Per Caritatem

In order to deal with Douglass’s “disciplinary issues,” his master at the time, Thomas Auld, sent the young boy of sixteen to Mr. Covey, a man known in the community as a slave-breaker. Prior to his arrival and in spite of overwhelming obstacles, Douglass had already learned to read. Though his literacy opened up new worlds for him and allowed him to express himself as well as to know himself more profoundly, it also produced discontent and a deep sense of loss having realized what he could have been had he been a (white) free man as opposed to a (black) slave.  In other words, Douglass’s literacy no doubt afforded him a freedom of sorts within the oppressive, racialized society in which he lived; nonetheless, his newly found mental freedom was not sufficient.  After all under the all-pervasive white gaze of a racialized society, no matter how educated he became, he continued to be viewed and treated as less than a person, as property, as a tool for the white man’s projects and economic gains. The insufficiency of this “inner” freedom is seen in Douglass’s narration of his fight with Covey.

Describing his first six months with Covey, he writes, “scarce a week passed without his whipping me.  I was seldom free from a sore back.”[1] He then recounts how Covey worked him day and night and in all weather conditions and how at last the brutal, inhumane work schedules and regimented violence broke him.

I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me.  Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me.  I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute![2]

Although Douglass had attained a level of freedom through literacy—an accomplishment that was itself an “argument” against the white hegemonic discourse pronouncing blacks as subhuman, incapable of “higher” rational reflection, and thus in need of (white) masters—he, as an embodied, incarnate being remained bound and subject to the (irrational) whims of white society.  No matter how literate, educated, and articulate he became, the dominant discourse scripted him as subhuman while the racialized social apparatuses—including Covey’s panoptic plantation—actively sought to suppress his intellectual achievements and to crush his spirit, reducing him to a beast-like existence in order to “prove” the veracity of their narrative.

After one of Covey’s particularly cruel, near-death beatings, Douglass decides to flee. Reluctantly and out of necessity he eventually returns to Covey’s plantation.  His return leads to a physical confrontation with Covey, who, with rope in hand tackles Douglass in a stable and attempts to tie him up.  Rather than remain a docile slave, Douglass decides to defend himself and to fight even if his action results in his own death. “At this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose.”[3] His resolve took Covey by surprise, and Douglass could see for the first time fear and uncertainty in his master’s eyes.  The two struggled for over two hours until Covey finally gave up.

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative as a Challenge to Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic

If we bring Douglass’s narrative into conversation with Hegel’s discussion of what is commonly called the master/slave dialectic, some rather interesting insights as well as challenges surface.  Hegel devotes several paragraphs (178-196) in the Phenomenology of Spirit to the master/slave or, as Miller translates the terms, the “lord” and the “bondsman” relationship. Recognition by the other is central to Hegel’s account of the actualization of self-consciousness.  The self requires the recognition of another “I” which corresponds to itself with respect to equality, freedom and independence, as neither recognition of one’s own existence nor consciousness of a mere independent external object provides the requisite certainty Hegel claims is needed for the full actualization of self-consciousness.  The recognition among the “I’s”, in other words, must be mutual—each self must recognize the other as an independent, equal, free “I.” As the struggle for self-consciousness unfolds, a problem arises because at first each “I” sees the other “I” only as an object, a thing external to itself and to be used for its projects and plans.  As Hegel puts it, at this stage they exist as two conflicting manifestations of consciousness; “one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another.  The former is lord, the other is bondsman.”[4] According to Hegel’s narrative, in this initial struggle between the two consciousnesses, the bondsman shows his servile nature in that he would rather preserve his life than lose it and thus submits to the lord or master becoming a tool for the latter’s “pure enjoyment.”[5] In such an arrangement, the relationship and recognition involved is clearly asymmetrical, unequal. Ironically, this one-sidedness which seems to benefit the master, according to Hegel’s dialectical logic, turns out as advantageous to the slave.  Because acquiring full selfhood requires the other, if the other is servile, dependent, enslaved, and so forth, then the self who seeks recognition becomes these things as well.  The situation is much better for the bondsman, as his essential reality has been the lord, an “I” existing for-itself not for-an-other.  Keeping with Hegel’s logic, because the slave and master are integrally connected, the truth of the master has been from the beginning implicit in the slave.  As Hegel explains,

It [servitude] does in fact contain within itself this truth of pure negativity and being-for-self, for it has experienced this [in] its own essential nature. For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations.[6]

Hegel goes on to state that this radical uprooting and disruption of one’s stability is “absolute negativity, pure being-for-self” and as such is implicit in the bondman’s consciousness.[7] As the dialectic demands, this “moment of pure being-for-self” does not remain implicit but becomes explicit for the slave “for in the lord it exists for him [the slave] as his object.”[8]

Then Hegel begins to focus on the role of labor and how this too sets the slave free. Having achieved self-consciousness through his experience of “the fear of death, the absolute Lord” in which the master’s free, self-consciousness becomes his ideal object, the slave’s relation to labor is transformed. In short, through his labor, the slave “becomes conscious of what he truly is,” another “I” and not a mere thing. The master was moved by desire to gain recognition through an other, the slave, and thus to overpower him.  However, the master’s relationship with the slave was unequal, distorted, and reduced the slave to a mere tool for his enjoyment. Given this arrangement, the master’s relation with the material realm is mediated through the slave. The slave, in contrast, works directly with the material realm, cultivating it and infusing it so to speak with his own creative ideas and mental energy. In so doing, the slave comes to respect the material realm on its own terms, working creatively with it and leaving something of himself in it as a gift to others. Thus, through his labor, the slave, in contrast with his master, experiences nature as having its own independence and integrity, its own permanence and objectivity.  Why? Because the master’s desire compelling him to conquer and treat the slave as a labor-machine operates by way of destruction, negating the other and leaving only lack and unfulfilled desire—an instance of Hegel’s bad infinite.  “[T]hat is the reason why this satisfaction is itself only a fleeting one, for it lacks the side of objectivity and permanence.  Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.”[9] With the permanence provided intelligent shaping or “formative activity,”[10] the object produced via the slave’s labor acquires a lasting quality, a form or design that is both intelligible and transferrable over time—using Aristotle’s language inflected through a Hegelian grammar—we might say, it has become in-formed matter and possesses its own integrity.  “It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.”[11] In addition, because he has had to labor neither for himself nor his own projects, the slave has learned to suspend his desires.  Having habituated himself this way, he works creatively with nature, respecting and valuing it rather than seeing it as a means to satisfy his insatiable desires.  What at first seemed to produce only alienation—perpetual labor for an other and never for oneself—ultimately came to be understood as “formative activity,”[12] a distinctively human activity involving cognitive capacities to creatively shape, form and interact with the material world, valuing its integrity, and allowing it to be other. In short, with the triple complex:  fear of the master de-stabilzing the self, service for the master’s sake denying one’s own desires, and labor as “formative activity” resulting in a free relationship with the material realm—together enable the slave to discover himself as an “I” in harmony with the world.  It is not by accident that the next section of the Phenomenology transitions into Stoicism—a view emphasizing inner freedom, a rationally ordered universe, detachment from and indifference to external realities and occurrences outside of one’s control, and an acceptance of one’s place within the larger ordered, rational whole.

Notes

[2] Ibid., 58.

[3] Ibid., 64.

[4] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 115, paragraph 189.

[5] Ibid., 115–6, paragraph 190.

[6] Ibid., 117, paragraph 194.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 118.

[10] Ibid., 119.

[11] Ibid., 118.

[12] Ibid., 119.

*The first image was copied from this website:  http://americanmasterworks.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html

*The second image was copied from this website:  http://almoscollectibles.com/afroamericanpaintings.html.

In the opening chapter of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass immediately introduces the reader to a theme that he will develop and elaborate throughout his autobiography, namely, the reduction of slaves to the status of (non-rational) animal or beast.  As Douglass explains, he, like most slaves, was uncertain as to his actual age and had never seen any record of his own birth.[1] “By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.”[2] To inquire of one’s master concerning records, one’s birth date, and related matters was to show signs of a “restless spirit.”[3] Not only was Douglass kept ignorant of his own age, but he had to rely on what he could weave together from fragmented conversations and bits of gossip he had overheard regarding the identity of his father.  “My father was a white man.  He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage.  The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father.”[4] Liaisons of this sort between masters and female slaves were common and point (among other things) to the irrationality of the hegemonic, pro-slavery discourse and the self-deception in which its participants engaged.  That is, on the one hand, slaves were said to be non-persons, sub-human, more or less beasts; yet, masters regularly raped and sexually abused their slaves, indicating that they themselves did not believe their own narrative but were unwilling to give up their place of privilege and the “benefits” that came with it.  The institution of chattel slavery, founded upon bio-behavioral racial essentialism and maintained through various legal, cultural, and economic structures and strictures, created a lawless space for white, male slaveowners.   Like Gyges hidden from sight when sporting his magical ring and bent on satisfying his desires at the expense of others, these men used the “invisibility powers” of institutional and systemic racism and their privileged place within that system to exploit and destroy fellow human beings.

by John W. Jones

The other side, so to speak, of the dominant narrative’s construction of the slave’s subjectivity is its active erasing or re-scripting his or her history and culture.  One way to engage in this erasure is to dis-integrate, divide, and ultimately destroy familial bonds.  Douglass’s account of his own experience of forced separation from his mother suggests that the practice was common, and highlights its negative impact.  “My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. […] Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it.”[5] The child is then moved to a different location, perhaps a different plantation altogether and is placed with an elderly female slave, who, given her frailty and age, is neither profitable to the master nor pleasurable.  As Douglass observes, this practice renders virtually impossible the emotional bonding that ought to occur between mother and child, and resulted in many women suppressing their affections for their children.[6] Although he was able to spend a few hours with his mother in the evenings—after she had worked a full day and walked twelve miles to visit him—Douglass was not allowed to visit her when she fell ill, nor was he permitted to be present when she died and was laid to rest.[7] “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” Significant temporal markers that most of us take for granted—one’s own birth date—as well as the spatial presence required for familial cohesion to occur, were denied Douglass.  His spatio-temporal existence, like the other beasts of the field, was disciplined, shaped, and determined by the work day and work season—“planting-time, harvest- time, cherry-time, spring-time.”[8]Here we have the forced reduction of man to homo economicus; however, the term is infused with new meaning.  The slave as economic being is in no way motivated by self-interest and is treated as a non-rational animal, a mere means benefitting the master’s self-serving ends.

