Per Caritatem

Those familiar with Douglass’s Narrative of the Life will readily recall his creative, improvisatory maneuverings as he strove toward his goal of literacy. Given that the authoritative discourses did not even permit serious discussion of the possibility of a slave being formally educated, Douglass employed his creative intellectual and imaginative powers to create his own “school” by transforming his daily tasks into opportunities to improve his reading and writing skills. Whether it involved playing on white boys’ pride in not wanting to “lose” a writing game to a slave or bringing extra bread on an errand to gift impoverished white children in exchange for a “stealth” reading lesson, Douglass created educational sites out of mundane tasks—and more extraordinarily, he created these within a context of oppressive, unjust, and demeaning social relations. [1]

Douglass takes advantage of this antagonism and creates educational sites wherever he goes. Having utilized fences, brick walls, and pavement as make-shift copy-books,[2] Douglass states that his writing lessons were at last completed when could copy “the Italics in Webster’s Spelling Book” by memory. [3].  In addition to improvising with the objects just mentioned, Douglass notes that he had also make good use of little Master Thomas’s (Mr. Auld’s son) old and quite used copy-books. As Douglass explains, while Mrs. Auld attended her weekly Monday afternoon meeting, he would “spend time in writing in the spaces left in [little] Master Thomas’s copy-book, copying what he had written.” [4]. After seven long years with the Auld family, Douglass achieves his goal of literacy through intentional, creative acts of resistance. In other words, Douglass, well before Derrida and other deconstructionists, seeks those left over spaces, the in-between, silenced, erased and already “written” spaces in order, as Sisco puts it, “to exploit their rich potential.”[5]

However, Douglass’s attainment of literacy, just as Auld predicted, proves painful given Douglass’s status as a slave—one living yet socially dead. Having read and studied various essays and speeches arguing against slavery and promoting universal human rights, Douglass’s anger and hatred toward his oppressors intensified. As he explains, his new found ability to articulate with the utmost clarity why slavery was unjust and his increased knowledge regarding matters of justice and human rights gave rise to a deep discontentment—the “very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow”[6]. Commenting further on the double-sidedness of literacy for a slave, Douglass writes:

The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. […] I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. [7]

Douglass goes on to say that he at times wished himself ignorant or a beast—in short, he preferred any condition that would rid him of his incessant thinking. “It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me.” [8] However, he could not make his mind stop. “It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever.”[9] In other words, wish as he may, there was no turning back to blissful ignorance. Douglass’s literacy made him aware of his wretched condition as a slave in a way that was not possible before. Listen, as Douglass continues his eloquent description of how his deep longing for freedom was ever before him, bidding him draw near yet leaving him bound, boxed in, and unable to reciprocate.

[Freedom] was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm. I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed [10].

At this stage, Douglass came to the painful realization that for the slave, literacy, how ever good and necessary its attainment may be, is not sufficient for true freedom. True freedom requires the ability to participate as a full citizen and to have equal opportunities for education, employment, housing, and other rights granted fully functioning citizens qua social and political agents.  This realization in no way diminishes Douglass’s extraordinary achievements in the midst of a hostile and oppressive society. As we have seen, Douglass’s resistance to and reharmonizations of the authoritative (white) discourses and unjust socio-political practices highlight his creative ability to reconfigure his environment and re-narrative his subjectivity. However, Douglass’s freedom through literacy was partial, and, paradoxically, the limited nature of his freedom become painfully apparent as a result of his literacy.

Notes

[1] Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 41.

[2] Ibid., 44.

[3] Ibid., 44–45.

[4] Ibid., 45.

[5] Sisco, “Writing in the Spaces Left,” 201.

[6] Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 42.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 42­–3.

[10] Ibid., 43.

