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Post by Admin on Jul 29, 2020 6:56:13 GMT
(Re)Defining the black body in the era of Black Lives Matter: the politics of blackness, old and new Shayla C. Nunnally Pages 138-152 | Received 23 Oct 2017, Accepted 17 Dec 2017, Published online: 04 Jan 2018
Race and (African) American political development Race is a social construction, an idea with no biological foundation (Omi and Winant 1994; Gossett 1997). As a concept, race organizes bodies into a social hierarchy, whereupon bodies are attributed different values and social statuses. In the United States, people’s bodies are defined socio-legally and differently over time, distinguished as “white” and “non-white” persons (Mills 1997; Haney-Lopéz 2006). Yet, the most restrictive racial categorization has been based upon defining, by law and societal definition, those persons of African descent, who have also become known as “black” (Davis 1991).
The American racial hierarchy places whites’ sociopolitical status atop nonwhites’, and contemporary data continue to illustrate the extent to which whites have a higher socioeconomic status compared to most other racial and ethnic groups, barring the advancements of some Asian American ethnic groups (McClain and Carew 2017). In an era of the Black Lives Matter movement, it is important for scholars of American political development to contextualize the historical and contemporary meanings of race, in order to account for its effects on society today, and in particular, its effects on the socially-constructed “black body.” In the words of political theorist, Chris Lebron, “The black body has always been at the center of racial inequality in America – how could it not, given our irrational preoccupation with skin color (Lebron 2017: 102)?”
However, through understanding the construction of the “black body” over time, we as political scientists can understand better the political contexts and policy environments in which the “black body” continues to be scripted disparately compared to the “white body,” in particular. Engaging “the black body” in this way, also, assists us in understanding the contemporary political messages of black political actors, especially those who identify with the tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement.
As researchers of American political development, understanding the construction of the “black body” helps us to understand race, itself, as a larger institution with social, political, and economic processes for which people interact, according to racially-ascribed social norms, social networks, expectations, and political preferences, based upon their racial group status. In the conceptualization of King and Smith (2008), we also can render more visible the adaptation of political actors’ interests based upon their situatedness in the American racial hierarchy via what they refer to as “racial institutional orders,” which adapt and change over time to serve racialized political interests. Thus, it is important to comprehend the construction of the “black body,” over time, in order to understand the significance of (African) American political development in times past and in an era of the Black Lives Matter movement.
How this particular “black body” has been treated lends critical analysis to the personification of bodies, once deemed “property” by the state and not recognized with personhood. Black Americans’ human and civil rights had to be accrued, recognized, and protected by the state – a state that also historically proved complicit in their oppression. Without the knowledge of this historical treatment of the “black body,” we lose sight of the various possibilities for political violation, activism, and agency to incorporate the “black body” as a full, human, rights-bearing body, in the American politic. American political development studies can provide us the contexts, over time, of state and societal discourses, laws, and the identification of specific strategic political actors, whether as perpetrators of (in)justices or as agentic actors. Hence, African-American political development assists us with tracing the processes of blacks’ struggle to move beyond the constructed, corporeal “black body” towards black humanity, and what Lebron (2017) would perhaps note distinctly as “black personhood.”
In my discussion of the “black body,” I, first, describe the historical origins of its construction as a corporeal body, socio-legally proscribed as enslaved, devoid of liberty, “property,” and without constitutional rights, until Reconstruction-era laws recognized and applied to it citizenship, voting rights, and legal protection, nonetheless, with social inequality. Next, I describe the state’s legal divestment of equal protection of the laws, as applied to the “the black body,” through the use of scientific racism to “prove” biological, racial differences and promote negative, black racial stereotypes that became public knowledge about black Americans and facilitated the fabricated “Negro problem.” Then, I discuss how this racial “knowledge” was used to promote inequality and additional divestment of resources in different aspects of black life, most notably, in the area of education, where “separate but equal” educational facilities, in practice, were operated as under-resourced black public schools. Yet, these schools also became inadvertent sites of resistance, as black Americans sought and acquired higher education levels.