Notes

[2] Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 15.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 15, 16.

[6] Ibid., 16.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 15.

* John W. Jones’s  painting, “Slave Mother and Child” was taken from this website: http://www.colorsofmaoney.com/prints_by_john_jones.htm.

Actor and hip hop artist, Dante Terrell Smith, better known as “Mos Def,” grew up in Brooklyn and exhibited musical and acting talents at an early age.  Mos focused on musical theater in high school, attended New York University, and went on to establish himself as both as an actor and a significant voice in the world of hip hop, recording several solo and collaborative albums.  Mos’s lyrics are filled with layers of socio-political and religious commentary and critique, allowing for multiple interpretations and dialogic interdisciplinary engagements.  Below I offer one possible way to enter into dialogue with a song called “Mathematics” from his 1999 debut solo album, Black on Both Sides.

The body of the song opens with a six line stanza rhythmically interweaving the numbers one through ten in between concrete, historical particulars (Pete Rose—i.e. “Charlie Hustle”) to more abstract, universal, and religious allusions (e.g., “Seven firmaments of heaven to hell, 8 Million Stories to tell”).  Then in the next stanza, Mos moves away from the abstract and becomes more personal.  In these nine lines, he highlights how the poetics of a socially conscious hip hop—in particular the voice that it gives to the voiceless— lifts the “powerless up” from the social sinkholes of stigmatized spaces (ghettos, prisons, and “streets too loud to ever hear freedom sing”) and, in his case, has allowed him to overcome some of the socio-political obstacles faced by African Americans so that he might speak on behalf of suffering others.  Yet, as the last three lines indicate living in a condition both created and abandoned by the state—not to mention a socially ostracized, stigmatized “space” (projects, no-go zones etc.)—breeds violence, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness among those forced to occupy those infernal spaces.

The body of my text posesses extra strength
Power-liftin powerless up, out of this, towerin’ inferno
My ink so hot it burn through the journal
I’m blacker than midnight on Broadway and Myrtle
Hip-Hop past all your tall social hurdles|
like the nationwide projects, prison-industry complex
Broken glass wall better keep your alarm set
Streets too loud to ever hear freedom sing
Say evacuate your sleep, it’s dangerous to dream

The next section begins to develop and elaborate the kind of “mathematics” Mos has in mind.  Having to live in such inhumane circumstances of course takes its toll on a person’s psychological, emotional, and physical well-being, and often paradoxically, accelerates and intensifies the construction of the subjectivities that the hegemonic class had hoped to eradicate. As Mos explains, those who internalize the stigma and negativity imposed on them by the dominant narrative—the “chain cats”—end up dead, crushed in spirit and ground to dust for the economic gain of the (largely white) elite class.

But you chain cats get they CHA-POW, who dead now
Killin’ fields need blood to graze the cash cow
It’s a number game, but shit don’t add up somehow

When your world—the social space into which you have been thrown by forces outside of your control—is created, founded, and built upon injustice and exploitation, even something as supposedly clear-cut, steady, dispassionate, and uncontroversial as mathematics becomes a site of socio-political polysemous meanings.  So how does the “shit” not add up? Here are a few examples.

Like I got, sixteen to thirty-two bars to rock it
but only 15% of profits, ever see my pockets
like sixty-nine billion in the last twenty years
spent on national defense but folks still live in fear
like nearly half of America’s largest cities is one-quarter black
That’s why they gave Ricky Ross all the crack
Sixteen ounces to a pound, twenty more to a ki
A five minute sentence hearing and you no longer free

First, Mos critiques the music industry whose sights are set not on artistry and beauty but on profits.  Then he highlights the government’s out of control spending on national defense while simultaneously creating an atmosphere of public panic of the socially constructed “terrorist” as the new “other” to fear. Lastly, he offers his interpretation of the Ricky Ross case.  In a series of controversial articles in 1996, Gary Webb argued that the new all-out war on drugs had a disproportionate impact on blacks, particularly young black males on the lower end of the socio-economic and educational spectrum.  In the Ross case, as Webb explains, you have on one side, “Ricky Donnell Ross, a high school dropout, and his suave cocaine supplier, Danilo Blandon, who has a master’s degree in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.” Both men were arrested for major drug trafficking offenses; however, according to Web’s story, even though Blandon testified in court that “the first kilo of cocaine he sold in California was to raise money for the CIA’s army, which was trying on a shoestring to unseat Nicaragua’s new socialist Sandinista government,” and admitted that his modus operandi was to employ guys like Ross, “a South-Central teen-ager who had the gang connections and street smarts necessary to move the army’s cocaine, a veritable blizzard engulfed the ghettos,” after all the deals were made in the “justice” system, guess which one ends up in the hole after his “five minute hearing”?—Ricky Ross.[1] The section ends with a jab at the new big brother State with its surveillance techniques now legalized and expanded beyond panoptic prisons.

The next seven lines continue to describe life in the urban hellholes, the ghettos and hyper-ghettos where people become hardened and turn to crime and other parallel economic (and often illegal) structures carved out in response to socio-political and economic ostracism and spatial confinement.  Note again the hopelessness and the sense of human potential wasted.

Rock your hardhat black cause you in the Terrordome
full of hard niggaz, large niggaz, dice tumblers
Young teens and prison greens facin’ life numbers
Crack mothers, crack babies and AIDS patients
Young bloods can’t spell but they could rock you in PlayStation
This new math is whippin motherfuckers’ ass
You wanna know how to rhyme you better learn how to add
It’s mathematics

Next we have a structural mirroring of the opening stanza playing off the one through ten number theme and closing with an eleven line description of the “numbers” problem where dead-end low wage (non-salaried and hence no benefits–health insurance, retirement fund, etc.) jobs and poverty-stricken living produce and give rise to drug use, trafficking, and other criminal activities.

Yo, it’s one universal law but two sides to every story
Three strikes and you be in for life, manditory
Four MC’s murdered in the last four years
I ain’t tryin to be the fifth one, the millenium is here
Yo it’s 6 Million Ways to Die, from the seven deadly thrills
Eight-year olds gettin found with 9 mill’s
It’s 10 P.M., where your seeds at? What’s the deal
He on the hill puffin krill [crack cocaine] to keep they belly filled
Light in the ass with heavy steel, sights on the pretty shit in life
Young soldiers tryin’ to earn they next stripe
When the average minimum wage is $5.15
You best believe you gotta find a new ground to get C.R.E.A.M.[2]

The white unemployment rate, is nearly more than triple for black
so frontliners got they gun in your back
Bubblin crack, jewel theft and robbery to combat poverty
and end up in the global jail economy
Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks but increased police presence

From the hopelessness of the ghetto, you move to the hopelessness of the prison and the cycle continues; however, along the way, should you survive the prison camp, the panoptic gaze makes sure that the negative narrative inscribed in your body and indelibly marking your soul stays with you—no bars needed as confinement, stigmatization, segregated spaces, and negated freedom operate on the outside through a network just as rigidly structured and socially impermeable as the hierarchical social strata of the carceral system. Lastly, Mos doesn’t mince words about the role race plays in this deadly numbers game.  Whether chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the ghetto, or hyper-incarceration, “blackness” continues as the mutable target socially constructed in the past as (subhuman) “thing” and now as the “dangerous other” whom, since we can no longer legally lynch, must be destroyed by more socially acceptable means.

And even if you get out of prison still livin’
join the other five million under state supervision
This is business, no faces just lines and statistics
from your phone, your zip code, to S-S-I digits
The system break man child and women into figures
Two columns for who is, and who ain’t niggaz
Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings
but you push too hard, even numbers got limits
Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret:
the million other straws underneath it
It’s all mathematics

Notes

[2] I had no idea what C.R.E.A.M. meant, but after a bit of searching here I found out that it is an acronym which stands for “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” and was made famous “by the Wu-Tang clan […] to describe money. Ever since the Wu-Tang commenced their rap reign in the early 90’s, CREAM has become the universal hip-hop word for money.”

Although elsewhere I bring Douglass’s insights into conversation with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, here I want to focus on how Douglass’s observations converge and resonate with Rieger’s thoughts on the myth of the (autonomous) individual. Rieger is in no way suggesting that the humanity, subjectivity, or agency of a marginalized or oppressed person is or can be totally eradicated by the dominant culture, narratives, or “master” subjectivities.  Rather, like Douglass, Rieger’s point, which presupposes and affirms human solidarity, is that we are both socially constructed and self-constructed.  Thus, on the one hand, Rieger emphasizes how under the current rule of Empire “subjectivity is being actively colonized at the level of the cultural, the emotional, and even the spiritual,” and those in the dominant position of privilege can “happily encourage others to take things into their own hands—to become active subjects, in other words—without having to be too worried that this will ever become a reality,” thus strengthening “the myth that the powerful have gained power by becoming active [autonomous] subjects themselves […] and putting blame on all others who fail.”[1] Yet, on the other hand, Rieger stresses the agency and creative possibilities of human beings, even when they find themselves in demoralizing, inhumane, and oppressive socio-political contexts like chattel slavery or colonialism.

The good news […] is that, despite all its efforts, Empire is never able to control and co-opt subjectivity and desire totally and absolutely. A first sense that subjectivity cannot be co-opted grows entirely out of an observation of the ambivalence of the status quo. The Empire’s power and influence may be substantial and all-encompassing, but are never absolute, never without ambivalence. Even subjectivity that has seemingly been erased by Empire keeps erupting, at times in unexpected places. It is a significant datum of history that even slaves—people who were not supposed to have any subjectivity at all—were able to reassert their subjectivity, rise up, and challenge the Empire. The Judeo-Christian traditions are founded on such a slave uprising in the Exodus and on many other stories of resistance by people who were considered lacking subjectivity in the ancient world.[2]

Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and countless other “erupting” subjectivities refused the pre-scripted (racialized) narrative of the dominant culture and chose instead various paths of resistance, (re)scripting their identities, (re)asserting their humanity, and gifting us with living memorials of hope to encourage us in times of doubt and despair.  In light of the double construction of subjectivities—that is, our social and self-construction—there are no autonomous self-made subjects; yet, there is no reason to conclude that social construction and agency are mutually exclusive or that the former necessarily eradicates the latter.

Notes

[2] Ibid.

In the context of discussing Lacan’s distinction between “realism” as that which the dominant group takes as reality—master narratives, nationalisms etc. belong here—and the real, the underside of “realism,” Joerg Rieger highlights the “myth of individualism.”