Both philosophers of race and sociologists have explained how the racialization of phenotypic differences and negative socio-political narratives of race such as equating blackness with criminality detrimentally affects economically disadvantaged African Americans, especially young, black males. However the stigmatization of places such as ghettos and particular urban areas also reinforces an us/them divide and negatively impacts the life chances of its residents. Along these lines, Ato Sekyi-Otu, in his work, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, analyzes how the colonized suffer violence in fixed, segregated space, or as Frantz Fanon might put it, “Manichean” regions of (non)being and mere subsistence. As Sekyi-Otu argues, spatiality takes center stage in Fanon’s descriptions of colonized existence, where separate quarters and fixed social (im)mobility constantly confront the colonized person.[1] This is not to suggest that temporality has no place in Fanon’s theorizing. Fanon, for example, speaks of the colonized existing in “dead time” and makes multiple references to the fact that the black person’s past and future, because already negatively scripted by dominant white narratives, constantly threatens his or her present.[2] It is, however, to claim that Fanon’s thematizing metaphors of spatiality and the primacy, analytically speaking, that he gives them, is part of a larger critique of classical Marxism (and certain currents in existentialism.)[3] Rather than explicate inequality in terms of  “social relations of production” and time or unfree, alienated labor, which involves a qualitative loss and distortion of our experience of time, Fanon unmasks the “logic of social hierarchy which ‘parcels out the world’ by virtue of a politics of space founded on race.”[4]  In other words, for Fanon, that spatiality, like temporality functions as a primordial or basic component of human experience is granted and uncontroversial. However, the controversy instigating Fanon’s protests arises when spatiality is transformed “into an extraordinary state of coercion.”[5] Thus, to accurately portray the character of the colonial experience, Fanon thematizes or, as Sekyi-Otu puts it, dramatizes “the ursurpation and coercive structuring of space as the defining reality of social domination, indeed of social being.”[6] With Fanon’s insights concerning the connection between race and the “politics of space” in mind, let us examine select passages from his book, The Wretched of the Earth.

Fanon’s analyses focus on the “compartmentalized world” of the colonized and the ways in which the colonized experience psychological harm and collective injury as a result of being forced to live as a dishonored group in a sequestered and “fixed” physical and social region. For example, Fanon describes the colonized world as “a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations.” [7] The divide is of course drawn along racial lines where the “white folks’ sector” (colonists) and the colonized constitute a Manichean space whose darker regions are “kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts” and other explicitly violent measures.[8]  Fanon goes on to highlight the stark differences—politically, economically, and sociologically—between the colonized and the European sectors.

The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads […] the streets are clean and smooth, without a pothole, without a stone. The colonist’s sector is sated, […] its belly is permanently full of good things.[9]

In contrast, the colonized live in dilapidated structures signaling transience, stagnation, subjugation, and dishonor. “It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other.”[10] From the architectural structures to the lack of human goods to the constant police surveillance and threat of violence, the colonized are engulfed in a geopolitically carved nether-region that constantly communicates their alleged inferiority and status as social refuse. The “native” sector signifies “a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people.”[11] Living in such confined, stigmatized, and coercively instituted spaces adversely impacts a group’s self-perception. Given the economic, political, and legal differential between the colonized and the colonists, it is unsurprising that the “colonized’s sector is a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is prostrate.”[12]

            In addition to his emphasis on the politics of space to describe the structure of domination in the colonial world, Fanon also examines the colonists’ racialized discourses, highlighting their role in vilifying and dehumanizing the colonized.  Similar to the contemporary racist narratives prevalent in the U. S. that equate black males with criminals and deviants, Fanon observes that the Manichean world of the colonists backed by its “agents of law and order” is not satisfied with enacting physical, spatial constraints to restrict and keep the colonized under its surveilling gaze. To these already violent and coercive measures, its public discourses transmute “the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil.”[13] According to this narrative, it is not that the colonized possess weak values or lack certain values, rather, as Fanon explains:

The “native” is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, the absolute evil. A corrosive element, destroying everything which involves aesthetics or morals, an agent of malevolent powers, an unconscious and incurable element of blind forces.[14]

Here the “native” is judged not only a social reject but also a dangerous “corrosive element,” which thus must be coercively sequestered so as not to harm or contaminate the alleged moral, aesthetic, and intellectual superiority of the European colonizers.

Although I do not develop this connection here—but I am presently working on a chapter for a book project where I discuss this link extensively—Loic Wacquant’s work on America’s northern ghettos (1915–68), the subsequent post-1968 hyperghetto, and the hyperghetto-carceral continuum similarly serve to forcibly contain, restrain, and stigmatize dishonored populations. As time warrants, I hope to post more on these and other Wacquant-Fanon areas of overlap.

