’s contributions by omission. How a couple hundred years-chattelized people may still be finding its way in the wake of many fates worse than death. I made sure to acknowledge post-Civil War Black Codes and racial segregation has left an insurmountable deficit — all by design.
Even then, I understood how to him, an immigrant — uninitiated to the oral histories and ancestral knowledge that I had by osmosis — judged Blacks against popular culture that’s polarizing even amongst Black Americans at times. I was dressed in a polo shirt and jeans; non-imposing and clean-cut. I was a safe choice for this conversation. I played apologist to one accusation of inadequacy after another. Me, a soon-to-be college graduate working in a suburban public library.
I’d counter.
He’d dig in further.
I walked away as insulted as I could be on the clock.
He was genuinely confused, and so was I.
I can still hear the frustration in his voice, but I remember the condescension more.
As a dyed-in-the-wool existentialist, questions of identity occur naturally to me. The library exchange would be the first of 2 inflection points that prompted a reexamination of what being “Black” means.
The American lens
Personally, I’ve yet to hear of a group that rivals the identitarian knot that is the Black American. The prototypical Black American is a descendant of enslaved Africans that were captured, commodified, tortured, generationally stripped of identity and then molded by proximity. Identities like “Black”, “White”, or “Asian” could be considered a natural consequence of living in a pluralistic society. It’s generally accepted as tactful, but inherently unconcerned with nuance. That’s evident anytime you apply for a job or tick a box on the census. Growing up with my colloquial understanding of “Black” and “White”, cognitive dissonance showed up more innocently — trying to comprehend how a “Hispanic” person could be Black or White if Spanish was not a fixture in the “Black” or “White” communities. Regardless, an answer required was an answer given.
People with our skin tone around the world would be brought under the “Black” umbrella, especially in relation to their treatment from “White” countries. Black people, perpetuating American culture, bought into this oversimplification because skin colour was the visibile form of social currency for most of American history. It painted a picture that ‘White folks’ could be a family the next street over and people in Russia, France or Greece. And I was left to square how all of these people were the same and nothing alike at the same time.
Frog meets scorpion
Barack Obama was the harbinger of my political awakening like many in 2007. Millennials felt the disturbance in the Force as our futures grew darker post-9/11. The ground was shifting beneath our feet and we looked for a saviour to stem the tide. Obama postured himself as the counterweight to what Neo-conservativism had wrought in the world. He had all the right platitudes with an iconic cadence that convinced me ‘hope and change’ was only a vote away. I’d learn that political deception is accepted as a rite of passage more than a moral affront in U.S. politics.
The fight for a public healthcare option ended extremely fast.
The banks were made whole after spectacular fraudulence.
Bush-era tax cuts didn’t sunset. They were made permanent.
Occupy Wall Street wasn’t heeded, it was obliterated.
The “dumb wars” didn’t end — they expanded.
I was typically the lone dissident in the room; sympathetic to criticisms like that of the late Glen Ford, Glenn Greenwald, and Chris Hedges. I was mostly ignored as a malcontent, written off as a contrarian or accused of watching Fox News. A reflexive defense of his actions, no matter how consistent with his predecessor or worse, was a script that ran on command for so many reasons — facts be damned.
“There are two currents in Black political thought and action that have been there ever since there has been a Black polity in the United States. One is self-determinationist, a politics that is progressive that seeks to transform the world around us…and one that is representationist that does not seek transformation of society but only wants to make sure that Black people are represented at all levels of the power structure... That representationist tendency was fulfilled totally with the election of the first Black president.”
— Glen Ford, On Contact with Chris Hedges
In time, dispassionately, clarity would lead me to two strains of thought in respects to Obama’s presidency:
1) wrongheadedness and conventional political deception; and
2) my projections and expectations.
For relevancy’s sake, I’ll speak to the latter.
Parsing President Obama’s “Blackness” has been a hot topic since his ascension. Everyone in the diaspora qualifies as “Black” under the juvenile American paradigm of identity, but not everyone under that umbrella is Black by heritage in the colloquial sense of the identity. With Obama, I realized my expectations were ultimately born out of his skin tone’s proximity to my own. Pure assumption; I was cultured to view anyone I shared pigmentation with as tantamount to kin, and so was anyone else I knew around me. A very capricious notion.
Barack Obama was born to Ann Dunham, a White woman from Kansas, and Barack Obama, Sr., a Kenyan man. He grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia far removed from the historically Christofascist South of my familial backdrop, but not untouched by the assumptions that comes with a melanated existence. With establishing axioms, differences in environment are more consequential than skin colour by magnitudes.
No one actually feels Blackness in their skin, it’s more of an always-on spiritual clash of paranoia and pride as a condensed description. My parents and further back lived in the reality of the Americana underbelly. The only way those memories persist unwashed by the shame of the guilty is because of the oral histories passed down to us by elders.
Alan Keyes, a former U.S. Ambassador and Conservative pundit, challenged Barack Obama for the Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos in 2004, he was asked about being used as a racial mascot (essentially) to counter Obama’s “Blackness” as significant in his rise. Keyes’ response was partially as follows:
“Barack Obama and I have the same race — that is, physical characteristics. We are not from the same heritage…there’s something racist about not looking at the specific heritage of individuals, but only looking at their skin color.
