Black Views Differ

Over 50 voices challenging monolithic narratives of blackness

“Some view racial membership as an immutable status — you are born black and that is it. I do not. I view choice as an integral element of membership. In my view, a person (or at least an adult person) should be black by choice, with a recognized right of resignation.

Carrying through with that contractualist conception, I also believe that a black person should have no immunity from being de-blacked. Any Negro should be subject to having his or her membership in blackness revoked if he or she pursues a course of conduct that convincingly demonstrates the absence of even a minimal communal allegiance.”


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“I will not allow identity to trump my rationality and my individuality. I’m a human being first. I think about politics and I come to the conclusions that I come to. It doesn’t stop me from being black. Sometimes those opinions are conservative. No apology is being offered for that here.”


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“One must be wary of drawing any defining lines around blackness: the concept is too malleable for containment. Blackness is not just skin colour, but a polysemous consciousness.”


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“I feel, being a Black man, as if we’re always in some kind of paradox or a clusterfuck of trying to figure out who we are and what that means in relation to other people. It’s constantly changing. I want to capture the idea of code switching—if that wasn’t a thing, if Black men and Black people in general didn’t have to constantly morph into a different person based on the context of their surroundings, what would that look like? That’s how I handled the question of unpacking Black masculinity—if it was free and didn’t have limitations based upon societal standards, within the Black community and outside of it. What would Black masculinity look like if it was able to be fully free and not tainted by whiteness, if it wasn’t being monitored and policed by that colonialism?”


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“Even though there is consensus that the Black Social Movement has advanced the fight for the rights of historically marginalised people, it is also visible that it reproduces oppressive behaviors by remaining silent on the demands considered less important, such as questions of gender, gender identity and sexuality.

Part of the problem is related to widespread presence of cis, heterosexual men as leaders of the main organisations that fight for the rights of the black population. Their demands are connected to their lives and realities, which reinforces some stereotypes. These include the naturalisation of the idea that ‘blackness is constituted through the normalisation of the heterosexual black man, represented by the emblematic virility of his physical force, aggressive nature, violence, hearty apetite for sex and powerful penis.’ Within this logic, travesti or trans identity is something completely disconnected from blackness. Trans bodies, identities and subjectivities will not have a place within the Black Social Movement, as their ‘lives are not considered lives and materiality is understood as not important.’”


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“Black studies scholars have recently begun calling into question the predominance of 'resistance' as an interpretive lens. In Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture, he questions the 'practically unconscious … equivalence between blackness and resistance' that 'thwarts other ways of reading.' Quashie explains, 'As an identity, blackness is always supposed to tell us something about race or racism, or about America, or violence and struggle and triumph or poverty and hopefulness. The determination to see blackness only through a social public lens, as if there were no inner life, is racist.' The goal of such a critique is not to dismiss the power and importance of resistance within ongoing black freedom struggles but to ask what subtlety, complexity, and richness of human experience is lost when black life is understood exclusively as a resistance project. Is there room in our scholarly examinations for black interiority, forms of community, joy, frivolity, or contradiction?”


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“Because blacks live amidst such hunger for the moral authority of their race, we embraced protest as a permanent identity in order to capture the fruits of white guilt on an ongoing basis. Again, this was our first fall by our own hand. Still, it is hard to imagine any group of individuals coming out of four centuries of oppression and not angling their identity toward whatever advantage seemed available. White guilt held out the promise of a preferential life in recompense for past injustice, and the protest identity seemed the best way to keep that promise alive.

An obvious problem here is that we blacks fell into a group identity that has absolutely no other purpose than to collect the fruits of white guilt. And so the themes of protest–a sense of grievance and victimization–evolved into a sensibility, an attitude toward the larger world that enabled us always and easily to feel the grievance whether it was there or not. Protest became the mask of identity, because it defined us in a way that kept whites 'on the hook.' Today the angry rap singer and Jesse Jackson and the black-studies professor are all joined by an unexamined devotion to white guilt.”


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“Feelings and opinions have replaced critical thinking, or at least a robust critical thinking, in attempts to decenter whiteness and challenge hegemonic forces in academia. These feelings and opinions seem to have led to framings of the world that see violence against people of color in places where it may not necessarily exist, which works as an obstacle to dealing with actual racism. What's more, the prevalence of feelings and opinions over reason and facts leads to 'strategies' that, if followed to their ultimate consequences, are more effective at enhancing group dignity and esteem than in actually making progressive changes to structural racism that can benefit our students and society at large. One cannot successfully change reality if one is effectively estranged from it.”


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“A never-quite-vanquished nationalism remains a poignantly unavoidable source for frictions between the articulation of group identities—those persistent fictions—and individual negotiations of either more-or-less orthodox cultural allegiance or cosmopolitan openness (even assimilationism). For most minority entities, then, a measure of cultural nationalism—or group unity—has been a prize element of their steady existences as quote-unquote communities. The hazard of nationalism—its tendency to decay into fallacious myths, misty romanticisms, and blood-rite fascisms—persists, then, despite the globally swaddling and homogenizing embrace of IBM and Coca-Cola.

Black intellectuals possess no immunity against the potentially toxic allure of nationalism. Rather, we have been notorious for being either ‘too’ doctrinairely race-conscious, or nation-conscious (consider Malcolm X), or for not being conscious ‘enough’ (consider Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.).”


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“I am what my friends would identify as a 'Nigerian Black American'. So when I talk about black issues, specifically being a Nigerian woman who was raised in America, I'm talking largely about the issues that are plaguing what we would identify as Black America. So if we're talking about mass incarceration, if we're talking about police brutality, if we're talking about all of these different phenomenon – a lot of times we're identifying those as a Black American issue.

So what does my family say? 'Fumilola always wants to talk about the Black Americans as if they are all one people.' But I'm like 'we are'. It would serve us to acknowledge our sameness. But what do I hear on the African-American side? That 'Africans think they better than us. Cuz y'all come over here and, oh, so y'all just better? Y'all don't wanna be Black Americans?'

And so, where I sit is right in the middle of that conversation. Translating between the two communities and saying 'you have more alike than your differences' and it would serve you to function in coalition and engage in a contemporary pan-Africanism – but we would have to respect each other's differences in order engage in a contemporary pan-Africanism.”


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