This is guest post by filmmaker, writer, and cultural critic, C. I. Aki. Aki describes his “literary upbringing” as “an unconventional one that featured an odd mélange of street and letters.” Aki writes passionately about the ways in which we engage, (mis)understand, and participate (as well as fail to participate) with others. Aki’s work—via film and pen—seeks to challenge our cultural categories, in particular those that objectify and present themselves as having neatly summed up what this or that group is and what individuals and groups have the potential to be (and not to be). In his post, Aki gives us a taste of his latest film, The Runner, in which he takes up and translates into the medium of film everything from Homi Bhabha’s discussions on the  “ideology of sight” to Toni Morrison’s insights on the metaphor of race in Playing in the Dark to Graham Ward’s musings on difference. Enjoy and be sure to share your thought with Aki! 

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“Whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?”—Moby Dick.

“Since the beginning of the nation,” wrote Ralph Ellison, “white Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the ‘outsider’.” Before the election of president Barack Obama,[1] the topic of racial prejudice was fast becoming a topic people considered undesirable to bring up, somewhere in between extraneous and spurious, and at worst knotty and entangling. But with the historic election of Barack Obama four years ago, the nation seemed to have given a collective sigh of relief regarding the matter of racial prejudice, eager to hurriedly close the book on the matter and proclaim, “class dismissed”—Saved by the bell Barack. This breathless declaration of the matter as resolved was so pervasive that even some blacks—primarily those who occupied positions in mainstream America (e.g. Terry Ellis, assistant professor at Columbia University)—went on the record to declare the happy days of Post-Racial America. Proclamations of Obama’s election as the premier sign signifying a new Post-racial America served to solidify the myth of a so-called Age of Obama. Meanwhile, back in the trenches of culture, we find many everyday blacks, those burdened and beaten down, having become significantly poorer during this recession. For these individuals, daily reality race confronts them, offering not platitudes on high, but the simple truth that race still matters, prejudice still remains, and the discussion is still relevant.

It was Toni Morrison who observed in her essay, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination that, “Race has become metaphorical—a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological ‘race’ ever was. [...] It seems that it has a utility far beyond economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before.”

My upcoming short film, The Runner, deals with many of the themes Morrison so eloquently brings to our attention—all of which lead to the major theme: our need for real bodies of community. One subtext that emerges in the film is our cultural indifference to difference. For example, in the film, race as reduced difference and distance functions as a metaphor of tension and uncertainty. We sense this in the opening scene with the juxtaposition of the lead female, Grace, who is white, and the titular character, the runner, who is black.  Here in this first scene, we begin with a subtle form of inaccessibility and disconnect between the runner and Grace. By happenstance they come into and occupy the same social space and spatial location. The closer the two come toward each other (reducing the literal distance between them), the more tension the scene is designed to produce. We see in the runner’s face, a subtle awareness that he is unwelcome within this space—a sense of being unwelcome that is communicated via Grace’s discomfort, disinterest, and a tinge of distrust.

As the film progresses, the narrative feeds our racialized cultural assumptions. A few scenes after the opening scene, the tension heightens with the revelation of the dead white girl coupled with occasional takeaway shots throughout the film of the runner sprinting desperately down a desolate road, isolated from everyone else in order to underscore his assumed outsiderness. As the story develops, we find out that the runner is not the antagonist. In fact, at one-point he is the victim, who rises to the challenge and ends up becoming the victor—a victor whom Grace at first viewed as a distrusted outsider. As it turns out, the real antagonist is the eccentric yet mad Robert Franks, whom Grace imprudently trusts. Interestingly, she describes Franks as being “so unlike [different than] anyone else.” This is, curiously, a different kind of difference: a “difference” within a familiar domain; Franks is white, and thus a difference that doesn’t divide or deter, but in fact generates great curiosity, cachet and delight (as difference is indeed designed to do). Because in the domain from whence it comes—white, this difference is given élan rather than exclusion). As the film ends, a weeping, traumatized Grace, who has buried her face and body in the arms of the runner, looks to thank him for saving her life. We see his black body, the so-called opposite color of Grace’s white body, carrying the cuts and scars of his sacrifice for her, and we see Grace discover that the runner is not an outsider to her, but in fact, her hero. The image of Grace inside of him, his black body wrapped around her white body, symbolizes a union of the two, as one body, both alive, both different, yet both as one. As he walks off into the night, Grace recalls that he was the same fellow in the beginning of the film that she saw and anticipated for a moment as different; but, as is revealed to the viewer at the end of the film, she found a general interest in him approaching tender curiosity. Although he never “saw” (via the gaze or “ideology of sight”) her yet still saved her, she “saw” him.  At the end of the film, as he walks away now her hero, Grace realizes that the grandeur of her salvation and his heroism is that in their embrace they were one and had always been one, members in communion of the true and real community body: a body of life, and of life more abundantly.

