Four Autobiographical Notes
When people endeavor to make sense of the genocidal and ethnocidal horrors of colonial racial capitalism, they too often endeavor to imagine the spectacular acts of mass murder and mass destruction perpetrated against Black peoples, Indigenous peoples, and other non-white peoples. The difficulty is, however, that we can only make sense of these spectacular acts of death and destruction after we have, to borrow a phrase from Saidiya Hartman, illuminated the “terror[s] of the mundane and quotidian” from which these spectacular acts emerge. As I argued in the dispatch titled “The Therapeutic Imagination”, if we fail to counter colonial racial capitalism in its mundane and quotidian forms, we will only ever find ourselves belatedly reacting to it in its most spectacularly violent forms with a spectacular violence of our own.
The following dispatch is composed of four autobiographical observations that illuminate how the mundane and quotidian facts of my own existence are bound up with the genocidal and ethnocidal horrors of colonial racial capitalism. I have attempted to write dispatches of this sort before. Indeed, the third note below is a revised version of an earlier attempt, a dispatch titled “Another Black Man in America”. But it is my hope that more and more of my dispatches from here on out will be of this sort, working with and from the mundane and quotidian. This hope was first expressed in my first ever dispatch written two years ago, “Radical Everydayness”, but this hope has languished in obscurity for much of the past two years. Reading Christina Sharpe’s marvelous Ordinary Notes, twice over the course of the past two months, brought this hope back into prominence and inspired me to act on it.
First Note. Three Scrambles for Afrika
The First Scramble for Afrika, “The Slave Trade”, was the proto-colonial scramble to turn Afrika into “a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins”: to kidnap and deport/export the greater share of enslaved Afrikans to the New World. During this Scramble, approximately thirty million Afrikans were kidnapped, deported, and submitted to slavery and social death in other regions of the world, and approximately total of one hundred million lives were taken from Afrika, including those killed during capture, in the holding camps, on the death marches to the coast, and over the course the Middle Passage. The First Scramble was defeated by the resistance of the enslaved Afrikans of the diaspora, exemplified by the Hatian Revolution and the General Strike that decided the U.S. Civil War, which transformed slavery from a profitable luxury into a Trojan Horse that threatened to undermine New World settler colonial empires from within.
The Second Scramble for Afrika, “The Land Grab”, which took off in the wake of the “non-event of emancipation” and the closing of the frontiers of the New World, was the proper colonial scramble to conquer, colonize, and exploit the Afrikan continent and its inhabitants with extreme prejudice. During the Second Scramble, Europeans overthrew the rulers whom they had propped as agents and clients, and they declared themselves the new enlightened rulers of the continent. Though Europeans claimed to have abolished slavery on the continent in the process of conquering it, they actually re-created the horrors of New World chattel slavery in the heart of the continent. The largest territorial claim on the continent, the Congo Free State was settled and run as one giant slave plantation, and half of the territory’s population, an estimated 10 million Congolese people, would be murdered by the overseers of Master Leopold’s plantation-state. The Second Scramble was defeated by the organized resistance of colonized Afrikans on the continent which transformed colonies from a profitable luxuries into dangerous liabilities.
The Third Scramble for Afrika, “The Debt Trap”, is the ongoing neo-colonial scramble to under-develop and over-burden the postcolonies of the Afrikan continent in order to extract tribute from them in the form of debt servicing payments, valuable natural and human resources, and pledges of fealty to this or that neo-colonial economic bloc. The Third Scramble is, in a sense, a return to the modus operandi of the First. Instead of imposing foreign rule on the peoples of the continent, today’s neo-colonizers bribe, corrupt, and terrorize the statesman and warlords of the postcolonies to compel them to sabotage and sell their nation-states into debt slavery, recalling the manner in which the Afrikan kings and warlords of the early modern period were bribed, corrupted and terrorized by proto-colonizers to sell their most vulnerable subjects and neighboring peoples into chattel slavery. Home to 34 of today’s 50 poorest states in the world, Afrika loses more to capital flight, unequal exchanges, and brain drain than it obtains from aid, external borrowing, foreign direct investment, and remittances from Afrikans abroad. If the global economy weren’t rigged, Afrika would be a “net creditor” to the rest of the world.
I am a child of the Third Scramble, born to Lacustrine Bantu peoples who migrated from the postcolony of Tanzania, amongst the poorest of the Third World, to the Settler States of the Amerikaners, the present First World Imperial hegemon, by way of the United Kingdom, the declining predecessor and forerunner of the present hegemon.