As I point to the significance of (African) American political development in understanding the agentic constitution of unconventionally-studied black institutions, such as black public high schools, I highlight the need for examining the historical context, sociopolitical engagement, and activist responses of black Americans to Jim Crow-era oppression. Through this lens (among others), I argue that we can further contextualize the historical framing, contemporary nuances, and complexities of the “black body” in the new-age, Black Lives Matter movement. It is through this movement that we see clear articulation that all “black bodies” can make legitimate claims for equality and justice and rightly be a part of black political agendas, whereas historically, such inclusion may have been more marginal.
Defining the “Black Body” in historical perspective: a societal denigration Scholars of American race and politics acknowledge the extent to which, over time, white supremacy defines the relationship between white and nonwhite persons and further defines the practices that restrict nonwhite persons’ behavior, and they also acknowledge how this affects incorporating the analysis of race and American political development (Lowndes, Novkov, and Warren 2008). Emerging from New World, western hemispheric contact among indigenous peoples of the Americas, Europe, and Africa, the bodies of people from each of these continents were defined by the economy of slavery, such that Europeans drove and immensely profited from trade markets built upon cheap (and mostly, unpaid) labor and production of indigenous and African peoples, beginning in the fifteenth century.
By the mid-seventeenth century, the first laws distinguishing Africans from Europeans appeared in the North American colonies, and by the century’s end, slavery in colonial America became racialized and codified as synonymous with the “black body” and further characterized by lifelong stricture, based on the enslaved status of the African mother, and not patrilineage (Painter 2006; Franklin and Moss 2007). Not only could a black person, then, be born into slavery, but also, one could die in slavery, with limited options for freedom. The institution of chattel slavery further commodified and economized the “black body” as “property” and the “white (male) body” as free, citizenship-worthy (via the Naturalization Act of 1789), and importantly, protected, by the rights embodied in the U.S. Constitution (Mills 1997). Although at one point recognized as three-fifths a person for representation purposes in the U.S. Constitution, nonetheless, enslaved Africans did not have the right to vote, themselves, until codification over almost eight decades after the ratification of the Constitution.
In a slavery-based, economic system that prized human procreation to breed and maximize the reproduction of certain body parts believed to be assets for labor, the “black body” became institutionalized as a public entity, subjected to public scrutiny, violated of personal-space and privacy, and marketed for sale on public auction blocks (Hartman 1997; Johnson 1999). This public objectification further devalued the humanity and personhood of enslaved Africans, who, also as commodities sold in chattel slavery, were recognized by the U.S. courts as property to be bequeathed, even upon their slave owner’s death. While freed African people existed in smatterings throughout the North and the South, the U.S. Supreme Court, nonetheless, established a different status for enslaved Africans, who lacked governance over their own “personhood,” because they were deemed “property” with no rights for which the Court acknowledged or found worthy to protect; furthermore, national citizenship was barred from all descendants of enslaved Africans (Dred Scott v. Sanford 1857). Otherwise, defining this “black body” as “rights-bearing” and capable of sovereignty also challenged conventional ideological arguments that slave–owners touted as reasons to protect slavery: Slavery was declared a “societal good” because it offered structure and resources that, otherwise, enslaved Africans would be unable to provide for themselves (Faust 1981). Simply put, slavery’s paternalism was seen as a public good, and while Northern abolitionists opposed slavery, many Northern blacks were discriminated against and not acknowledged as social equals to whites, in that region (Litwack 1970).
The American Civil War helped bring slavery to an end, and yet, despite passage of the Civil War Amendments, which formally prohibited slavery, provided birthright citizenship to natural-born persons, equal protection of the law, due process, and voting rights (for black men), the assumption of full-citizenship for African-Americans would not occur until the mid-twentieth century, during a Second Reconstruction era. In a society also grappling with the ideological dominance of white supremacy theories and a dominating “science of race,” by the latter-nineteenth century, oppression of the “black body” occurred further by racial knowledge publicized through research, media hysteria, and (pseudo-)scientific racism that was also taught via the public education curricula (Gossett 1997; Mills 1997; Dorr 2000).