Grace found in the runner, not only the physical salvation of her life from the hands of the deranged Robert Franks, but also an expanded understanding of the human experience and a greater self-clarity and self-understanding by the expanded experience of the humanity (and community body) to which she belonged. In essence, Grace discovered in the runner’s so-called difference a transfiguration of her being and ontological possibilities of which no amount of self-affirmation via homogeneity can provide. This is why our cultural indifference to difference robs and stultifies our human experience. As theologian Graham Ward writes, “There is no pure difference. Difference qua difference is an abstraction no one could recognize. Difference is relative, and distance spatializes that relativity.” So-called “difference” in our American imagination exists insofar as it is made to be negative. That is, difference is used to divide, to privatize space (place over space), to sub-ject one person for the purpose of protecting/securing/propping-up another, and to make the case for holding power and then distributing the adjudications of that power along particular fixed and discriminatory lines. The myth of pure difference is at odds with the idea of a real society; a rejection of what it means to be members of a body. In this scandal lies the refuge of cultural cowards, the insulation of “faux-hemians”, the artillery of bigots, and the barriers to the uniquely beautiful. Its maintenance—the mythos of intractable difference—is necessary for those who are comfortable with their security in the present “order of things,” no matter how superficial and unfair the arrangement is or how estranging it is to others. Thus, their security is to lie to themselves, like a short man forcing those around him to drop to their knees to validate his claim that he is taller than them. This is the tendency of how we view identities and “being.” We do not participate in a true economy of bodies and souls, and as a result we often fail to produce truly penetrating lives (penetrating for the whole human race). As Graham Ward observes: in “an economy of response, [there is] a structured dialectic between self and other, in which difference and affinity, distance and proximity is negotiated in a sensuous move from sight to touch” (and, I would add, to psychic penetration). This is how we must engage our fellow brothers and sisters, not as others, but as another, another member of the same body. As W. Somerset Maugm wrote, “the essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.”

 As we tried to illustrate in The Runner, difference (metaphorically represented by race) should not cause division but discovery, we showed how a selfless humanity, one that is courageous and heroic saves our humanity. This was in contrast to a few of the other characters in the film, who chose to save themselves because it was convenient and did not cost as much; yet in the end, theirs was a fleeting gain, a false salvation, a superficial one that paled in comparison to the real salvation, the real humanity that shined no matter how bloodied and disparaged. The runner does not only represent black people, and Grace does not only represent white people, they both represent the whole of human race, individual members of the real community body.

Given this real community that unites us, in closing I want to briefly point out some of the heroic people who are white but not insulated within white America. To speak for myself (and certainly I speak for many other blacks), there are many non-blacks, and specifically white Americans who make up my social circle. Some of these people did not appreciate me until the “second remove,”[2] when, after their initial decision of indifference, they came to eventually discover what I had to offer (as I saw the same desire for discovery in them), and not as a matter of marketplace profit, but human profit and cultural expansion. Some of these people are my closest of friends (one is my best-friend), some are colleagues, and some are acquaintances, many are members of our production team. They have impacted my life, and I hope I have theirs. They have made the human race a more heroic one, and thus a more real one by not beholding what is unfamiliar with an ideology of difference, but by an earnest participation in all that the human experience has to offer. I will write more about this “second remove” and the other factors that go into this sub-economy of response at a later date. But for now, it is important again for us to recognize that we do have a narrative of difference in our culture, and we must overcome our cowardice, our selfishness, our squareness, our bigotry, and our insulation to be heroic humans, to effect a heroic human race. This is what we must do; this is what we can do. Who are you running for?

I have been corresponding with Michael X. Smith, an African American male, who was convicted of capital murder by an all-white jury and is currently serving the fourteenth year of his life-sentence in a Texas prison. Michael claims that he did not commit this crime and has attempted for over a decade to gain a re-trial to prove his innocence.[1] In my correspondence with Michael, we discuss numerous topics including his case, his family memories, his experiences in prison, his faith, and his reflections upon Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of the Life. In a recent exchange, I asked him if he would be willing to share his thoughts on his experience of time and space in prison and to reflect on a specific passage from Douglass’s text. Michael not only agreed to this but also gave me his permission to share his reflections publicly. The passage serving as our improvisatory point of departure is one of Douglass’s most eloquent soliloquies expressing his longing for freedom as he watched sailboats—unfettered, white, and unconstrained—glide across the Chesapeake Bay.  Douglass’s “sailboat” passage comes only a few paragraphs after another well known passage, in which he describes how his master, Mr. Covey, through inhumane physical and psychological torture had succeeded in “breaking” him and had left him in a state of despair. “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; […] and behold a man transformed into a brute!”[2]