My parents secured their permits to enter the First World by way of the extraction of valuable natural and human resources from Afrika. My mother’s entry permit to the First World was purchased for her by her father, an urbane merchant who made his money in the 1970s and 1980s by facilitating the extractive and unequal trade of valuable minerals from the resource rich regions surrounding Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, Congo, and Burundi, his homelands, to the European continent. By contrast, my father, the son of a rural family enlisted in a colonial agriculture “modernization” scheme, was granted an entry permit to the First World after competing in the intellectual hunger games organized by British colonial schools and proving himself a valuable human resource, worthy of extraction from the Afrikan continent, to be refined in academic and research institutions in the First World Imperial core, and, then, either installed as a comprador elite back in his peripheral homeland or, alternatively, kept on as a decorative beast in the Imperial core.
My parents met while studying in the United Kingdom in the midst of the Thatcherite neoliberal counter-revolution that began in the late 1970s, and they were granted entry permits to the Settler States of the Amerikaners a few years later in the early 1980s, when my father was offered a position as a decorative beast in the service of the National Institutes of Health, arriving in the Settler States at the height of the Reaganite neoliberal counter-revolution. These two neoliberal counter-revolutions waged against oppressed ethno-classes in the United Kingdom and the Settler States coincided, of course, with a global neoliberal counter-revolution, a period of open economic warfare and covert military operations targeting the Third World anti-colonial nationalist movements that had won national independence but had not defeated the forces of unequal geopolitical integration. This global neo-liberal counter-revolution culminated in the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s, which firmly yoked Third World postcolonies back to their (neo-)colonizers according to a logic of abjection and unequal integration that cast Afrikan nation-states, continental and diasporic, as the most abject of all nation-states.
If it wasn’t for the depredations and deprivations that the Third World debt crisis inflicted upon a recalcitrant Tanzania with a peculiar harshness, it is quite possible my parents might have chosen to return to Tanzania in the late 1980s instead of choosing to make lives for themselves and their children in the Settler States of the Amerikaners.
Second Note. Four Waves of Amerikaner Settlement
It follows that I am not only a child of the Third Scramble for Afrika, I am also a child of the Fourth Wave of Amerikaner Settlement.
I was born in the neoliberal “global city” that was New York in the late 1980s, in the immediate wake of the successes of the global neoliberal counter-revolution described above, my father having secured a position as a decorative beast at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Growing up in the financial capital of the Settler States, the cruelties that the Three Scrambles inflicted upon the Afrikan continent were distant and spectral realities to me during my formative years, but the brutalities that the Four Waves of Amerikaner Setterism inflicted upon the peoples of the Afrikan diaspora in the Settlers States were proximal and palpable to me. The after-lives and present-lives of the Four Waves of Amerikaner Settlement were everywhere around me, in the built environments of the Amerikaners, in Amerikaners’ ways of doing and dwelling, and in Amerikaners’ habits of speaking and writing.
During the First Wave of Euro-Amerikaner Settlement, “Native Genocide and Negro Slavery”, Euro-Amerikaners conquered and settled the lands East of the Mississippi River system and endeavored to either enslave or exterminate the Natives whose lands they conquered. Extermination of the Natives being deemed preferable to their enslavement, the Euro-Amerikaners imported and exploited enslaved Afrikans, racialized “Negroes”, to working on chain-gangs and in forced labor camps, developing stolen land and sweating in extractive and productive industries, especially in the South.
During the Second Wave of Settlement, “Manifest Destiny”, was the wave during which Euro-Amerikaners proceeded to settle the lands West of the Mississippi River system, importing indentured “Coolies” from Asia (a majority of them Chinese) to develop the newly conquered territories, as supplement to the labor of enslaved Afrikans as well as that of the Mexican settlers whom the Euro-Amerikaners were to displace and force into subservient roles as laborers.
The Third Wave of Settlement, “Industrial Empire”, followed the closing of the frontier. During this Third Wave, the Euro-Amerikaners rapidly accelerated the mass importation and assimilation of impoverished working class populations from Europe in order to (i) re-populate and settle lands that were being depopulated as non-Europeans (the Native, the Afrikan, the Mexican mestizo, and the Asian) endured expulsions, ethnic cleansing, and terror campaigns to keep them in subordinate positions relative to white Euro-Amerikaners; (ii) work the factory floors that were proliferating as the Northern Settler industrial economy prevailed over the Southern Settler plantation economy in the wake of the Amerikaner Civil War; and (iii) serve in the Euro-Amerikaner military as the Settlers endeavored to acquire an overseas empire for themselves by force of arms, looking towards the then hegemonic British Empire as role model and rival.