Individualism is the sort of master narrative that those in power who share in the dominant subjectivity tell about themselves in order to cover up and repress the real—that is, all those who have contributed to their success and those on whose backs their success is ultimately built.  This repressed world of the individualist includes teachers, parents, and peers, but also housekeepers, workers who produce at low ages, and all the other service providers and subordinates in the command structure.[1]

Rieger continues, accenting the ways in which the narrative of individualism is intimately connected with the construction of dominant subjectivities.

The seemingly self-made dominant subject must tell realism’s story of individualism and repress the real; this is the only way to avoid being challenged by another kind of subjectivity that is part of the real.  The Lacanian notion of the repressed real helps us see that there is no autonomous subject.  Individualism is merely the myth of the powerful; even the dominant subjectivity cannot exist in isolation.  Oppressors who seek to safeguard their own subjectivity by perpetuating the master narrative of individualism simply fool themselves because their identity is invariably built in relation to others and, more specifically, on the back of others.[2]

Here Rieger highlights the fact that the so-called “self-made dominant subject” is always already in relation to others.  More to the point, such “self-made” individuals—particularly those quite content to live within rather than beyond the “spirit of the Empire”—constitute their subjectivities and identities in relation to those whom they script, oppress, exploit, marginalize, and confine to urban and (to borrow Glenn Loury’s term) other “nether” non-spaces of existence.

In his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass captures our heteronomous (rather than autonomous) way of being in the world in his narration of the reciprocal nature of the master/slave relation.  Covey, a particularly merciless slave owner, was renowned for his “ability” to break slaves, and Douglass, unfortunately, became existentially acquainted with Covey’s “skills” in cruelty on a regular basis.  After one of Covey’s near-death beatings, Douglass decided to flee; however, feeling trapped, hungry, and having no permanent place to reside, he eventually returned to the plantation.  Recognizing that his return will result in some form of violent “discipline” at Covey’s hands, Douglass experiences a “conversion” of sorts.  That is, rather than remain a docile slave, he chooses the (active) path of resistance; when Covey attacked him with rope in hand, Douglass—at that time a teenager—defended himself and took his “master” to task.  “At this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose.”[3] Douglass’s response caught Covey completely off-guard, and for the first time Douglass saw Covey tremble—the myth of the autonomous “self-made dominant” subject began to unravel.  The two struggled for over two hours until Covey finally gave up.  Rather than hand Douglass over to the authorities or have him severely beaten or hung—all common and accepted practices in that day—Covey does nothing.  For the remainder of his “disciplinary training” on Covey’s plantation, Douglass receives no further violent treatment from his “master.”  How are we to understand Covey’s response?  As Douglass explains,

Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker.  It was of considerable importance to him. That reputation was at stake; and had he sent me—a boy about sixteen years old—to the public whipping-post, his reputation would have been lost; so, to save his reputation, he suffered me to go unpunished.[4]

Covey, as a member of the elite slave-owning class, was in fact not an autonomous subject, whose supposed “success” might serve as an exemplar for other aspiring (white, male) members of society.  Instead, Covey’s identity, his sense of self, his subjectivity was deeply connected to those whom he sought to “break.” When the socio-political status of the underclass changes, the mythmakers tend to awaken from their contented slumber and new myths must be crafted to keep the public in a state of alarm and uneasiness, fearing the hegemonic-scripted “other,” who, after all, wants to take what rightfully belongs to them (i.e. the dominant class and those imbibing their myths).  (Does this story sound familiar?)[5] Stay tuned for Part II…

Notes

[2] Ibid., 48.

[3] Frederick Douglass, In Douglass: Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave/ My Bondage and My Freedom/ Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.  Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 64.

[4] Ibid., 65-6.

[5] The forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod (July 2010) is one contemporary variation on this rather worn out theme. Consider, for example, the “chapters” in this story— the N.A.A.C.P. challenges the Tea Party leaders to expel the racist elements from among their ranks resulting in Tea Party member Mark Williams’ expulsion; Andrew Breitbart posts a highly edited video clip of Ms. Sherrod’s alleged “reverse racist” speech at a N.A.A.C.P. meeting, which was immediately aired on Fox News and later shown to be an excerpted clip from a speech in which Ms. Sherrod was recounting her own story of racial reconciliation.  These events (not to mention others) suggest that race (and, given the context, race relations in the United States in particular), race-baiting, and the media’s role in constructing racial identities continue as significant socio-political problems that must be engaged.  These issues are in no way resolved or behind us simply because Barack Obama holds the highest public office in America. See, for example, Frank Rich’s assessment of the Sherrod incident in his New York Times editorial, “There’s a Battle Outside and It is Still Ragin’.” The New York Times, July 24, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25rich.html?_r=1 (accessed  7/26/10).

* The first image, South Carolina Slaves, by an unknown artist was copied from this website:  http://www.voiceseducation.org/category/tag/fugitive-slave-law.   The second image, Slave Revolt, was published in The Abolitionist in 1802 and was likewise copied from the same website.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon recounts his experience on a train of being “fixed” by a white other—an other which happened to be a child who had already been habituated to see blacks as defined by the white imagination.  As the child’s refrain, “Look! A Negro!”[1] crescendoed forth and came to a close with a fearful questioning of the “Negro’s” next move, Fanon not only experienced the gaze of the white other, he also began to see himself through the white gaze.[2]

I cast an objective gaze over myself, and I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics—and they burst my eardrums with cannibalism, backwardness [l’arriération mentale], fetishism, racial defects, slaves and above all, and above all:  “Y a bon Banania.”  On that day I was disoriented, incapable of existing outside with the Other, the White man, who mercilessly imprisoned me.  I carried myself far away from my Dasein [de mon être-là]—very far away—and constituted myself as an object.  What was this for me, if not a separation [décollement], an uprooting [arrachement], a hemorrhage which congealed with black blood over my entire body.  Nevertheless, I did not want this reconsideration, this thematization of myself. I wanted quite simply to be a human among other humans.[3]

As Fanon takes up the white view of himself, he experiences its all-encompassing reach.  That is, his becoming a white-defined black other involved more than his present encounter with the child on the train; in essence, he entered into the white erasing and re-scripting of black history.  Not only is his present fixed by the white other, but his past is fixed as well.  The child’s unison refrain gives rise to polyphonic lines of “cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism” and the like.

Even if it is the case that the child, because of his lack of cognitive development, is an unwilling or non-culpable participant in furthering racism and racial discourse; nonetheless, the effect—un-reflective racism in children—is a reality that confronts the black other on a daily basis and forces him to experience his phenotypic differences as conceived by the white imagination.  As Fanon explains, “I am overdetermined from the outside.  […] The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me.  I am fixed.  Once their microtomes are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality.”[4] Fanon’s body, particularly his ever-present, always uncovered black skin, brimming with manifold white-determined meanings, takes on a life of its own.  This second-self is created through discourse—a socially constructed subjectivity—a kind of reverse shadow whose form creates a path upon which Fanon must walk. As the encounter with the child continues and the refrain sounds once again, “Look, a Negro!  Maman, a Negro!”, the boy’s mother, somewhat nervously, cries, “Ssh! You’ll make him angry.  Don’t pay attention to him, monsieur, he doesn’t realize you’re just as civilized as we are.”[5] As Kant, Hegel and other Western philosophers have asserted, the Western tradition, for which white European culture becomes the surrogate, is the standard for determining whether a nation has a culture or could possibly become cultured and civilized, and thus enter into world history.

Kant, paving the way for Hegel, claims that true history begins with the Greeks and that non-Greek peoples are validated only through contact with the Greeks.  On Kant’s estimation, the (non)histories of non-Greeks are simply “terra incognita,” an amorphous X, lacking (Western) form and thus unable to appear as intelligible.  He then turns to the Jews to illustrate how a nation may enter a state of historical and cultural recognition.

This happened with the Jewish nation (volk) at the time of the Ptolemies through the Greek translation of the Bible, without which one would ascribe little credibility to their isolated records.  From that point forward (if this beginning has been properly ascertained) one can pursue its narratives.  And thus with all the other nations (Völkern).[6]

In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel takes up this same line of thinking; however, in order to justify his position, he provides an elaborate narrative in which Geist’s presence or absence indicates whether a nation has historical, cultural or socio-political significance.[7] One might go as far as to claim that the mother’s remark to Fanon has its own genealogical history which is consonant with the Western philosophical tradition; her awareness of this history matters little.  Approached in this manner, echoes of Hegel’s depiction of Africans as cannibalistic can still be heard in the child’s cry, “Maman, the Negro’s going to eat me”.[8]

All of these discourses—whether philosophical, pseudoscientific, or everyday chatter on a public train—comprise the many pieces of Fanon’s “black” self, woven together by the white other.

Notes

[2] See also Bart van Leewan, ‘To What Extent is Racism a Magical Transformation?’ Journal of Social Philosophy 38 (2007), 296 ff.  Van Leewan discusses the ‘gaze’ from the perspective of the racist in order to give an account of the motivational structure of racism.  In addition, van Leeuwen’s essay offers several practical anti-racism strategies (see especially, 303–5).

[3] My translation.  Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 90-1.

[4] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 95.

[5] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 93.

[6] Immanuel Kant.  ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784)’, trans. Allen W. Wood, 107–120, at 118. Anthropology, History and Education. Ed. and trans. Günter Zöller and Robert Louden.  (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), 118.

[7] Robert Bernasconi has devoted several manuscripts to the study of Hegel and his Eurocentrism.  See, for example, Bernasconi, ‘With What Must the Philosophy of World History Begin?  On the Racial Bias of Hegel’s Eurocentrism’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22 (2000):  171–201.  See also, Bernasconi, ‘Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti’.  In Hegel After Derrida, ed. by Stuart Barnett, 41–63.  London:  Routledge, 1998.

[8] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 93.

