By Wahneema Lubiano | with thanks to NewBlackman
As some of the contributors articulated in Toure’s Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness,
others in numerous pieces of scholarship produced over the past
decades, and still others in public discussion in various places,
Blackness is both a form of chosen identity and, at the same
time, is an imposition from the larger social order. Under some
circumstances that imposition has coercive power and pressure behind it;
we don’t live solely within the terms of our own imaginations, not even
in our own drama around that identity. That external imposition often
interrupts our identity reveries and speaks a pathology narrative about
us and does so sometimes with and sometimes without our own consent. It
is that understanding of the imposition of coercive history in the
present moment that makes “post-blackness” inadequate as a rubric for
accurately describing the effects of structural racism, of white
supremacy in the present. And Toure takes note of that fact in his
book.
But
“post-blackness” is also situational—or, as Michael Eric Dyson asserts
in the introduction: “. . . Blackness bends to the tongue it tumbles
from at any given moment of time” (xii). And it is in this regard that
I’m interested to some great extent in specific situational elements of
the phrase’s use: its use as a means to describe a moment in cultural,
artistic, or emotional self-understanding – yes, there indeed I can see
its usefulness and it is that usefulness that I’m addressing when I’m
quoted in the book talking about why Dave Chapelle’s show prompted me
away from any simple dismissal of the phrase when Toure first brought it
up in our conversation. I thought that the phrase was a useful way to
describe what I saw as a kind of pre-figurative existence in Chapelle’s
work—he was performing possibilities of art—of humor and wit—that were
not completely captured by the imposition of social blackness both
across our history and in the present moment.
But
“post-blackness” is also situational—or, as Michael Eric Dyson asserts
in the introduction: “. . . Blackness bends to the tongue it tumbles
from at any given moment of time” (xii). And it is in this regard that
I’m interested to some great extent in specific situational elements of
the phrase’s use: its use as a means to describe a moment in cultural,
artistic, or emotional self-understanding – yes, there indeed I can see
its usefulness and it is that usefulness that I’m addressing when I’m
quoted in the book talking about why Dave Chapelle’s show prompted me
away from any simple dismissal of the phrase when Toure first brought it
up in our conversation. I thought that the phrase was a useful way to
describe what I saw as a kind of pre-figurative existence in Chapelle’s
work—he was performing possibilities of art—of humor and wit—that were
not completely captured by the imposition of social blackness both
across our history and in the present moment.
Yet,
the phrase itself is redolent of past decades of anxiety about black
art, black cultural production—an anxiety exemplified in the 1926 fight,
in the pages of The Nation magazine, between Langston Hughes
(“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”) and George Schuyler (“The
Negro Art Hokum”) around the burden of representation (as Stuart Hall
has described it) for Negro artists. “Post-blackness” is a rubric that
reminds me that cultural producers are continually caught in the dilemma
in the West of a pressure to define themselves, to distinguish
themselves, as mythic individuals—that’s the ur-narrative of U.S.
individuality writ large; so, of course, artists, other cultural
producers, cultural critics, and we ourselves continually produce
narratives of “generational shift”—it’s a handy way to make individual
space, to posit a conversational imperative, and have that imperative
recognized. And it doesn’t much matter, when that posture is assumed,
that space claimed, whether it is a new moment in fact or a seemingly new
moment—the gesture is meant to establish a possibility here and now. I
find those repeated moments sociologically rich and interesting.
But
while I don’t want to cast aspersions on that gesture, I do want to
move onto something else that came up as we explored the gesture of
Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon, something that I’d love to talk about
more, if people care to, and it’s this: the social utility, the
currency, of post-blackness. Let me make what I’m saying more concrete.
When
Toure asked me about the most racist thing that ever happened to me, my
first response (along with many of the other contributors he quoted)
was to say that structural racism enacted itself in such a way that I
wasn’t personally confronted with the most racist things that had ever
happened to me. But Toure pushed back on this; he pushed me to think
about my earlier and younger understandings of racism: the moment prior
to my arrival at an analysis of structural racism. He wanted me to
speak about something that hurt way back when. So, I told a story from
my high school years and a bad encounter with a guidance counselor bigot
because that story gave me a chance to talk about Howard University;
being a student at Howard was a moment of a kind of pre-figurative
post-blackness for me. The most powerful take-away of that story was
not the incident with the guidance counselor. What transformed my life
was my discovery of a rich and complex existence within the terms of
blackness (a situated blackness) at Howard University. I found ordinary
life at Howard. (That was the saving grace.)
My
imagination’s earned currency of post-blackness in turn contributed to a
moment of real tension at the end of my interview with Toure when we
were talking about Barack Obama, and he asked “How do we create more
Barack Obamas?” In my response, I remember telling Toure that while
Obama is certainly exceptional in that sense that he’s the U.S. head of
state, he is also ordinary; he is the matter-of-fact product of his
class origins and his elite education. I know thousands of people who
are proudly Black and intellectual, as Toure described him, but Obama’s
existence, like theirs, like ours, was largely a matter of chance and
the specifics of history. An elite education produces a Barack Obama or
any number of other specific kinds of black—or other—intellectuals.
It
is the constraint of capitalism that restricts those numbers. My last
sentence of that exchange was “And I think capitalism is a really bad
idea.” I remember that Toure responded with “Wow, we’ll really have to
talk about that sometime.”
This
then might be a great time for all of us to talk about the currency of
post-blackness within the terms of late capitalism in this moment of
occupy everywhere.
***
Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African & African American Studies at Duke University. Lubiano is the editor of The House That Race Built: Black Americans, US Terrain
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