As Douglass explains, Sundays were the only days that he had for leisure and reflection. However, given his brutal work regime and the physical and psychological abuse he suffered as a slave, once Sunday finally arrived Douglass had little mental or emotional energy to give to his own projects. Most often Sundays were spent catching up on needed sleep. When he was able to rouse himself in a “flash of energetic freedom” coupled with “a faint beam of hope,” the reality of his life as a slave quickly extinguished those momentary, flickering rays and thoughts of taking his own life, as well as Covey’s flooded his mind.

Douglass’s malaise sets the stage for his reflections on the paradoxical character of sailboats from a slave’s point of view.

Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint.[3]

To those unfettered by the bonds of slavery, these majestic sailboats symbolized open horizons and the ability to pursue uncharted paths in order to make one’s mark on the world. To those like Douglass, constrained and stigmatized, the very same sailboats were reminders of the vessels used to transport thousands of men, women, and children to a strange land where their humanity was stripped from them and their value was now measured by their labor-producing capacities. Haunted by the reality these ships signified, Douglass addresses the ships with an apostrophe, unleashing his frustration and longings.

You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip!  You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron!  O that I were free!  O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing!  Alas! Betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll.  Go on, go on.  O that I could also go!  Could I but swim!  If I could fly!  O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute!  The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance.  I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery.  O God, save me!  God, deliver me!  Let me be free!  Is there any God?  Why am I a slave?^[4]

Douglass continues his monologue and ultimately resolves that he will attempt to escape his bonds, as he would rather die trying to secure his freedom than live as a slave. Inner dialogues of this sort in which Douglass reveals his existential angst as he struggles to keep his sanity and to avoid fall headlong into an abysmal state of hopeless and despair allow us to catch a glimpse of the mental and emotional energy required of the slave simply to survive.

Incarcerated persons experience similar sentiments, as they try to find ways to cope with their oppressive, hopeless environment—an environment in which time is often “lived through” as wasted, lost, and spent. In addition to the sense of lost time, prisoners experience time as an eternal now—a fixed point having no reference outside of itself; thus, temporality transmutes into spatiality. What in the outside world was experienced (at least to some degree) as possibility and movement grinds to a screeching halt and becomes a kind of immobility and closure. From an existential perspective, frozen time and spatial constraint form more of a continuum than two separate categories. What was the past is now no more, and the future, especially for those serving life-sentences without parole, is simply more of the same.

In a recent exchange with Michael, I asked him to comment upon Douglass “sailboat” passage. Here are a few excerpts from his letter.

Douglass is in bondage as a slave for life, identified to others by his black skin color, [which] is no fault of his own. I too am in bondage (prison) for life—not for anything I have done wrong, but for others looking upon my black skin and seeing me as a criminal (Michael X. Smith, Oct. 8, 2012).[5]

Michael continues, comparing his confinement to Douglass’s enslavement and highlighting the loss that both experience.

We have nothing. Everything is taken away from you—all your family members, loved ones, friends. Even the people you are used to seeing around you—all are gone. You are isolated […] You only have your feelings and thoughts. You are helpless, confused, sad, lonely, powerless. You feel sorrowful, trapped, weighed down, crushed, unwanted, unloved and the list goes on. Then you see the officers go home every day. You see inmates, whose time is up and who have been in this place for many, many years, go home. I walk out on the rec yard looking on the other side of the razor-wire fence. I see the officers’ and employees’ parked cars. I look for any car to leave. Move car! Move on! You are free. Leave! O how I wish I could be free. (Michael X. Smith, Oct. 8, 2012).

As Michael implies in the above excerpt, the inmate likewise experiences time as that which the prison authorities control. In other words, your time is confined time—time parceled out and determined by the legal system and the prison authorities.  Just as his fellow inmate’s time was “up,” Michael’s time is both frozen and, when allowed to “flow,” predetermined and managed by guards, officers, wardens, and other prison officials. In the passage below, Michael describes what it is like to live according to managed prison-time.