During the ongoing Fourth Wave of Settlement, “Global Hegemony”, the Euro-Amerikaners have leveraged their status as global hegemon in the wake of the Imperialist World Wars (1914-1945) in order to (i) promote an increasing portion of the assimilated European settler-citizen working class to soft-labor regimes and extend them credit on relatively easy terms to fuel their consumer habits; (ii) export the most physically and psychologically degrading hard-labor regimes over the border and overseas to neo-colonies, client states, and treaty ports in the Third World; and (iii) import migrant laborers from the Third World to do the most psychically and physically degrading forms of hard-labor remaining within the borders of the Settler States, supplementing the labor of established “national minorities” (the Native Amerikan, the Afrikan Amerikan, the Latin Amerikan mestizo, and the Asian Amerikan), and using immigration and border security measures to render Third World migrants precarious and vulnerable to expulsions.
Furthermore, during this ongoing Fourth Wave, an effective counter-insurgency strategy of the Euro-Amerikaners, deployed against “national minority” populations and Third World migrants alike, has been to fraction off the talented tenth from “national minority” populations and from foreign-born non-European migrant populations and to grant them the status of “near whites” or “honorary whites”. These talented tenths are kept in relative luxury as decorative beasts in the Big Houses of Empire (the Ivory Towers, the Executive Suites, the White Cubes, and the Arenas of Sport and Entertainment), and/or they are employed to manufacture consent to forms of unequal integration and apartheid amongst their natal communities, both locally and globally, as agents of the White-Saviour Industrial Complex.
My father, a medical doctor employed at research institutions, but now retired, was counted amongst that talented tenth fractioned off from populations of foreign-born Afrikan migrants. Like many of his ilk, he spent his working life competing in the intellectual “hunger games” for individuals from oppressed ethno-classes: he never stopped having to prove himself worthy of his place in the talented tenths. He was a slave to the imperative that he outperform his peers while graciously receiving less for his labors than his peers. He was always under pressure to either produce an outstanding “contribution” or, alternatively, to service the egos of his white benefactors according to their narcissistic or masochistic tastes. Decades of performing in this degrading and embittering competition, in a hostile country an ocean away from his homeland, took its toll on his body, mind, and spirit, and it made it difficult love and care for his wife and children in tonic ways beyond his being a “provider”.
Separating from my father when I was 12, and henceforth refusing to suffer the imposition of being beholden to a patriarchal “provider”, my mother went from being the kept woman of a Black man of distinction, ensconced in the talented tenths, to being a precarious and vulnerable Afrikan migrant engaged in hard-labor. After striking out on her own, she would spend the rest of her life performing underpaid and exhausting care work for persons with disabilities who had the privilege of access to social services, most of them white Amerikaners. A toxic combination of work induced stresses and illnesses misdiagnosed due to medical racism would kill her the month after my 22nd birthday.
Third Note. Another Black Man in Amerika; or, the Fact of Racial Genocide
By the time I was ten years old, the imperative had been drummed into my ears, beamed into my eyes, and even beaten into my flesh: excel intellectually, maintain good manners, be well-spoken, and, by all means, never let your appearance, bearing, and conduct slacken when you are under the Gaze of the White Man (or his proxies), lest you be taken for an uncultured, uncouth, and uncivilized Negro.
Whenever I failed in this regard — whenever I performed poorly at school, whenever I spoke and acted out of turn, whenever my appearance, bearing, and conduct was wild and unruly — I would be punished by my parents, and my punishment would inevitably be accompanied by the refrain, “Keep this up and you’ll become just another Black man in Amerika.”
My parents knew that I knew that being “just another Black man in Amerika” was something dreadful, even though the reasons why this was the case had never been explicitly stated to me by them or by anyone else. There was, of course, no need for them to state the obvious to me, was there? All that they had to teach me explicitly was the imperative that I save myself from the dreadful fate of becoming “just another Black man in Amerika” by and through becoming a “Black man of distinction”, counted amongst the talented tenths.