Social Darwinists openly debated what to do with the ill-fated “Negro,” who also posed a societal burden (along with other racial and ethnic groups considered to be of “lower stocks”) and an inconvenient pariah for whites, who, themselves, were deemed naturally “fit” to evolve and contribute to societal progress. Hence, in their view, whites were forced to solve the “Negro question,” for a less “evolved” race – ”the Negro.” This query – what to do with the “Negro” – prevailed in the latter-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, because blacks, at the time, were deemed a societal threat because they were no longer bound by institutionalized slavery, which supposedly provided the paternalizing structure to tame blacks’ purported inferior intelligence, depraved mentality, and disobedient deportment (Faust 1981; Taylor 2016). Without some formal, institutionalized system of containment, blacks were feared to run amok.
Indeed, this was a “condemnation of blackness,” met with the perceived need to control “black behavior” through public policies that also criminalized behaviors associated with “the black body” (Muhammad 2011). These policies varied in their attempts to curb criminality, miscegenation, and reproduction (within and across races with whites), and segregation in every aspect of life. The “negro” was unaccommodated, treated second-rate, and openly violated, despite his incorporation into the American polity, via Reconstruction-era public policies. Moreover, outright disfranchisement and disavowal of protection for the “black body” during Jim Crow, further oppressed these sociopolitical advancements, post-slavery.
The psychological effects of Jim Crow, in particular, cast black bodies in ways similar to the American institution of slavery but also differently, based upon pointed second-class citizenship status. Rather, physical, psychological, and policy-driven violences obliterated the “black body” from public discourses of equality and led to divestment of Reconstruction-era (and later, twentieth century) political investments (Mills 1997; Taylor 2016). The “black body” was relegated to a racialized private sphere for which equality could only be spoken in the confines of racially-segregated spaces (the black public sphere), wherein black institutions (like the church and educational facilities) and organizational spaces in Southern states, were heavily concentrated by black Americans, prior to the Great Migration of many to Northern cities in the early-twentieth century (Dawson 2001). This black “home sphere” provided resources, wherein otherwise, the state failed to do so, based upon its own discretion (Lewis 1990).
Black Americans countered this state- and societally-sanctioned condemnation of the “black body” through their own articulation of the “New Negro” identity and politics via arts, letters, black media, and activism in the early-twentieth century, and they objected to the negative constructions of “blackness” and recast the “black body” as humane and self-articulating (Lebron 2017), as opposed to an inanimate “body” on which to project negative aspersions. Nevertheless, simultaneously, violences were onslaught against the “black body” and normalized in the form of racial etiquette, segregation, exclusion, legal re-enslavement via a convict-lease system, and extra-legal lynchings (Litwack 1998; Pinar 2001; Blackmon 2008; Lebron 2017). The racial project of a black parallel society – Jim Crow – lasted almost one-hundred years, after the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. Second Reconstruction public policies such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 improved the corporeal status of how the “black body” was treated by prohibiting formal barriers to public accommodations, voting, and housing. However, these policies still did not address the economic degradation and police brutality that coupled anti-black and systemic racism, which also existed in de facto forms in the North and other predominantly black urban centers across the country (Taylor 2016), and despite policy enactments meant to address racial inequality, civil unrest erupted across the country, beginning with the riots in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965 and lasting through the latter 1960s, with unrest in other places such as Newark, Detroit, Chicago, and New Haven, but also many more. The Kerner Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson, attempted to determine why these riots occurred: Put simply, it was because extreme racial inequality persisted.
By the mid- to latter- twentieth century, once civil rights policies had been implemented, white politicians used black pathological arguments to court white, anti-black animus and political outrage in opposition to rapid changes wrought by the civil rights movement and civil unrest, and they implicitly blamed black Americans for their own circumstances and civil disorder, ignoring the role the state and societal practices played in creating them (Mendelberg 2001; Taylor 2016). Yet, black political elites, over time, increasingly took similar, more moderate political tones, as they also denounced the presumed behavioral practices of the black poor, as being sociopolitically degenerative and anathema to black advancement (Taylor 2016), perhaps even changing the previously more liberal, social welfare support of the black masses by the early, twenty-first century (Tate 2010). This led to increased public policy divestment and a call for “law and order,” leaving many urban black communities’ problems’ address unfulfilled, and practically abandoned.