My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country… My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been deeply shaped by my struggle — deeply emotional and deeply painful — with the reality of that heritage and what it says about humanity…”
- Alan Keyes, 2004
By birth rite I’d accumulate stories to calibrate my scales of justice. I had a direct feed into mid-20th century southern terror and beyond. This type of knowledge is cellular. An epigenetic library of generational reference under the Wilkersonian idea of American caste.
My grandmother told me about staring in terror as her father sat armed with a rifle near the front door during the Beaumont race riot of 1943.
My grandfather recalled being warned to stay off the streets by his White boss who was kind of enough to drive him home.
My dad visited home from college in 1974.
“You better come and see about your brother,” said a voice beckoning for his presence at Hardin County jail. When he did, he found his brother unconscious in a pool of dried blood in Hardin County jail, having bled from the ear. He later died from his injuries. The autopsy made note of a skull fracture and it was ruled an accident.
Privately, a doctor in Houston indicated otherwise.
Huff Creek Road was just the road to visit my grandfather’s grave before 1998. I can still remember the fluorescent paint circles scattered around — markers for scattered remains and belongings of James Byrd after his brutal murder by dragging.
I remember my dad asking me if “that shotgun is still in the backseat?”, after two guys shouted “NIGGERS” at him and his two sons passing by on the highway near Zion Hill Cemetery, my grandmother’s resting place.
Is it reasonable to assume — or worst, expect — someone who lacks a particular context to carry motivations of people that do?
I came to terms with my disappointments with President Obama’s administration. They were misplaced. Despite what I felt the night of November 8, 2008, I don’t believe America has achieved what it thought it had beyond strict symbolism.
The sum of experience
“Black” was an evolution of the African-American identity (just as “African-American” was an evolution of sentiment prompted by Jesse Jackson in the late 80's in the post-”Negro” awakening of the Civil Rights movement.) It became a successful export for self-reference for the African diaspora living among White populations and anyone else that related.
For a continental African or Caribbean person, identity is at least buttressed by a country of origin with a congruent dominant culture, save for tribal differences. Many nuances are also involved regarding national institutions of slavery among the vying colonies in the New World, especially in practices of record-keeping.
To anyone familiar with American racializing, people of the African diaspora and continental Africans alike are simply “Black” by this standard. For non-American “Blacks”, this provides a similar dual-identity to that of White Americans that tend to be able to trace their roots — the option to be Nigerian, Jamaican, Guyanese, or “Black” if they so choose. Another wrinkle: many in the African diaspora understand their perceived identity as a common American practice and acknowledge it out of expediency with no intent to forge their American counterpart’s identity.
Many Black-passing peoples reject the association — often vehemently — because of negative associations. I can personally attest to reflections abroad of Black Americans. Opinions are more often full of antipathy. One must appreciate the irony between the contempt for Black Americans by many cultures abroad, yet the ability to be seen as the same at a moment of convenience.
That’s to say being associated with Black Americans isn’t all bad. What Black Americans establish in culture just as often reverberates around the world. A proud legacy of art, innovations, and resistance that sets a standard for ‘cool’. The fluidity of this identity can prove challenging for Black Americans who have been trained to see Negroid features as the sum of identity. Black Americans often take offense to people that look like them declining to identify with them out of a perceived rejection of ‘what they are’ or at the least ‘how they’re seen’ under American racialization. Even among those that share my origins, perspective divergence is to be expected. But, if that group includes people that promote themselves as an avatar for people it doesn’t share a context with, the futility of this identity becomes apparent.
In recent years, distinguishing descendants of the formerly-enslaved in America from more recent immigrant cultures have found traction. A.D.O.S. (American Descendants of Slaves) has grown from conversation to organization, but is rejected by some as exclusionary and divisive to the “Black” community — paradox notwithstanding. Although it may not supplant “Black” or “African-American” as a primary qualifier, it nods to the growing sentiment to consider the historical conditions as a social verification along with the African phenotype. This means the familial lines that suffered directly under Reconstruction — the second era of American history that denied Blacks, specifically, their due in the American saga. Those results are not a reality everyone that identifies as “Black” carries with them, despite the effects of the Maafa in their own heritage.
Conclusion
Humans exist in a continuum of emotional and intellectual contagions. These culminate through religions, fashion, art, food, etc. and become transferred, transformed, or annihilated. “Race” is a framework informed by immaterial pieces of ourselves that we aren’t capable or ready to part with. There are too many undressed psychic wounds collected through the ages; too many facets of how we order ourselves that give oxygen to this archaic value in lieu of our ability to ‘know better’. The world does not often enough operate in terms of universal qualities, but instead in particulars with corporeal consequences.
Self-acknowledgment should not be seen as self-otherization, but its to say that Black Americans are well within reason to acknowledge the particulars of conditions as qualifiers for a distinct identity in the African diaspora. It should not even be seen as a rejection of pan-Africanist views, but as an embrace of the aeonic improbabilities that ultimately gave way to form.
Of which — in time — are destined to change by every indication of human history.