Now, I must state the obvious here, lest any reader play innocent. To be taken for “just another Black man in Amerika” is to be subject to murder as an unintended consequence of routine disciplinary action, or as normal(ized) accident, or as the collateral damage of society’s pursuit of progressive optimization. My murder requires little extra formal justification if I am taken for “just another Black man in Amerika”, but it requires detailed formal justification if I am taken for a Black man of distinction and not “just another Black man”. Intellectual achievement, good manners, proper diction, a sophisticated appearance, bearing, and code of conduct — all of this signals to the world at large that I may be a Black man of distinction and that my murder may require detailed formal justification. Knowing that my life was in real danger otherwise, my parents quite literally beat the imperative to signal distinction into me as a child, from the age of six up until the age of twelve. I am not alone in this regard: too many Black boys have been and are still being taught the imperative to signal distinction by and through injury and insult, acts of corporeal and communicative violence inflicted upon their bodies and psyches by people whom they call family, friends, mentors, and teachers. This sort of violence is but one of the many scourges of racism.
“What is racism?” Michel Foucault asked at the end of his 1975-1976 lectures at the Collège de France, titled “Society Must Be Defended”. Foucault’s answer to this question has stuck with me. In part, this is because being able to cite the sophisticated conjectures of erudite and esoteric Frenchmen is a mark of distinction for a Black man in Amerika, but it is also because the sophistication of Foucault’s conjecture is actually rather profound. Foucault’s answer runs as follows:
[Racism] is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. […] In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable condition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the state functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the state. […] If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say “killing,” I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.
So, what is profound about Foucault’s definition of racism? Well, as Foucault himself puts it, his definition holds that “[t]he specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power.” To be rather more specific, modern racism is bound up with techniques and technologies of normalizing power: normalizing statements, normalizing implements, and normalizing environments. Going a step beyond Foucault, insofar as optimizing powers are variable controllers and modulators of normalizing powers, I hold that prevailing techniques and technologies of optimizing power give rise to modular racisms or “postmodern racisms” that are more “liberal” and “progressive” than the modern racisms engendered when techniques and technologies of normalizing power prevail.
Techniques and technologies of normalizing power operate in rather obvious ways but, at the same time, they make it easy for some individuals to disavow their rather obvious operations, to mis-attribute their effects, to blame “isolated bad actors”, “being at the wrong place at the wrong time”, and “accidents of birth”. Those who say that the police murder of another Black man in Amerika is just a “normal accident” are disavowing the obvious fact that techniques and technologies of power have effectively normalized the “accidental” murder of Black men by police in Amerika. Of course, those who find it easy to disavow this obvious fact are those for whom “accidental” murder by police has not been so normalized. By contrast, those for whom“accidental” murder by police has been normalized must perform remarkable mental gymnastics if they are to disavow this obvious fact and, what’s more, they risk being murdered if they act in accord with such a disavowal.
Techniques and technologies of optimizing power are more subtle and insidious. Taking it for granted that the murder of another Black man in Amerika is a “normal accident”, optimizing powers aim to find ways to decrease the occurrence of “normal accidents” by subjecting Black men to increased administration and supervision. In other words, an optimizing power asks itself, “How can we better administer and supervise the lives of Black men so as to lower their normal murder-rate?” Optimizing powers tell us that Black males must not be left to their own devices: they “prove” to us that Black males are less likely to be murdered if they are placed into special after-school detention programs as young children, placed into special summer employment programs as young adults, and live their entire lives in neighborhoods patrolled by squadrons of police officers equipped with body-mounted surveillance cameras.
Optimizing powers teach us that Black male populations are “at risk populations” or “populations in crisis” that really ought to be set apart from other populations and put under special administration and supervision. To teach us this, optimizing powers will invariably cite the “fact” that Black male populations are unusually vulnerable to the “normal accident” that is murder, conveniently forgetting that this “fact” is artificially induced, the result of the effective operation of normalizing powers. Next, optimizing powers will “prove” the virtues of special administration and supervision by running more or less “controlled” experiments: they will demonstrate that sub-populations of Black men that submit to special administration and supervision are less likely to be murdered than sub-populations that are left to their own devices. What needs to be understood here, however, is the fact that optimizing powers effectively work to maintain and increase murder-rates in sub-populations left to their own devices relative to those that receive special administration and supervision. In effect, this means that optimizing powers confront Black males with a deathly ultimatum, “If you want to reduce your chances of being murdered, you must submit to some form of special administration and supervision; there is no alternative”.