The environmental effects were devastating, manifesting even today in concentrated poverty, under-performing, elementary and secondary public educational institutions, public health issues, and mass incarceration, further complicated by over-policing and racially disparate, and unfounded “War on Drugs” policies (Alexander 2012; Taylor 2016). Despite 1960s public policies meant to fight the “War on Poverty” and usher in urban redevelopment, the contexts where blacks were more heavily concentrated were not socially mobile for black urban poor people (Taylor 2016). This was not enough. With a changing economy, wherein industrial jobs no longer flourished and shifted to a service industry, black Americans, prepared for the former economy, faced fewer job opportunities in the new one (Rothstein 2017). To an eye unsympathetic to systemic racism, devoting public policies to address blacks’ impoverished conditions may appear worthless and unavailing, but this thought, itself, is grounded in institutionalized thought about the Negro and the “black body.”
Black futility = public divestment: publicizing the “black body” as “waste” As white society and many white political actors of the Jim Crow era saw it, investing in “the Negro” was a doomed enterprise, because, too, “the Negro” was doomed for corruption and extinction, as Social Darwinists predicted in the latter-nineteenth century (Gossett 1997; Dorr 2000). To embolden societal knowledge and support of eugenics-based policies, sociopolitical actors encouraged biological instruction on the topic and its ideological premises in the classrooms of public high schools and colleges and universities (Dorr 2000). Disciplines such as biology and anthropology institutionalized the notion of black inferiority in their theories and research (Gossett 1997; Baker 1998). Thus, racial knowledge about the inferiority of “the black body” also evolved in the classroom – textbooks and curriculum: It was purported as fact.
Prevailing latter-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century discourses cast black people as “deficient” and “futile” and lacking potentiality of full investment. Pseudo-scientific and public racial knowledge supported these claims, and the “black body,” formerly recognized as a valuable labor commodity, became free and assuming of personage, but also biologically and societally repugnant in ways that required regulation, legally and extra-legally, over time (Roberts 1997; Pinar 2001; Hancock 2004; Simien 2011; Threadcraft 2016; Lebron 2017). It is through these violences that the “black body” was cast as a site of “public waste,” which was ultimately expendable for the better and public good of white society, through even state-sponsored eugenics projects (1930s–1970s) meant to curb reproduction among a people deemed “unfit” for reproduction and social evolution (as Social Darwinists conceived it). Their bodies were deemed ripe for medical experimentation as enslaved persons under duress (without informed consent) and at the behest of medical schools and the state (Washington 2006).
Moreover, with respect to land, black people often were segregated in resource-poor neighborhoods, poor quality land, and even exposed to environmental hazards – all indicators of environmental racism (Bullard and Wright 2012). Additional government-involved productions of casting the “black body” to racially-marginalized spaces, and sometimes environmental “wastelands” (Bullard and Wright 2012) involved legalized, geographic segregation through the housing market in the early- and mid-twentieth century, such that resources could be concentrated-out black neighborhoods (Katznelson 2005; Coates 2014) and school districts could establish demographic and economic imbalances in black and poor children’s education (Highsmith and Erickson 2015). Through the government evincing what Moffett-Bateau (2014) refers to as “bureaucratic violence,” today, black public housing residents experience constant, overbearing surveillance, over-regulation of their behavior, and over-exposure to violence to the point that they also feel less protected, less safe, and less empowered to advance change. Bureaucratic violence against black people also occurs when the government responds slowly, if at all, to their concerns, rendering their voices politically ineffective and serving as an affront on their political efficacy.
Casting the “black body” in public as essentially and biologically different from the “white body” also undergirded the segregationist arguments for separating blacks from whites in every aspect of society, including limiting and decreasing public spending on blacks’ education in public schools and educators (in comparison to such spending on whites), during Jim Crow. Philanthropists and scholars (white and black) debated the capacity of black intellectualism, as they indulged larger societal questions of the “Negro problem,” and questioned black inclusion based on, yet again, where the “black body” fit into Southern political economy, especially. If the “black body” were to “fit” into society, it would have to retain its place as subservient to the “white body.” Thus, the “Negro problem” also became an educational question – “How (and to what extent) to educate the Negro?” As “separate and (un)equal” became part of the answer to this question for many whites, black leaders' visions varied, yet towards an eye of “black progress.”