You are on their [the prison’s] schedule. [When it comes to] work, they give you the job, tell you your work hours, your days off, what you are to do, and when you come back to your cell. [They tell you] when you can go in or out of your cell, when you can get clean clothes, shower, and eat. [They tell you] what you are to eat, when you can go to eat, where to sit, when you can go to rec [recreation] or to the day room to watch T.V. […] Anything can change at any time: a lock down, a gang fight or some other type of fight, a shakedown of the unit (Michael X. Smith, Oct. 8, 2012).

With this last statement—“anything can change at any time”—we see that although time is highly structured for the prisoner, it is also unstable. Moreover, the inmates are cognizant of this instability, as they are all-too-familiar with the procedures, consequences, upheavals, and potential dangers that arise when a unit goes through a lockdown or a shakedown, or when a gang fight breaks out.

Just as time is experienced in multiple ways—as frozen, managed, lost, spent, wasted, and unstable—so too is space experienced. On the one hand, spatial confinement fixes one’s space to a 9’ by 6’ cell. On the other hand, personal space is illusory. That is, the inmate has no personal space, as his cell is always subject to invasion and intrusion.  Addressing the latter, Michael writes:

There is nothing free and nothing that belongs to you. At any moment, your name and cell number can come up on the shakedown list. [If it does] you have to get out [of your cell] and the officers go through your stuff. If you get a write-up, they can take everything you have, except for legal materials. And do not make an officer mad at you. There is no telling what he’ll do to your stuff or with your stuff. And even in prison you can get locked up in a more restricted place […] There is no such thing as “my space” (Michael X. Smith, Oct. 8, 2012).

Since the inmate has no space to call his own, his possessions also become fluid, ungrounded, and discarded at a moment’s notice. Pictures of one’s family members, books, personal letters—all of which have emotional and deeply human significance—can be stripped from an inmate at any time. Again, paradoxically, the prisoner’s environment is simultaneously over-structured and structure-less. Given this atmosphere of instability and anxiety, an inmate seeking to find a positive way to deal with his stress must overcome extraordinary barriers—internal and external—in order to redeem his time. As Michael explains,

For you to get some rest in between all that is going on, you must be at peace with yourself and create your own time and place to rest. You do this by going to school, to the library, or to church. You choose who your friends are, and you do not let them choose you (Michael X. Smith, Oct. 8, 2012).

 Notes

As Sekyi-Otu explains, Fanon begins his monumental work, The Wretched of the Earth, by challenging Marx’s and Engels’s dismissal of a conquest theory of social transformation in favor of their now famous dialectical materialist interpretation of history.[1]  As he narrates the tragic drama not of human history in the abstract, but of the colonized world, Fanon takes up this “discarded object of historical knowledge” and thus places conquest at the center of his account. “Fanon’s text dramatically assigns causal primacy to the political event, in the shape of violent conquest, in the constitution of social reality.”[2] Fanon zeros in on the colonized world, the world as experienced by the colonized; the world “raped into existence” by the colons (colonizers), whose identity becomes co-constitutive with that of the colonzied.  “It is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject.  The colonist derives his validity, i.e., his wealth, from the colonial system.”[3] As experienced or lived, the creation of one’s world does not occur via a predictable developmental process; rather, “the kind of temporality that defines historical change in this universe will be more like the abruptness that, as Foucault would have it, characterizes certain transformations in regimes of discourse and forms of knowledge.”[4] One day you live among your people in relative peace, practicing your cherished customs and speaking to one another in your native tongue. Then the next day your peace turns to war, your customs are condemned, and your language is banned.  You must now embrace the script of your captors. Every aspect of this strange, suffocating world—from the spatial restrictions and confinements to the unjust legal codes and governmentally sanctioned brutality—reinforces this script and serves as a daily reminder of your alleged inferior identity. Given the physical and psychological violence required to create and maintain this colonized world and to produce fully formed colonized subjects (that is, those who have internalized the colonizers’ narrative of the natives’ intellectual, moral, and cultural inferiority), is it all that surprising that Fanon would underscores the violence and pain required to topple this world and to decolonize its subjects?  Following Sekyi-Otu, who offers a sophisticated dramatological interpretation of Fanon’s work, I see no reason to conclude that Fanon is promoting a mere glorification of violence. Rather, Fanon likened the violence required for the survival, healing, and restoration of the colonized to the violence of surgery forced upon an individual when disease has taken over his body and threatens his very existence.  In other words, given the systematic, entrenched injustice upon which the colonial world is founded and maintained, decolonization will require violence in some form or fashion. However, one should not interpret Fanon in a woodenly literal manner, as he regularly employs irony, parody, and metaphor for rhetorical and dramatic purposes.[5]