Optimizing powers, in other words, constitute a protection racket that compels its victims to surrender their autonomy instead of (or in addition to) their money. To recognize this is to recognize that incarceration as a form of socio-political death in the US is only the most obvious part of the New Jim Crow power formation. To get a fuller picture of the New Jim Crow, I suggest you pay closer attention to the organs of the white savior industrial complex that operate within the US: they pass for social services and charitable organizations but they effectively compel Black people to surrender their autonomy, to submit to special administration and supervision, in order to receive protection from physical and socio-political death.
The Black man who signals to the world that they are a “Black man of distinction”, one worthy of ranking in the talented tenth, is signaling to the world that they are ready, willing, and able to submit to special administration and supervision at all times. The Black man who signals to the world that they are “just another Black man” is one who signals to the world that they will resist special administration and supervision. Black parents, fearing for the lives of their Black boys, are pressured to ensure that their boys are always ready, willing, and able to receive special administration and supervision. Indeed, returning to my own example, my parents wanted to ensure that I was ready, willing, and able to submit to extra-curricular administration and supervision but, between the ages of six and twelve at least, I actively resisted submitting to the most basic curriculum of administration and supervision — I was a truant and an underachiever. Knowing that my failure to submit to administration and supervision might very well result in my being murdered, my parents employed injury and insult, corporeal and communicative violence, to teach me a lesson and to compel me to submit. This is to say, in other words, that my parents thought that it was reasonable to employ corporeal and communicative violence against their child if doing so effectively meant keeping their child from being murdered. Raising me up in New York City and Pittsburgh during 1990s, during the heyday of the superpredator myth, my parents were by no means alone in this regard.
Now, I need to reiterate that, throughout this text, I have not been referring to “simply murder as such” but “also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.” In other words, rather than “simply murder as such”, I have been referring to murder disguised as unintended consequence of routine disciplinary action, to murder disguised as normal(ized) accident, and to murder disguised as the collateral damage of society’s pursuit of progressive optimization. If you will allow me to interpolate a text by Friedrich Engels:
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds […] in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
The fact that Black peoples who resist special administration and supervision are subjected, in the very manner that Engels described above, to mass murder by omission — this is precisely what George Jackson in Blood in My Eye named “the fact of racial genocide” in its most mundane and quotidian form. Recognizing this, one must realize that Black parents who “discipline” their children by inflicting corporeal and communicative violence upon them are reacting to the oppressive fact of racial genocide. Ay, and to criticize their “reactive” parenting without acknowledging the oppressive fact of racial genocide is to criticize them in bad faith. That I am alive, and that I am able to write this text with a modicum of skill and self-awareness is, in part, a testament to the ways in which their parenting succeeded in spite of the fact of racial genocide and their reactions to it.
It should also be added that my parents failure to discipline me into accepting administration and supervision was just as liable to have me taken from them as their “going too far” in disciplining me. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Black parents are reported to child-welfare officials both when their children refuse to submit to administration and supervision and when they compel their children to submit to administration and supervision. Black parents are perpetually being punished by white Amerikaners (and their proxies) for either under-reacting and over-reacting to the fact of racial genocide. The effective result of this being that half of all Black children in the Settler States experience a child-welfare investigation by the time they reach age 18. As case in point, I should add that, for a brief time during my childhood, I was removed from my parents home and placed in the care of a child-welfare agency.
Fourth Note. Disowning Our Ancestral Tongues; or, the Workings of Ethnocide
Entangled with the psychic and physical violence inflicted upon me in order to teach me the imperative to become a Black man of distinction, there is also the matter of the cultural violence that was inflicted upon me towards the same end, which served to keep me from properly communing with other continental and diasporic Afrikans.
My older sister was found to be “delayed” in her speech by her pre-school teachers, and my parents took her to a speech language pathologist when she was around three or four and I was around one or two. The pathologist told them that the problem was that they were speaking to her in multiple languages that were grammatically incompatible. If they wanted her and, by extension, me to advance beyond our peers in English language acquisition and performance, the pathologist prescribed that they speak only one language at home: English. Thus, between the ages of one and two, my parents ceased speaking to me in an Afrikan tongue, and I never learned Swahili to any degree of competency until I made my own efforts after leaving home. This is to say nothing of learning the Lacustrine Bantu tongues (Bwari, Jita, Kerewe) which are now effectively dying off in my extended family with the passing of my grandparents’ generation of speakers.