By the shedding of whose blood have we become one of the wealthiest nations in the world?  To begin an answer, why not turn to one whose back bore many a bloody lash for the sake of the so-called “American dream.”  In his 1852 oration, “The Internal Slave Trade,” Frederick Douglass offers his own analysis and stringent condemnation of America’s participation in the trafficking of human beings for economic gain.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave trade—the American slave trade sustained by American politics and American religion!  Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market.  You know what is a swine-drover?  I will show you a man-drover.  They inhabit all our southern states.  They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation with droves of human stock.  You will see one of these human-flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans.  These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers.  They are food for the cotton-field and the deadly sugar-mill.  Mark the sad procession as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them.  Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives.  There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray.  Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms.  See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes, weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn.  The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength.  Suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul.  The crack you heard was the sound of the slave whip; the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the babe.  Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains; that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on.  Follow this drove to New Orleans.  Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers.  See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude.[1]

This is simply one among many scenes depicting the hardships African American slaves endured on a daily basis as a result of the institution of chattel slavery.  Enslaved by the love of money, the master’s vision becomes distorted.  Not only does he see human beings as things, but the sounds of suffering fall silent to his ears.  Deafened to the wailing of mothers’ torn from their children, he transposes the dissonance of clanking chains into gold-en keys, which like the dual cut of a double-edged sword open the door to his future and secure the bonds of his brother.

To add to their humiliation and degraded status as mere property of the white man, slaves were subjected to public auctions where they were ordered to stand, often naked or nearly so, and allow the potential buyers to examine their bodies to ensure their suitability for long-term servitude.  If a slave’s body showed signs of illness, disease, or possible weaknesses, they were passed over as bad investments, unprofitable for the master’s business.  Scar tissue on a slave’s back—the number of scars, whether the scar was old or relatively fresh—became the subject of a mythology employed to determine a slave’s character.   Too many scars indicated a rebellious spirit, whereas having few scars meant that the slave possessed a docile, obedient spirit.  “As they worked their way from inflicted scars to essential character, buyers fixed slaves in a typology of character according to the frequency, intensity, and chronology of the whipping apparent on their backs.”[2] While the slaves stood humiliated, exposed and wondering what kind of master might purchase them on that particular day, the slave buyers paraded themselves before the crowds as augurs who “could read slaves’ backs as encodings of their histories.”[3]

Notes

[2] Johnson, Soul by Soul, 145.

[3] Ibid., 145.

In my previous post, I gave a broad overview of three central views of race in contemporary race theory literature:  racial skepticism (K. Anthony Appiah), racial constructionism (Ron Mallon), and racial population naturalism (Robin Andreasen).  Racial skeptics hold that since biobehavioral racial essences do not exist, and there is nothing for the term “race” to signify, “races” do not exist.  The racial constructionist agrees that there are no racialized essences; however, she understands race as a social kind and sees value in racial discourse.  The racial population naturalist likewise rejects racial essentialism; yet, she claims that “races may exist as biologically salient populations, albeit ones that do not have the biologically determined social significance once imputed to them.”[1] Personally I situate myself within the racial constructionism camp and thus consider race an important social reality worthy of our discourse, study and continued reflection.

In this post, I want to focus on the term “social constructionism” in order to then discuss how various thinkers have come to understand subjectivities, identities and concepts as socially constructed and whether or not or to what degree human agency is compatible with some variant of social constructionism.  More specifically, I am interested in understanding how identities or subjectivities and concepts such as “race,” “slave,” and “black” arise, how they are sustained and eventually become ossified historically, and what role various socio-political institutions, discourses and cultural practices play in their formation and maintenance.

As a provisionary starting point, it is helpful to think of social constructionism as analogous to the production of artifacts.[2] Broadly put, an artifact is an object designed and created by a human agent for a specific purpose or set of purposes.   Such objects include handcrafted bookshelves, Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, Cézanne’s painting, Le Cabanon de Jourdan, and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor.  Here we have reasonably unobjectionable instances of objects designed and produced by identifiable agents.  However, when we consider Western tonal music, the modern state or human language, we encounter artifacts whose specific intentional and originary agents are difficult if not impossible to identify.  Nonetheless, in the second group of examples human agency is no doubt involved and the emergence and maintenance of each involves reference to historical and socio-political practices, customs, and traditions.  Similarly, as Sally Haslanger explains, certain categories of individuals “count as social constructions because the conditions for being a member of the kind or category include social (properties and) relations.”[3] For example, to be considered (legally and officially) adopted obtains only in a society that recognizes the status of legal adoption and has the social and political structures in place to facilitate such practices.  Just as agents produce artifacts for various purposes, so, too, identities, subjectivities and concepts are constructed intentionally as well as unintentionally through discourses, institutions, traditions and socio-political practices.[4]

With the above sketch in place, let us turn to a few examples from Frantz Fanon in order to illustrate more concretely how human subjectivities—like artifacts—are constructed.   As Fanon explains, in a mostly black community in the Antilles, he neither identified nor saw himself as a “black” subject; however, once he entered a predominantly white socio-political context where the category “black” is assigned in advance multiple negative meanings, a confrontation with racially scripted phenotypic differences was unavoidable. [5] Fanon likewise narrates how a particularly painful racial encounter on a train was a breaking point for him.  That is, although he resisted repeatedly the ascriptions imposed upon him by the dominant discourse, he eventually gave in and began to internalize the white-defined view of the black other—intellectually inferior, culturally incompetent, an object to be fixed.  With this example, we see how discourse can function—one may even argue—causally to construct a particular subjectivity or identity.  Here we have a subjectivity, “black,” which was constructed in a specific socio-historical context through discourse, institutional practices, legal structures and so forth.  There is nothing intrinsic to the subject that corresponds to the fictive identity created by the dominant discourse; yet, because the society itself is, in this case, structured racially, those who have been labeled “black” can and often do come to see themselves as possessing at least some of the characteristics that have been ascribed to them.   As Haslanger observes,

Our classificatory schemes, at least in social contexts, may do more than just map preexisting groups of individuals; rather our attributions have the power to both establish and reinforce groupings which may eventually come to “fit” the classifications.  In such cases, classificatory schemes function more like a script than a map.[6]

None of the above should be taken to mean that an individual is completely socially determined or unable to resist or re-construct his or her subjectivity.  In future posts, I plan to discuss specific examples of such resistance possibilities via textual analyses of Foucault, Fanon and Frederick Douglass.

Notes

[2] This section on social constructionism is indebted to Sally Haslanger’s work.  See especially, Sally Haslanger, “Ontology and Social Construction,” Philosophical Topics 23 (1995):  95–125.

[3] Ibid., 98.

[4] Regarding unintended socially constructed identities, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the history “delinquency,” showing how it emerges as an unintended subjectivity produced by the modern prison system.  This new subjectivity arises in spite of the fact that the stated intention of the institution is to rehabilitate offenders.

[5] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 90.

[6] Haslanger, “Ontology and Social Construction,” 100.  Haslanger labels this type of construction, “discursive.”  Here “[s]omething is discursively constructed just in case it is the way it is, to some substantial extent, because of what is attributed (and/or self-attributed) to it” (Ibid., 100).

Describing how “black” subjectivity in a colonized context is socially constructed and comes to function as an imposed hermeneutical lens for black experience, Frantz Fanon writes,

For no longer does the black man have to be just black, but he has to be black over against the white man. Some would want to remind us that this situation works both ways.  We answer back that it’s false.  The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.  From one day to the next, Negroes have two systems of reference from which they must take their bearings.  Their metaphysical, or less pretentiously, their customs and the authorities to which they referred, were abolished because they were in contradiction with a civilization that has ignored them and imposed itself on them.[1]

As my own description of Fanon’s passage indicates, the terms “social construction,” “constructionism,” and similar phrases are commonplace in much of the current philosophical literature on race, gender and sexuality.  For example, most contemporary philosophers of race argue that race is not a natural, biological kind—a widely-held belief that came to full fruition in the nineteenth century. [2] In contemporary race theory literature, this former view of race goes by a variety of names:  racialism (K. Anthony Appiah), biobehavioral essentialism (Ron Mallon), racial essentialism and so forth.   Given the widespread rejection of this position among race theorists, it is important to have a clear idea of precisely what the position entails.  Ron Mallon presents a concise explanation of the three aspects of racialism or what he calls biobehavioral essentialism.

Races were believed to share biobehavioral essences:  underlying natural (and perhaps genetic) properties that (1) are heritable, biological features, (2) are shared by all and only the members of a race, and (3) explain behavioral, characterological, and cultural predispositions of individual persons and racial groups.[3]

Although there are significant points of disagreement among scholars engaged in race related studies, there is, as Mallon highlights, a general consensus among philosophers of race, sociologists and biologists that “races do not share such biobehavioral essences.”[4] Perhaps the strongest piece of evidence against racialism is the conclusion reached in recent scientific studies of intra- and intergroup genetic variation.  As the study of genetics gained prestige in scientific circles, those adhering to racial essentialism turned to this new field, believing that the differences among races must be the result of an underlying genetic discrepancy.  However, “studies of human genetic diversity suggest that genetic variation within racially identified populations is as great as or greater than diversity between populations.”[5] In light of these findings, the possibility of confirming a distinct racial essence “shared by all and only members of a race” is highly improbable.[6]

Even with a general consensus concerning the untenability of racialism among philosophers of race, debates abound as to whether racial discourse should be retained given the negative purposes for which it has been utilized. In light of the abundant evidence against a biobehavioral essentialized notion of race, many race theorists argue for what Mallon has labeled, “racial skepticism, the view that races do not exist at all.”[7] Others, however, believe that although an essentialized, hierarchical view of race must be rejected, racial language, nonetheless, should be salvaged, albeit purged of its negative history.  This second group defends what Mallon calls racial constructionism.  On this view, race is a social construction and thus exists as a social, rather than a natural kind.[8] Racial constructionists hold that the notion of race as a social kind plays a crucial role in establishing, maintaining and developing a group’s identity; consequently, it as well as racial discourse must be preserved.  Mallon lists a third group, racial population naturalism, which claims that “races may exist as biologically salient populations, albeit ones that do not have the biologically determined social significance once imputed to them.”[9]

Notes

[2] For a helpful historical and philosophical discussion of the significant figures and events that paved the way for nineteenth century (pseudoscientific) racial essentialism, see Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race?  Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2001), 11–36. Bernasconi argues that although Kant was not the first to use the term “race,” he was the first to give the term definitional precision  As Bernasconi explains, for Kant, what distinguishes race from variety is the fact that “races are marked by hereditary characteristics that are unavoidable in the offspring” (Ibid., 17).  Regarding the problems of a biological concept of race, see Daniel Blackburn, “Why Race is not a Biological Concept,” in Race and Racism in Theory and Practice, ed. Berel Lang, 3–26. Oxford:  Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.  See also, Ron Mallon, “‘Race’:  Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” Ethics 116 (2006):  525-551, especially 528–29.

[3] Mallon, “‘Race’:  Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” 528-529.

[4] Ibid., 529.

[5] Ibid., 529.

[6] Ibid., 529.