When decolonization dismantles “worlds,” it calls for a re-scripting of subjectivities. Previous social identities and imposed roles are undone. What was stipulated as natural and necessary is shown to be unnatural and contingent. Decolonization reconfigures social reality, or to use Fanon’s words, it “fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a non-essential state into a privileged actor.”[6] Decolonization must erase the imposed whitewashed script so that a new human subject may emerge. Thus, Fanon states that at the outset of any decolonization process, we must begin with a “kind of tabula rasa.” This tabula rasa stands for the colonized themselves, who must re-narrate and thus reconstitute their subjectivities and collective history. Of course, given the co-constitutive relation between colonized and colonizer, the latter as well as the former undergo identity re-formations. That such a reordering and refashioning of social identities and of the colonial world itself is possible highlights the historical and contingent nature of both. Stated otherwise, decolonization unmasks the unnatural and non-necessary character of the colonial ordering of the world as well as the colonizer’s illegitimate claims of intellectual, moral, and cultural superiority. The white narrative is revealed as false narrative, and the revelation of this truth brings about an identity crisis for the colonizer. Here we have a second erasure, but this time the newly found blank slate status has not been intentionally willed; rather, it has been, as it were, violently imposed via the decolonization process. Improvising on Fanon’s earlier claim, we might say that the colonist’s “wealth”—that is, wealth broadly construed to include social identity and social capital—has been invalidated.[7]

As Seyki-Otu observes, the race-based colonized world as experienced by the colonized does not conform strictly speaking to a Hegelian dialectic; rather, as lived it is experienced as a compartmentalized Manichean world of unharmonizable absolutes.  There is the black world and the white world. A synthesis for the purpose of a higher unity does not exist, nor is it possible. Fanon was acutely aware of the “absolute differences” confronting the black subject daily when forced to live in the white man’s world. In light of this, we should read the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, not as a reactionary response birthed in the ressentiment of a Nietzschean slave and unable to break free from the master’s conceptual framework, but as Fanon’s re-presentation of the lived experience of the colonized. In other words, Fanon’s text is polyphonic and employs multiple voices, perspectives, and rhetorical strategies. Consequently, we must listen carefully to its various inflections, modalities, and key changes. In particular, our ears must be tuned to Fanon’s strategic use of a dramatico-narrative antidialectual key—a key which allows the dissonance of the lived experience of the black person to sound forth in its fullness. For those who have ears to hear, Fanon is simply presenting the obvious. How else would the colonized experience the racialized world of colonial domination but as a confining, “compartmentalized world,” a “world divided in two”?[8]

In Plato’s famous work, The Republic, Glaucon, Socrates’ spirited, energetic, philosophically erotic dialogue partner, challenges Socrates to give an adequate definition of justice and to convince him as to why a just life is superior to an unjust life. As part of Glaucon’s argumentative strategy, he offers a thought experiment, the story of the Ring of Gyges (359d-360d), in which the unjust life is presented as the best life. Socrates’ job is then, on the one hand, to show how Glaucon’s account is flawed, and on the other hand, to answer the questions mentioned above (e.g. “what is justice?” and “why is justice superior to injustice?”). The view of justice presented in the Ring of Gyges myth does not represent Glaucon’s own position; rather, he articulates the sophist Thrasymachus’s position, which in some closely related variation is also shared by the “many” (i.e. the hoi polloi) yet is amended in order to make it as persuasive as possible. As the story goes, Gyges, a lowly shepherd finds a magical ring that makes him invisible. He uses it to engage in acts that would normally be socially unacceptable and, in some cases, quite illegal but which allow him to act on whatever desire he may have and to “get away with it” (e.g. he sleeps with the queen; he kills the king and takes over his kingdom). So the lowly shepherd becomes in effect a despotic tyrant.

So what is Glaucon’s point? His point is the following: if any of us possessed such a ring, we’d do the same thing.  Why? Because, so the story goes, we really want to perform unjust acts, and if we could do them and not be punished for them via the law etc., then we most certainly would. Stated otherwise, if you could engage in unjust acts to fulfill your desires and you could do so with absolutely no negative consequences, what reason would you have for engaging in just acts?