Political and educational leaders in white Northern and Southern contexts disagreed over how blacks should be educated for societal participation. They even debated black educational curricula to the effect of sustaining racially-status quo social and economic structures, wherein “black bodies” would fit into the Southern economy, mostly as agrarians and menial laborers (hence, an industrial education) and not as free-thinking labor agents and entrepreneurs (hence, a classical education). Black political leaders (a la Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and later, Carter G. Woodson) of the day engaged in similar debates; however, their thinking veered towards black group advancement, and at times, curricular enhancements to defy societal beliefs about black inferiority (a la Woodson). Thinking “freely” defied Jim Crow’s racial etiquette, especially in Deep South states, which were still heavily dependent upon an agricultural economy and subjugated, black labor (Anderson 1988; Fairclough 2007). The general societal mode, no matter the investment, was that the “Negro” was inferior, meanwhile “whites” were the supreme race. Various systems, including labor, medicine, housing, land concentration, and public education, thus, propagated white supremacy.
To this extent, the institutions that helped facilitate the everyday oppression of black Americans become potential research sites for race and (African) American political development, because these spaces also became politicized points of equal entry and treatment of black Americans. (Later, I emphasize this point with respect to studying African-American political development in the context of black education [and black public high schools, in particular], during Jim Crow.) However, it also becomes important for us to understand the costly effects of “forgetting” the construction of the “black body” in our political development analyses.
Forgetting the construction of the “black body”: racism and institutionalized oblivion As an ideology supported by interrelated beliefs, attitudes, societal structures, public policies, and lingering historic racial stereotypes, which stem from historic, hackneyed, and pseudo-scientific racialized knowledge, white supremacy, thus, sustains a psychology for which people comport or resist. The actions propagating white supremacy constitute racism. Through concealment of all the violences historically committed against black people, white supremacy is reified (Lebron 2017). Extracting these ideas and actions from their historical origins and relevance constitutes institutionalized oblivion and intellectual violences upon the subject, itself. It gives us un-contextualized rhetoric and attentive audiences, who arguably recognize the familiarity of white supremacy’s tenets, yet reduce its components to mere liberal-conservative ideological framing, when they once were couched in racially, liberal-conservative framing for which even political actors were publicly recognized (Carmines and Stimson 1989) and for which white political actors devised code-words to evoke white fears, without using racial epithets about blacks openly, because black, civil rights activism during the 1960s influenced American society to deem them no longer socially acceptable (Mendelberg 2001; Taylor 2016). These actions culminate in a public “forgetting” of historic facts about race, ones that even inform similar patterns of systemic racism today, and thus, contribute to a society with a nebulous concept of racism, but no practicing “racists” (Bonilla-Silva 2001 and 2006).
Because of the prevailing, memetic, and ideological nature of white supremacy, we must understand how different actors (white and nonwhite) interacted, complied, perpetuated, or resisted its tenets. This is important for incorporating race in the study of new institutionalism and examining political actors’ reactions to white supremacy, Jim Crow as its own institution, and other actors, whose commitment to these tenets and institutions can change over time. Again, this is similar to what King and Smith (2008) describe as “racial institutional orders.” However, the way in which American political development comes to understand these interrelated processes of black–white interaction, or what Johnson (2008) refers to as “interracialisms,” should be mindful of situating the black (historical) political subject more visibly in these intellectual enterprises and interrogations. (Harris-Lacewell [2003] makes a similar claim, as far as the study of racial attitudes in the U.S.)
The “black body,” however, is not just an inanimate concept or political subject to be analyzed: it is an intellectually, emotive and agentic “subject” for which the people, who occupy these bodies have sought liberation for centuries in the New World, through their opposition to their perennial objectification as “things” on which to project power, anger, control, inequality, and inferiority. Simply put, rather, the “black body,” beyond corporeality, is personified, and black political activism and struggles to attain equality, over time, remind us of this. Hence, we see blacks’ agentic production of black civil society, black-identified and associated arts and letters, and black institutions, which assist in presenting “blacks” as “humankind” (at all times, in their own perspective) and, importantly, “citizens,” especially post-Civil War proscription (Lebron 2017).
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