[7] Ibid., 525, italics retained.  See, for example, K. Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” in Overcoming Racism and Sexism, eds. Linda A. Bell and David Blumenfeld, 59–78.  Oxford:  Rowman & Littlefield, 1995; Naomi Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race (New York:  Routledge, 2002).

[8] Mallon, “‘Race’:  Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” 525-526, fn. 4.  See, for example, Charles Mills, Blackness Visible:  Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1998); Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York:  Routledge, 1996); Michael Root, “How We Divide the World,” Philosophy of Science 67 (2000):  S628–S639; Ronald Sundstrom, “Racial Nominalism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002):  193–210.

[9] Mallon, “‘Race’:  Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” 526.  See, for example, Robin Andreasen, “Race:  Biological Reality or Social Construct?”  Philosophy of Science 67 (2000):  S653–S666; Philip Kitcher, “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture,” in Racism, ed. Leonard Harris (New York:  Humanity Books, 1999):  87–120.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault develops what one might call his “panoptic theory of institutions.”  Drawing upon Bentham’s Panotpicon, a tower-like structure designed to facilitate simultaneous surveillance of prisoners from a stable centralized location, Foucault describes how prisons and other institutions continue the panoptic tradition albeit with ever-increasing technological sophistication.   As Foucault explains, the architectural construction of the Panopticon creates a situation in which the gaze of warden upon the prisoners is perpetual and inescapable.  Through various means—from psychological manipulation to the application of physical violence—the prisoners are made aware of this ever-present gaze and over time the external surveillance is internalized.  Although Frederick Douglass wrote his first autobiography more than a century before Foucault penned Discipline and Punish, Douglass’s vivid descriptions of life in a racialized society parallel and corroborate Foucault’s analyses.  In the passage below, Douglass gives an account of the ways in which, Mr. Covey, a well-known slave-breaker, exerted his own pantoptic gaze upon the slaves.

His [Covey’s] work went on in his absence almost as well as in his presence; and he had the faculty of making us feel that he was ever present with us.  This he did by surprising us.  He seldom approached the spot where we were at work openly, if he could do it secretly.  He always aimed at taking us by surprise.  Such was his cunning, that we used to call him, among ourselves, “the snake.”  When we were at work in the cornfield, he would sometimes crawl on his hands and knees to avoid detection, and all at once he would rise nearly in our midst, and scream out, “Ha, ha!  Come, come! Dash on, dash on!”  This being his mode of attack, it was never safe to stop a single minute.  His comings were like a thief in the night.  He appeared to us as being ever at hand.  He was under every tree, behind every stump, in every bush, and at every window, on the plantation. […] Mr. Covey’s forte consisted in his power to deceive.  His life was devoted to planning and perpetuating the grossest deceptions.[1]

Covey’s maneuverings, though lacking the sophistication of twentieth century surveillance technologies, nonetheless produced the same effect on the slaves.  That is, Covey was able to make his gaze always present even when he was in fact absent.  Covey, like the Panopticon, is seemingly omnipresent even when unseen.  Though limited by his physical existence, his regular surprise attacks coupled with the penalties that were exercised upon those caught idle or not working efficiently, allowed Covey to transcend his spatial limitations.  Having created an atmosphere of fear in which the slaves lived and moved and had their being, Covey’s actual physical presence was no longer needed.  That is, the sign of a broken slave was the internal inscription of the master’s gaze, or in more Foucaudian terms, the interiorization of the panoptic gaze and the subsequent creation of a new subjectivity, the slave.

Notes

Below is Frederick Douglass’s elegant description of how he often looked across the Chesapeake Bay, which was full of sailboats, and imagined that he was sailing away to live as a freeman.

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…with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint… ‘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?[1]

Notes

In Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, he describes his first six months with “master” Covey, a well-known “slave-breaker” to whom he had been sent due to his so-called “disciplinary” issues.  Douglass was about sixteen years old during his stay with Covey, and in spite of significant obstacles, had learned to read.  Though his literacy opened up new worlds for him and allowed him to express himself and even to know himself more profoundly, it also brought about a deep sense of loss—a realization of all that he could have been had he been a (white) freeman rather than a (black) slave.  In other words, Douglass’s literacy indeed produced in him a kind of freedom within the oppressive, racialized society in which he lived, but it wasn’t sufficient—after all under the white gaze, no matter how educated he became, he remained a mere thing, property, chattel.  The insufficiency of this “inner” freedom is seen in Douglass’s famous account of his fight with Covey.

When Douglass’s former owner, Thomas Auld, could no longer deal with Douglass, he sent him to Covey.  Douglass describes his time with Covey as follows:  “the first six months, of that year … scarce a week passed without his whipping me.  I was seldom free from a sore back” (p. 56).[1] He then recounts how Covey worked him day and night and in all weather conditions and how at last Covey’s “discipline” broke him.

I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me.  Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me.  I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute! (p. 58).

Although Douglass had attained a level of freedom through literacy—an accomplishment that was itself an “argument” against the white hegemonic discourse which claimed that blacks were subhuman, incapable of “higher” rational reflection, and thus in need of (white) masters—and thus had within himself moved from an animal-like existence to a more human existence, he as an embodied being was still in bonds and subject to the (irrational) whims of  white society.  In fact, Douglass indicates in the passage above, that Covey’s “disciplinary regime” (i.e. torture and inhumane work routines) transformed him back into a beast-like existence.

After one particularly brutal and near-death beating at the hands of Covey, Douglass decides to flee.  He returns to his former owner, Mr. Auld, who rather mercilessly commands him to go back to Covey.  As Douglass’s “dark night of slavery” continues, he contemplates suicide, living in the woods until he eventually dies for lack of food etc., or returning to Covey.  At last he decides to go back to Covey’s plantation, knowing that a bloody beating awaits him.  As Douglass is climbing over a fence to enter Covey’s field, Covey runs out to meet him with whip in hand.  Douglass manages to escape again and hides in the woods where he meets another slave named Sandy.  He and Sandy discuss his situation, and Sandy convinces him that he must return to Covey’s house.  However, before Douglass departs, Sandy gives Douglass a root with supposed magical, protective powers.  Sandy claims that if Douglass carries this root on his ride side, Covey will not come near him.  Douglass is highly skeptical but takes the root to please Sandy.  Douglass heads out a second time, this time returning on Easter Sunday.  Once Douglass enters his master’s property, he passed Covey, who, as a good Southern “Christian” is on his way to church.  To Douglass’s surprise, Covey interacts positively with him, which makes Douglass think that there might be something to Sandy’s root.  However, Monday is a different story; with Monday, we’re back to business as usual.  While laboring that morning in a stable, Douglass catches sight of Covey approaching with a long rope in hand.  Covey tackles Douglass and attempts to bind him with the rope.  Rather than remain a docile slave, Douglass decides to resist and fights back.  “At this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose” (p. 64).  Douglass’s response took Covey by surprise, and Douglass could see for the first time fear in Covey’s eyes.  The two struggled for over two hours until Covey finally gave up.

If we bring Douglass’s narrative (as a hermeneutical “tool”) into conversation with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, some rather interesting insights surface.  After Douglass’s act of physical resistance or more strongly put, his act of violence, Covey never again physically abuses Douglass.  Here contra Hegel’s account of the docile slave who cared more for his life than his freedom, the slave is willing to risk his life for freedom.  Douglass himself interpreted the fight with Covey as a decisive moment in his struggle for freedom.

The battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave.  It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.  It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free.  The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself.  He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery.  I felt as I never felt before.  It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom.  My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.  I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me (p. 65).

Here it seems that something beyond intellectual freedom (i.e. literacy and what I’ve called “inner freedom”) was required for Douglass’s “resurrection.”  As an embodied, political being, Douglass’s experience of freedom was necessarily limited so long as Covey and the socio-political slavery apparatus had dominion over his body.  According to Douglass’s account, some kind of physical resistance or force was needed not only for his own sense of freedom but also so that Covey might recognize him as an Other with volitional and rational faculties capable of producing deliberate and purposeful acts of resistance.    (Though my knowledge of Marx is quite limited, I suppose that a Marxist would be delighted with this reading).  My final point is to highlight the fact that in Douglass’s narrative, the slave does not gain freedom or bring about a reversal in the master/slave relationship through his labor (The Marxist would not, however, find this point delightful). To the contrary, Douglass says that the excruciating labor he endured under Covey’s supervision crushed his spirit—“ I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!” (p. 58).   Although acquiring skills through labor does not bring about a reversal in the master/slave relationship, the master’s identity is (as Hegel claims) dialectically related to the slave’s.  How so?  Covey chooses not turn Douglass in for a public “whipping.”  Douglass’s explanation for Covey’s seemingly inexplicable decision is that Covey’s reputation as a slave-breaker was on the line.  He failed to break Douglass, and to turn Douglass in would be to admit that failure and lose his reputation. In short, Douglass worked within the power mechanisms of an oppressive slave society, and his resistance proved successful on multiple counts.  Power relations, as Foucault emphasizes, are not merely oppressive.  Rather, when power relations obtain, genuine resistance is possible.