Although there are several dialogical directions one might take in discussing Glaucon’s myth, I want to engage in a similar thought experiment, altering Glaucon’s storyline in order to address contemporary concerns of justice in my own socio-political context, the U. S. A.  What if, instead of the lowly shepherd, Gyges, sporting the treasured ring of invisibility, an entire group of individuals are clad with invisibility rings, affording them privileges and freedoms denied to other groups in their society. Let’s assume (for the sake of the story) that the ring-wearing people have no idea that they possess these magical rings. They enter department stores and are not followed by security guards. They are not frisked or interrogated regularly in public spaces by the police as are their ring-less counterparts. When their crimes rates are the same as the non-ringed people, they are significantly less likely to spend time in prison. When they decide to move into a particular neighborhood or housing community, they do not worry as to whether their “kind” will be seen as a threat or as a “sign” that the neighborhood is in decline. Then let’s suppose that one day, the gods decide to reveal to one of the ring-bearers—a man named Edward—the magical properties of his ring. Thus, Edward’s ring is removed, and he is treated like the other ring-less people. In order to process his newly found knowledge, Edward decides to talk an evening walk. A young ring-clad female sees him walking toward her. Edward notices that she seems nervous, as she began looking around to see if there were any other ring clad people nearby. Then suddenly she crosses to the other side of the street. “Is she afraid of me?” Edward wondered. Acting as if he were still a ringed-one, he decides to cross the street in order to explain to the woman that he had been made aware of the invisibility powers of his ring—powers which grant his people unjust social, cultural, and economic privileges—and he was now trying to figure out what, if anything, he could do to make these truths known and to effect change more broadly—i.e., institutionally, legally, socio-politically, etc. However, Edward never had the chance to discuss these issues with the young woman. She panicked, began to scream, and ran to the nearest house. The owner of the house, George, had been watching the scene unfold through his living room window. George didn’t like ring-less people, and he was quite vocal in his community about his views. “These people are lazy. They don’t work, they do drugs, and they live off the welfare system—and hard-working people like me have to pay for their hospital bills when they overdose.” When George saw Edward crossing the street and moving toward the young woman, he ran to his bedroom to get his handgun. There’s no need to spell out the details of this story’s ending; it is all-too-familiar these days. Suffice it to say, Edward died that night from a gunshot wound to the chest.

In her book, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege, philosopher Shannon Sullivan builds upon insights from W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey concerning conscious and unconscious habits and applies these to race and white privilege. Sullivan understands “habit” as “an organism’s subconscious predisposition to transact with its physical, social, political, and natural worlds in particular ways. Habit is equivalent to neither routine nor a ‘bad habit,’ as the term is often used. Habits instead are that which constitute the self” (23).  Habits can be formed consciously or unconsciously, and quite often they are formed unconsciously. Our habits constitute our “style” understood phenomenologically (see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception); they are “manners of being and acting that constitute an organism’s ongoing character” (ibid.). Although habits stabilize and have a “steadiness” and regularity about them, they needn’t be understood as necessarily fixed or unalterable.  Moreover, habits affect both our mental and our physical being. We see instances of physical habit in the way that women in a sexist society carry their bodies—notice the difference in how women pose for pictures versus how men pose. Similarly with respect to race, we find both conscious and unconscious mental and physical habits, which can either limit or make possible one’s ability to act. As Sullivan explains,

“to be a white person means that one tends to assume that all cultural and social spaces are potentially available for one to inhabit. The habit of ontological expansiveness enables white people to maximize the extent of the world in which they transact. But as an instance of white solipsism, it also severely limits their ability to treat others in respectful ways. Instead of acknowledging others’ particular interests, needs, and projects, white people who are ontologically expansive tend to recognize only their own, and their expansiveness is at the same time a limitation” (25).

People are often asked to “own” their actions and to “break” their habits. So how might one work toward owning his or her white privilege? Of course the answer will differ from person to person, context to context, and so forth. Likewise, habits of this sort are not simply individual habits but are also social and require large-scale socio-political structural changes. However, in agreement with Sullivan, I believe that human agents can act to re-shape their “style,” re-constitute themselves, and strive “to transform their habits of white privilege to ones of resistance” (197). Thus, with Sullivan, I am committed to an ongoing self-interrogation, considering how I might “go ring-less” in my various spheres of influence.