MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

At the BET Awards on June 26, 2016, Jesse Williams spoke with the prophetic lyric of Baldwin and Morrison and the righteous rage of hooks and X. People of Color are “done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture […] like oil, black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations, then stealing them, gentrifying our genius, and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.” For this presentation, I leave aside definitions and applications of cultural appropriation and cultural racism. Instead, I want to focus on the twisted logic that undergirds the white gaze of the Black person.

I briefly offer a theory of racial bifurcation in which, on the level of the everyday lived experience, Black persons have their personhood rendered invisible while their Black body is highlighted as the only salient feature. As body, they remain trapped under the white gaze, which is both the lens and action through which whites view—explicitly or implicitly—Black persons.

The main thrust of my presentation is that whiteness has a Caliban problem, that is, the problem of seeing irrationality in the other–in this case, the Black body—when it itself is the bearer of irrationality. Black acts have often been understood as the manifestation of irrationality and superstition, that is, as lacking reason. Williams powerfully concludes his speech: “The thing is though, that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.” From a de-colonial perspective, one might claim that these antimodern Calibans escape the supremacy of white modernity. With a positive valence, they can be understood as productive forces for new modes of human freedom.