Notes

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon presents his two-fold schemata, the historico-racial (schéma historico-racial) and epidermal racial schemata (schéma épidermique racial) as a corrective to Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema (schéma corporel).  In brief, Fanon’s historico-racial schema brings to light the historical contingencies and mythological narratives imposed upon blacks, whereas the racial-epidermal schema speaks to the sedimentation of the so-called “black essence.”   In other words, once the (white-imposed) narrative of what it means to be a black person, which includes the various meanings that have been assigned to phenotypic differences, has become fixed, ossified and even naturalized in the social consciousness, various “scientific” discourses, and cultural and legal practices, the black essence has been “successfully” created.[1]

When the transition to the racial-epidermal schema takes place, the all-pervasiveness of the white gaze—here understood broadly as the white mythological narrative as manifest in the cultural consciousness and systematically expressed in the cultural institutions and practices of a given society—functions like a Panopticon, keeping the black person under constant inspection.  Though speaking of the incarcerated, Foucault’s description applies quite well to the black person’s situation vis-à-vis the white, European other, “he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.”[2] As soon as the racial-epidermal schema has come to fruition and the black essence fixed, the requisite racial machinery has likewise been established to ensure “proper” social boundaries and to keep the white mythology unchallenged.  In a way similar to the Panopticon’s ability to “disindividualiz[e] power” and distribute it through various socio-cultural and legal structures, institutions and people, Fanon’s schemata point to the systemic racial structures of colonized Europe.[3] These racialized disciplinary practices, though not identical to the disciplinary practices Foucault describes, nonetheless share close family resemblances with “a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference.” [4] The racial-epidermal schema, broadly construed to include these systemic, disindividualized power structures, enables even the most vulnerable and innocent members of society—the child on the train—to be an instrument of and even operate the racial machinery.[5]

When the white mythology has its way, it gives birth to black subjugation, which has both an external and an internal dimension.  The external aspect is socio-political in nature and is often manifest in discriminatory legislation and unequal educational and employment opportunities.  The internal aspect comes when the black person can no longer bear the weight of the white alienating gaze and internalizes the narrative.  To return to Foucault’s metaphor, when the black person breaks down and accepts the white mythos, there is a sense in which the panoptic surveillance is no longer needed.[6] In Fanon’s description of his self-fragmenting descent, he draws attention to the sense of powerlessness that he felt in a colonialized context wherein mis-recognition by the white other was the norm.  “Disoriented, incapable of confronting the Other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from myself, and gave myself up as an object.”[7]

Fanon is cognizant, in other words, of the black person’s participation in this already-given white-scripted history.  His statements, “I transported myself” and “gave myself up as an object,” acknowledge his active involvement in accepting the white mythology.  Although this particular act is negative, it nonetheless highlights the fact that the black person in a colonialized or similarly oppressive context is in reality not a mere res, a thing determined from the outside and lacking genuine freedom.  Fanon, in fact, makes numerous statements affirming his freedom—a freedom that involves his ability to creatively re-script his own narrative and to refuse to be shackled by a pre-given white narrative.

I find myself one day in the world, and I acknowledge one right for myself:  the right to demand human behavior from the other.  And one duty:  the duty never to let my decisions renounce my freedom.  […] I am not a prisoner of History.  I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction.  I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life.[8]

These declarations in no way undermine Fanon’s schemata, particularly his account of the coming-into-being of a fixed black essence once the racial-epidermal schema has been established. This is the case because his genealogy of racial sedimentation (i.e., black essentialism) or the giving way of Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema to the racial-epidermal schema is not a necessary but a contingent event, which qua contingent can (in theory) be undone or at least significantly dismantled.

In other words, Fanon’s agonized cry of alienation, although genuine and intensely felt, should not be interpreted as a despairing last word.  Rather, Fanon calls for a counter-narrative which refuses to be frozen in a white-scripted past.

Notes

[2] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200.

[3] See, e.g., Fanon’s critique of Monsieur Mannoni in chapter four of Black Skin, White Masks. Contra Mannoni’s claims, Fanon draws attention to the fact that the very “structure of South Africa is a racist structure” (p. 68).

[4] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 202.

[5] In his chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Fanon recounts his experience on a train of being “fixed” by a white other—an other which happened to be a child who had already been habituated to see blacks as defined by the white imagination.  As the child’s refrain, “Look! A Negro!” crescendoed forth and came to a close with a fearful questioning of the “Negro’s” next move, Fanon not only experienced the gaze of the white other, he also began to see himself through the white gaze. See Black Skin, White Masks, p. 92.

[6] See Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” p. 176. See also, Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 92.  Again, Foucault’s account of the effects of being constantly seen but never seeing share similarities with the experience of a black person in a white-dominating context.  “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.  By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects” (Discipline and Punish, p. 203).

[7] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 92.

[8] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 203-4.  Fanon goes on to say, “[t]he density of History determines none of my acts.  I am my own foundation.  And it is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom” (p. 205).

As Carter shows, Maximus the Confessor’s Christological vision has much to contribute to contemporary discussions on race, both theological and otherwise.  Love for Maximus is central to all actions, divine and human.  The “otherness” of creation came into being not by necessity but through unconstrained divine love and generosity.   Human beings, though the pinnacle of God’s creation because they image or reflect God in a unique way (imago Dei), chose to turn from their Creator, which resulted in a triple alienation.  Instead of intimate communion with God and one another, we experience discord, fragmentation and even hostility.  Instead of a respectful, cultivating relationship with the created order, we manipulate nature, giving little or no thought to its telos and purpose in God’s cosmic plan of redemption.  With God no longer our primary love, our “love” becomes self-focused and tyrannical.  This misdirected love is transposed into a dominating, monotone key in which polyphonic harmonies have no place.  Carter, in his appropriation of Maximus’ reflections on love, argues that distorted self-love (philautia) has the propensity to harden into a disposition of ‘possession’.[1] If such a disposition becomes entrenched in the social consciousness, we have at least one of the essential ingredients for large-scale mechanisms of oppression.[2] Carter believes that certain core teachings of the Enlightenment, especially those traceable to Kant, not only gravitate toward the possessive-tyrannical disposition, but are also integrally related to the emergence of various racialized mechanisms of modernity.[3]

For instance, in a colonialized situation, ‘philautia functions as a substitute for a doctrine of creation inasmuch as the self-constituting I creates a reality and draws all else into it by making it utility or assigning it a use value in the world of the I.’[4] Bringing Maximus’ theological critique to bear on the modern problem of racism, Carter interprets the modern self, driven by its misdirected self-love and armed with its Enlightenment, pseudo-scientific teachings of racial hierarchies, as a variation of Adamic transgression but translated onto the socio-political level.  That is, just as Adam (and Eve) unsatisfied with their sub-creator roles in God’s story, sought to become narrators of their own story, so too the Enlightenment discourse on race offers its own narrative of origins and human destiny.  This narrative, however, is rigidly monochromatic.  When taken up by certain misguided Christians, it transmutes into “a narrative of how human beings came to be bearers of race and how within this narrative whiteness became theologically supreme as a modality of religious dominance and world commerce.”[5]

As both ancient (Maximus) and modern (Fredrick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr.) Christian witnesses proclaim, the Christian narrative, which begins with creation out of love and climaxes with re-creation through the resurrected life of Jesus Christ, is not inherently a discourse of oppression.  It does, however, involve suffering, the shedding of blood and even violent death.  The Christian scriptural account does not present us with stories of perfect human beings.  Rather, it portrays humans—including those who are part of God’s covenant people—in their failings and achievements, in their faithfulness and recalcitrance.  Perhaps the most inexplicable part of the story is why a completely sufficient, content Trinitarian God willingly decides not only to begin and to continue the story but likewise to enter into the story and to assign himself a seemingly tragic role in which he suffers and dies at the hands of those whom he came to save.  Even so, when the Word became incarnate and made himself vulnerable to the vicissitudes and strains of human existence—misunderstanding, rejection, and even death-by-crucifixion—he proclaimed to the world that his Lordship was not the way of colonization or domination.  Rather, this omnipotent Lord set aside his privileges and became a slave, dying a slave’s death yet simultaneously conquering death, of which his resurrection is the definitive sign.[6]

With the incarnation and humiliation of Christ, the corporeal schema and the master/slave dialectic are undone, nullified and ultimately replaced by an inexplicable ‘logic’ of love wherein, paradoxically, a seemingly tragic death opens the way to life.   Christ’s particular, poor, Jewish flesh becomes, in Carter’s words, ‘the site of God’s wealth,’ the place where ethnic, class and even gender ‘binaries’ no longer serve oppressive purposes.[7] In other words, Christ’s flesh becomes the place where human diversity finds unity—a unity that saves difference.  We see this unity-in-diversity in the New Testament itself.  For example, Jewish Christians are not forced to relinquish their Jewish heritage and practices, though both must be re-interpreted in light of the Christ-event.  Nor are Gentile Christians compelled to become Jews and adhere to traditional Jewish customs (e.g., circumcision).  Rather, Christ’s particular Jewish flesh opens the way for all to participate in Trinitarian life.   Unlike philosophical schemata that flatten difference for the sake of unity (or vice versa), Christian conceptual categories, particularly those related to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, provide a model for a unity that upholds difference.  For instance, the horizontal one-and-many union between Christ and his people—people of diverse languages, ethnicities, and social classes—is an image of the one-and-many reality of the Trinity.  At the heart of Christian teaching is the proclamation that vertical and horizontal “communities” of unity-and-difference can (and in the case of the Trinity do) coexist in non-violent, non-dominating, reciprocal relations of love.

In light of the organic relationship that Christianity has with Judaism, the significance of Christ’s Jewish flesh must not be overlooked—a point that brings us back to Fanon.  In his critique of Merleau-Ponty’s generic corporeal schema, Fanon drew attention to the ways in which the white-scripted narrative (mis)colors black skin with multiple negative connotations.  Fanon’s analysis shares structural similarities (and dissimilarities) with the Christian’s emphasis on the importance of Christ’s particular embodiment as a Jew; however, the particularities involved are not racial in the modern, biological meaning of the term.  Christ’s Jewish flesh, nonetheless, exhibits the same polysemous and metonymic capacities—encompassing within it Israel’s covenantal history and reconfiguring that history in light of the central events of his embodied life:  Incarnation, death and resurrection.[8] Unlike the white-imposed narrative which closes off the black person’s freedom, Christ’s Incarnation and invitation to intimate union break down barriers of exclusion and thus open possibilities of freedom which transcend anything philosophy has to offer.

Notes

[2] Of course numerous other factors would have to be taken into account in order to give an adequate explanation of the rise of colonialism and racism.

[3] See also Robert Bernasconi, ‘Who Invented the Concept of Race?  Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race’, in Robert Bernasconi (ed), Race, (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2001).  Bernasconi argues that although Kant was not the first to use the term “race,” he was the first to give the term definitional precision.  ‘By setting out clearly the distinction between race and variety, where races are marked by hereditary characteristics that are unavoidable in the offspring, whereas the distinguishing marks of varieties are not always transmitted, Kant introduced a language for articulating permanent differentiations within the notion of species’ (p. 17).

[4] Carter, Race, p. 345.

[5] Carter, Race, p. 348.  See also Carter’s commentary on Maximus’ Epistle 2 and the ways in which it ‘becomes an interesting and unexpected resource for probing whiteness as a racial-colonialist way of ordering the world, that, in fact, deploys the discourse of Christian theology to do its work’ (p. 345).

[6] ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited [ἁρπαγμόϛ], but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross’ (Phil 2:5-8, NRSV).  See also 1 Cor 15 and Rev 1:18.