Going further and digging deeper, my parents also had a strong desire for me not to speak Afrikan American Vernacular English. Indeed, the term “Ebonics” briefly came into vogue during a formative period of my youth, and my parents latched onto it. My father went to great lengths correcting what he took to be the “bad grammar” of “Ebonics” coming out of my mouth — a grammar he recognized to be inflected by a number of “Afrikan-isms”.
In sum, my parents, effectively, wanted me to speak like a well-educated white person, perhaps even with a tendency to drop more Oxbridge-esque British-isms than American-isms. Ay, and my parents pretty much succeeded in shaping my speech patterns accordingly, with their efforts having been reinforced by my primary schooling: I only attended majority Black schools for three years total between Pre-K to 12th Grade, with my elementary schooling mostly taking place on New York’s extremely white Upper East Side, where I recall many little white kids with Black nannies from the Carribean. In any case, my speech was so polished that Afrikans and other international students who attended college with me in the US joked that I spoke in my classes as if I had attended an elite British or American boarding school somewhere on the continent. Prior to that, when I transferred into a majority Black school in Pittsburgh at age 10, the joke was that I talked like a book. Of course, I code switch into and out of erudite white speak but, admittedly, I speak it more fluently perhaps than any other sort of speak — excepting perhaps the Black Intellectual speak of continental and diasporic Afrikans of Generations X, Y, and Z who have been groomed to join the ranks of the talented tenths.
These days, when I reflect upon the above, I believe that my parents understood that I was undeniably Black/Afrikan in appearance and would never pass for a white person by sight but, and this would be my saving grace, I could learn to speak like (and write like) a white person, neither like a child of recent immigrants from the Dark Continent with their attendant miseries nor like a descendant of those who made the Middle Passage with their own attendant miseries. They imagined that speaking like (and writing like) a white person, instead of a Black/Afrikan, would give me an edge in the crab bucket scramble for a rank amongst the talented tenth. Signs betraying excessive Backness/Afrikanity in the realm of speech and writing — realms considered coterminous with the realm of thought — are liabilities for those who would move up or maintain their rank, excepting the rare few who have earned their rank by presenting themselves as exemplary and entertaining specimens of excessive Blackness/Afrikanity.
In the chapter titled "Writing Culture in the Negro in (Dis)Forming the American Canon, R.A. Judy helps us understand the logics at work here by pointing out how true "mastery" of the White Man's tongue, and the transcendence of Blackness, is not to be found in the speaking of the White Man’s language but, rather, in the "reasoned writing" of it. That being said, however, to speak in a manner that is closer to "reasoned writing" than to the vernacular is an index of one's "mastery" of the White Man's tongue and, thus, one's transcendence of one’s Blackness. This is what my parents wanted for me: to speak like a book, in the same manner that the educated white man wrote, in order to transcend Blackness and be recognized as human. They imagined this to be imperative for me in an era when being a young Black man without distinctions was to have police brutality against you written off on a police report with the catchphrase “no humans involved”.
Going further and digging deeper, Judy teaches us that the enslaved Negro who writes their narrative demonstrates their full humanity and emancipates themself by proving that they have "mastered" a European language in and through the practice of "reasoned writing". But this emancipation is achieved by the Negro only by letting something die or, rather, killing something in himself. As Judy writes, "The death that is emancipating is the negation of the materiality of Afrika." Considering this, I am reminded of a story related to me in the form of a tweet. An older Afrikan immigrant hears another, young Afrikan on a call in the grocery store aisle while shopping. The older man turns to the younger man and says to him, "I hear my country in your voice." Which is to say, in other words, that the younger man’s accent and the so-called "errors" that constitute the materiality of his speech indicate to the older man that the younger man is also an immigrant from his home country.
To "master" the White Man's tongue, then, is to be able to speak and write in the White Man's tongue in such a manner that obliterates the materiality of the Afrikan tongue. One could say, then, that my parents were told by the speech language pathologist that hearing Afrika in their children's voices would be a liability for their children: the materiality of Afrika in our tongues would "hold us back" and "deny us opportunities". So my parents diligently spoke English, and English only, to their children until their children were "advanced" in their English language skills for their ages, negating the possibility that an Afrika tongue would hold them back, and ensuring that their children's speech would be much more like the "reasoned writing" of the White Man.
This is how ethnocide works. In its most mundane and quotidian form: it marginalizes and pathologizes subjugated cultures and, then, goes on to prescribe conformity to the dominant culture as both (i) the cure to the pathology that it has made of the persistence of subjugated cultures and (ii) the access route from the underprivileged margins to the privileged center.