[7] Carter, Race, p. 368.  St. Paul says something along these lines in his epistle to the Galatians.  Describing the new reality of God’s people, those baptized into Christ who now form an alternative community operating against the grain of the world’s logic, St. Paul says, “[t]here is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28, NRSV).  Of course, I am not suggesting that this alternative community has been realized.  According to Christian belief, the full actualization of such a community will occur only in the eschaton.  However, even in the midst of the already-not-yet eschatological tension that characterizes the Christian life in via, the redemptive benefits of the Christ-event make possible proleptic glimpses of communal life in Christ’s kingdom.

[8] See Luke 24:27 where Jesus says that the law and all of Hebrew Scripture must be re-interpreted Christotelically.  In addition, though Carter does not develop this idea, the giving of Christ’s flesh in the Eucharist is another significant way that the many are continually made one in their present already-not-yet eschatological existence.

In the closing section of Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon emphasizes the need for the black person to be future-oriented and to actively reject the white-scripted narrative into which he was born while creatively carving out a new present and future.  For Fanon, this meant a willingness to employ violence and to risk his own life so that human beings would no longer “be enslaved on this earth”.[1] Yet, his vision also included a call to human solidarity, a call to blacks and whites and to all human beings to “move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born”.[2]

Does his appeal to human solidarity, his repudiation of the past and his refusal to allow the “density of History to determine” his acts mean that Fanon has no interest in his ethnic roots or that he sees no value in highlighting the distinct contributions of people of color?[3] One need not draw such conclusions.  Rather, because he is acutely aware of the power of socio-historical forces to create systematic, racialized mechanisms and eventually essential-ize a people group, Fanon understood the need for a “disalienation” to occur.[4] This disalienation requires that the black person break the bonds of his historical (white) inscription and begin to write his own narrative.  Here we should not overlook Fanon’s affirmation of human free agency even in extreme situations of oppression.  As human beings, we are not determined completely by socio-historical conditions.  However, in the colonial situation where skin color defines in advance a person’s value and his or her place in society, abstract philosophical schemata—such as Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema and Hegel’s mythological master/slave dialectic—come up short because they fail to consider the existential reality of racial difference.[5]

Among other things, Fanon’s account of his experience in a white-scripted world points to the human need to understand oneself as part of a larger narrative—a narrative in which both human freedom and cultural and ethnic diversity are valued and respected.  Though the context was slavery and not colonialism and the dissimilarities between the two should be acknowledged, it is instructive to consider the ways in which some African Americans re-constituted their identity by bringing an ancient narrative of oppression and liberation into conversation with their present circumstances.  As Rowan Williams observes, if the dominant group takes on the role of defining the out-group’s identity, we should not be astounded if the latter’s response is, “‘We don’t need you to tell us who we are’.  Certain kinds of separatism are necessary to highlight the reality of a difference that has been overridden by the powerful conscripting the powerless into their story”.[6]

In fact, such a response in the form of counter-narratives of non-white-defined identity and creative strategies of resistance was precisely how many African-American slaves chose to struggle against white oppression and the brutality of American slavery.  Given the theological and specifically Christian approach that my account will discuss, it is necessary to acknowledge that Christianity has not been faithful to its own best teachings related to the issue of slavery.  In fact, under the banner of Christianity and with the “justification” of Scripture, many proclaiming the name of Christ fought to preserve the inhumane institution of slavery.[7] Nonetheless, in spite of such oppression, the African spirit resisted a reduction to white sameness.[8]

This resistance took many forms from physical violence to seeking a new life in free territories to purposely disrupting work routines.  Whatever shape the opposition took, a common conviction driving the slaves’ subversive maneuverings was a refusal to accept the degraded, sub-human existence imposed on them by white masters, coupled with a commitment to assert a self-defined, rather than an other-defined account of black identity.[9] Another area in which resistance manifested itselfwas in what we might call the specifically religious sphere.  “Slave religion”(Cone’s term), which continually asserted the dignity of blacks because they too are created in God’s image, not only affirmed “freedom from bondage” but also “freedom-in-bondage”.[10] That is, though Christian slaves did seek an ultimate end to their sufferings in the next life, they also believed in and sang spirituals about a God who was actively involved in history now—in their history—“making right what whites had made wrong.  Just as God delivered the Children of Israel from Egyptian slavery, drowning Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea, he will also deliver black people from American slavery”.[11] The spirituals are often inspired by biblical passages which emphasize God’s care for and active involvement in liberating oppressed people, as well as his willingness in the Person of Jesus Christ to enter into an exiled existence and even physically touch the untouchables.

While the black spirituals communicate an abiding trust in God’s promise to deliver his people, they also provide an avenue for the slaves to cry out in their suffering, thus creating their own version of Israel’s “How long, O Lord?”[12] Here we not only have an eschatological hope on the basis of who God is and what he has done in history and is doing in the present, but we likewise have an acknowledgment of the eschatological tension experienced now where injustice often prevails.  When the day finally came and the slaves were freed from their bonds, these African American believers experienced an “eschatological freedom grounded in the events of the historical present, affirming that even now God’s future [the eschaton] is inconsistent with the realities of slavery.  Freedom, for black slaves, […] was a historical reality that had transcendent implications”.[13] In other words, even though a form of liberation had come—a proleptic view of the eschaton—the very fact that slavery existed and thus required a decree of emancipation underscores the dislocated character of our present world.   In short, one of the central theological themes of black spirituals is the belief that God has not forsaken his people, coupled with the conviction that he will one day deliver them from their unjust human oppressors.   However, it must be stressed that the faith in view here was not a mere passive waiting for divine deliverance but involved creative strategies of active resistance to a white-defined identity.  “Resistance was the ability to create beauty and worth out of the ugliness of slave existence.  Resistance made dignity more than just a word to be analyzed philosophically”.[14]

Notwithstanding the genuine differences between Fanon’s colonial (and postcolonial) context and the African-American’s enslaved (and segregated) context, the oppressed in both situations are given an other-scripted narrative—a narrative which is one component of a socio-political, racialized apparatus that seeks to destroy difference.  Whether the narrative comes from “enlightened” Europeans or “Christian” slaveholders, the latter having more in common with the former than with the teachings of Jesus the suffering servant, the goal is domination and a reduction to white sameness.  If in fact colonialism and modern institutions of slavery are fueled by a desire to possess, destroy and re-make others in one’s own (white) image, and Christians who have supported these projects have been in grave error, is it possible to vindicate Christianity so that it might still be considered a valid option for the possibility of saving difference?  J. Kameron Carter believes it is possible and has recently made a case for rescuing Christianity from its perverse instantiations.

In part two, I shall discuss Carter’s reading of Maximus the Confessor.

Notes

[2] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 206.

[3] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 205.

[4] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 206.  This is not to deny the complicity involved in the black person’s internalization of the negative other-scripted narrative.

[5] This is not to suggest that Fanon’s critique resulted in his repudiation of all philosophical analyses and methodologies.  Rather, Fanon’s project can be seen as a needed corrective and expansion of the philosophical tradition.  On Fanon’s original contributions to the master/slave dialectic, see Nigel Gibson, ‘Dialectical Impasses:  Turning the Table on Hegel and the Black’, parallax 8 (2002), esp. pp. 33-41.  As Gibson explains, ‘[r]eciprocity in the colonial experience is not so much deformed as closed off.  The colour barrier stops the dialectic.  Fanon further maintains that the slave cannot win recognition through labour; since the master wants only work, he is not at all interested in recognition’ (p. 36).

[6] Rowan Williams, ‘Nobody Knows Who I Am Till the Judgement Morning,’ in On Christian Theology, (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2000), p. 281.

[7] See, e.g., James Cone’s discussion of slave catechisms created by white ‘Christians’ for the purpose of producing docile slaves and to attempt to convince slaves that they were in fact created to be slaves (The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972), pp. 22-23.  Here one sees more continuity with Aristotle’s notion of ‘natural slaves’ than the biblical teaching that all humans are created in the image of God and are therefore equal before God.

[8] As Cone explains, ‘[w]hen white people enslaved Africans, their intention was to dehistoricize black existence, to foreclose the possibility of a future defined by the African heritage.  White people demeaned black people’s sacred tales, ridiculing their myths and defiling the sacred rites.  Their intention was to define humanity according to European definitions so that their brutality against Africans could be characterized as civilizing the savages.  But white Europeans did not succeed; and black history is the record of their failure’ (The Spirituals and The Blues, pp. 23-24).

[9] Cone, The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 25.

[10] Cone, The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 28.  In chapter two, ‘The Black Spirituals and Black Experience’, Cone highlights the numerous ways in which African-American slaves actively resisted the white-imposed narrative and refused to accept the biblical hermeneutic of their ‘Christian’ masters.  ‘The slaves were obliged to create their own religion out of the remnants that were available and useful, both African and Christian.  These elements were woven together to provide a historical possibility for human existence.  While white religion had taught blacks to look for their reward in heaven through obedience to white masters on earth, black slaves were in fact carving out a new style of earthly freedom’ (The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 28; italics added).

[11] Cone, The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 32.

[12] Commenting on the slaves’ expression of faith in the midst of unjust suffering, Cone writes, ‘[f]aith in the righteousness of God was not easy for black people, since God’s liberating work in the world was not always when they expected it.  Their faith did not cancel the pain of enslavement’ (The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 35).

[13] Cone, The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 42.

[14] Cone, The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 27.

The history of black people, as mentioned previously, is simultaneously erased and re-written by the white imagination.  This new history defines what a black person is—intellectually inferior, in need of a (white) master, incapable of contributing positively to (white, European) society and culture.  The black person does not create this narrative, but is scripted into it and constructed by it.  Nonetheless, a time comes when a black person is confronted with the white mythos by way of a particular, concrete and often painful encounter and thus begins to accept and internalize the mythology.  In Fanon’s words, “[d]isoriented, incapable of confronting the Other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from myself, and gave myself up as an object.”[1]

Fanon’s dramatic re-telling of the train episode and the pre-theoretical, racial assumptions apparent in the child’s remarks about Fanon serve a two-fold function.  First, the narrative calls attention to the deficiencies of Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema.  Second, the narrative highlights the way in which phenotypic or so-called “racial” differences—as negatively interpreted by the dominant group in a given historical epoch—close off or a least severely hinder the possibilities of freedom, as well as personal and cultural transformation for the oppressed group.   Hence, Fanon offers his historico-racial schema as a corrective.  Yet, his account also includes the racial-epidermal schema.  Whereas the historico-racial schema brings to light the historical contingencies and mythological narratives imposed upon blacks, the racial-epidermal schema speaks to the sedimentation of the so-called “black essence.”   In other words, once the new narrative of what it means to be a black person, which includes the various meanings that have been assigned to phenotypic differences, has become fixed, ossified and even naturalized in the social consciousness and cultural and legal practices, the black essence has been successfully created.[2]

Once we transition to the racial-epidermal schema, the all-pervasiveness of the white gaze—here understood broadly as the white mythos as manifest in the cultural consciousness and systematically expressed in the cultural institutions and practices of a given society—functions like a Panopticon, keeping the black person under constant inspection.  Though speaking of the incarcerated, Foucault’s description applies quite well to the black person’s situation vis-à-vis the white, European other, “he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.”[3] Once the racial-epidermal schema has come to fruition and the black essence has been fixed, the requisite racial machinery has likewise been established to ensure “proper” social boundaries and to keep the white mythology unchallenged.  In a way similar to the Panopticon’s ability to “disindividualiz[e] power” and distribute it through various socio-cultural and legal structures, institutions and people, Fanon’s schemata points to the systemic racial structures of colonized Europe.  These racialized disciplinary practices, though not identical to the disciplinary practices Foucault describes, nonetheless share close family resemblances with “a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference.” [4] The racial-epidermal schema, broadly construed to include these systemic, disindividualized power structures, enables even the most vulnerable and innocent members of society—the child on the train—to be an instrument of and even operate the racial machinery.

Notes

[2] On the movement and interpretation of Fanon’s schemata, I follow Weate, who views the racial epidermal schema as “a later stage in psychosomatic disintegration and alienation” (p. 174).  Weate describes the movement to the epidermal schema as Fanon’s attempt to trace a “genealogy of racial essentialism” (p. 173).  As he explains, “[t]he epidermal marks the stage where historical construction and contingency is effaced and replaced with the facticity of flesh.  The colour of skin now appears to be intrinsically significant.  With the outset of epidermalization, we are at the edge of being-for-others sedimenting into an essence, a ‘fact’ of blackness.  Fanon is therefore demonstrating that essentialism is a discourse derived from a perversive repression of history.  By marking the two stages of the ‘historico-racial’ and then the ‘racial-epidermal’, he is therefore contesting the view that essentialism, and in particular black essentialism, is grounded in a biological problematic.  For Fanon, the essentialization of blackness is the product of a concealed perversion of history. It is only once this concealment is consolidated (through epidermalization) that questions concerning the biological ground of race arise.  The distinction he makes between the two stages of schematization or epistemic enframing therefore allow biologistic discourses around race to be seen as phenomena derivative upon a prior perversion of history that is subsequently concealed” (“Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” pp. 174-75).

[3] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200.

[4] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 202.

In his book, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon challenges Merleau-Ponty’s inclusive notion of a corporeal schema and substitutes his own schemata, first an historical-racial schema, and second an epidermal racial schema.  Briefly stated (and more on this later), Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema describes the way in which the body’s agency makes manifest the historical world.  For Merleau-Ponty, our bodies are not objects in space, rather they inhabit space and through them we experience the world and the other.  In so far as the body is able to participate in and transform its historico-cultural horizon, it is free; in so far as its capacity for expression and its ability to alter its own history and given context are denied, it is not free.[1]

With this background in mind, we turn to Fanon’s text in order to understand why he substitutes his historical-racial schema and epidermal racial schema for Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a corporeal schema.  Fanon argues that a phenomenology of blackness—the experience of skin difference and of being the black other—can only be understood in the encounter with whiteness or more precisely, the white imagination.[2] That is, in a mostly black community in the Antilles, Fanon was “content to intellectualize these differences”; however, once he entered the white world and felt the weight of the “white gaze,” he experienced his otherness and became aware of pre-theoretical racial attitudes which up to that point had not existed for him.[3] In his chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Fanon recounts his experience on a train of being “fixed” by a white other—an other which happened to be a child who had already been habituated to see blacks as defined by the white imagination.  As the child’s refrain, “Look! A Negro!,” crescendoed forth and came to a close with a fearful questioning of the “Negro’s” next move,  Fanon not only experienced the gaze of the white other, he also began to see himself through the white gaze.

I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, […]  Disoriented, incapable of confronting the Other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from my self, and gave myself up as an object.  What did this mean to me?  Peeling, stripping my skin, causing a hemorrhage that left congealed black blood all over my body.  Yet this reconsideration of myself, this thematization, was not my idea.  I wanted simply to be a man among men.[4]

As Fanon takes up the white view of himself, he experiences its all-encompassing reach.  That is, his becoming a white-defined black other involved more than his present encounter with the child on the train; in essence, he entered into the white erasing and re-scripting of black history.  Not only is his present fixed by the white other, but his past is fixed as well.  The child’s unison refrain gives rise to polyphonic lines of “cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism” and the like.

A few paragraphs before his description of the train episode with the child, Fanon mentions Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema, highlighting the difficulties that a black person experiences in a white-scripted world because of his skin color and the various meanings that have been given to these and other embodied differences.  In Merleau-Ponty’s account, the reciprocal and fitting relation between body and the world gives rise to the possibility of a mutual constructing and transforming of both.  The body is not a mere object in space, but rather is our way of being in a spatio-temporal world; it is the background “always tacitly understood.”[5] With his corporeal schema, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the body’s free agency in its ability to both disclose and transform the historical world.[6]

Fanon, however, is not satisfied with this generic schema and thus introduces his historical-racial schema, which is imposed on him by the white other.  For Fanon, Merleau-Ponty’s inclusive, universal rendering of the corporeal schema through which the self and world emerge does not account for the disparity of experience between whites and blacks with regard to their ability to actively participate and transform themselves and the world.  As Jeremy Weate explains,

In the interracial encounter, the White is able to participate in the schematization of the world, whilst the Black may not, for his skin difference closes down the possibility of free agency.  A white mythos inserts itself between the black body and its self-image, becoming the ‘elements used’ in a reflexive understanding of black subjectivity.  In contesting the terms of Merleau-Ponty’s account of bodily freedom, Fanon provides a genealogy of the existential unfreedom of the black body in the racialized encounter.”[7]

Notes

[2] Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” p. 171.  See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 89.  In addition to Merleau-Ponty, Fanon perhaps also has Hegel and Sartre in mind, particularly the former’s dialectical understanding of recognition and reciprocity.  See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 191–97.  For an analysis of Fanon’s reflections on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, see Turner, “On the Difference between the Hegelian and Fanonian Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon et al., pp. 134–51.

[3] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 90.

[4] Ibid., p. 92.

[5] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 115.  Elaborating his notion of body schema, Merleau-Ponty explains, “[b]odily space can be distinguished from external space and envelop its parts instead of spreading them out, because it is the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance, the background of somnolence or reserve of vague power against which the gesture and its aim stand out, the zone of not being in front of which precise beings, figures and points can come to light.  In the last analysis, if my body can be a ‘form’ and if there can be, in front of it, important figures against indifferent backgrounds, this occurs in virtue of its being polarized by its tasks, of its existence towards them, of its collecting together of itself in its pursuit of its aims; the body schema is finally a way of stating that my body is in-the-world” (Ibid., p. 115).

[6] Fanon describes with ironic overtones Merleau-Ponty’s account as follows, “[a] slow construction of my self as a body in a spatial and temporal world seems to be the schema.  It is not imposed on me; it is rather a definitive structuring of my self and the world” (Black Skin, White Masks, p. 91)

[7] Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” p. 172.

“When we rethink the ‘there’ of our identity and community, the historical and contemporary figures that we embody, we may ask, Who sings the praises of those valiant warriors that fought against the colonizers?  Who laments the mothers raped, trapped, and left to die in the decadent slums of cities barely on the realm of modernity when they are no longer fit to be servants in the households of the colonizers-or servants in the households of the newly enriched postcolonial post-avant garde?  Where are the mourners for those who suffer from the rotten foods sold to the postcolonials, enriching world metropolitan centers, now romanticized as postmodern?  Who cares for the amputees from foreign-made land-mines, now abandoned by those who planted them?

The warriors, the mothers, the servants, the truck drivers, the children-these are not ghosts, they are not specters, they are not images in our heads.  These are bodies, black bodies; bodies of black men seen as inherently criminal; bodies of black women unseen, commodities of exchange, objects, things, toys, subjectless receptacles; children seen as already damned and irredeemable”  (Fanon:  A Criticial Reader, xvii).

“Expressing the real is an arduous job.  But when you take it into your head to express existence, you will very likely encounter nothing but the nonexistent.  What is certain is that at the very moment when I endeavored to grasp my being, Sartre, who remains ‘the Other,’ by naming me shattered my last illusion.  While I was telling him:

My negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
It reaches deep down into the red flesh of the soil
It reaches deep into the blazing flesh of the sky
It pierces opaque prostration with its patience
[Césaire, Notebook of a Return
to My Native Land,
trans. Rosello and Pritchard, p. 114].

While I, in a paroxysm of experience and rage, was proclaiming this, he reminded me that my negritude was nothing but a weak stage.  Truthfully, I’m telling you, I sensed my shoulders slipping from this world, and my feet no longer felt the caress of the ground.  Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness.  Not yet white, no longer completely black, I was damned.  Jean-Paul Sartre forgets that the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (Black Skin, White Masks, 116-17).

As Sartre explains, negritude is the antithesis of the assertion [not Sartre's personal belief] of the supremacy of the white (the thesis).  Thus, negritude is the moment of negativity; a moment to be overcome.  In contrast to Césaire’s and Senghor’s understanding of black consciousness as an “absolute density,” Sartre presents negritude as a lack, as a “minor term” in the syllogism.[1] How might we understand Fanon’s statement, “Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness”?  Here one could perhaps apply Derrida’s insights while simultaneously expanding them by way of Fanon’s critique of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.  According to Derrida, the meaning of a person’s life is always constituted at the intersection of a reference to the past and some kind of anticipation of the future.  Of course Derrida has in view a deconstruction of the completely transparent, stable, secure Cartesian self.  Nonetheless, Derrida’s emphasis on the role of past and future in constructing the self seems applicable here; yet, it is in need of Fanon’s stress on the fundamental difference of the black man’s experience of the world as mediated by a black body.[2] If a (black) person’s past is erased and re-written in the image of a violent, totalizing (white) other (the project of colonialization), and his future is largely pre-determined by that same other, “damned” is a pretty good description of his present experience.

Notes

[2] Fanon replaces Merleau Ponty’s corporeal schema (schéma corporel) with his own schéma historico-racial and schéma épidermique racial.