To Call Us Black

Well-meaning arguments have been made to discourage our calling ourselves black. We are led
to equate name changes with breaking free from what enables racism to over-determine selfperception and collective strategy. Upending racism (as tidily defined in New World print
discourse) seems more manageable than going all out and ending the more nebulous, more
resilient, more encompassing, generative Discourse itself. Discourse must speak endlessly about
the people identified (visually or otherwise) with sub-Saharan Africa whom I'll call Black or
African. But Discourse has never really had a conceptual framework for thinking the question of
Africaness/Blackness (Sexton). Annulling Discourse signals the end of standard
understandings glaringly cradling much of cogently explained, publishable African-centered
discourse.
The name Black, like the designation, African, is the reason for our untenable condition.
Predictably, there've always been efforts to find that elusive rational name that should alter
Africa's Slave designation. Our friends' templates were adopted in speaking about this
perplexing problem (Curry, Adeleke). Think of the Negro Conventions resolutions around
Africanness. Discourse's custodians said the problem was about Black adjustment and White
supremacy/racism. We've milked that line to no avail. The point is, Blackness scandalizes the
World (Judy, Wilderson). It makes custodians of Discourse uneasy. That's why people are
encouraged to transcend Blackness, especially in the U.S.(Sexton) - the Western nation-state
built primarily on print logic and thus arguably, the most obligated to Discourse (McLuhan),
where the fascination with printable language is particularly striking, even if many may not read
books that much.
Friend and foe have always required of us to adjust our thoughts and deeds. The leopard's
inability to change its spots drove the seasoning, deportation, segregation and lynching policies
of the past. Today's anti-racists and post-racialists who identify as human instead of white, mirror
abolitionist and civil rights friends' efforts to discourage identity politics: you are not a color,
Blackness is limiting, it undermines strategy, wins no victories, empowers the enemy, alienates
allies, etc. Evolving beyond Blackness and other spoken racial distinctions should subvert the
status quo, they imagine. But that maneuver neglects close analyses of what some call antiBlackness. So it folds us right back into Discourse, leaving racism intact. Anti-blackness, the
lifeblood of Discourse, springs (not from misinformation, hatred and prejudice but) from a sense
of a securing the universal modern self. It is the structure of feeling enabling one to love
Blacks and still be thankful that one isn't Black (Marriot, Wilderson, Fanon). It's what produces
the distinct American-made concept, racism, in the first place.
20th century race theories generally argued that the problem somehow emerged as a result of
capitalist greed, 17th century U.S. class struggle and the introduction of the written code of U.S.
white-privilege. But we know that before the coinage of race in U.S. discourse, Europe had
already designated Africa in contrast to Asia and Native America as the land of the Slave
(Anderson), the unintelligible (Mbembe), the sovereignless (Hartman & Best). The earliest
Papal Bulls spoke with this in mind. The West defined itself in the course of... a history engaged
almost from the start in a legitimizing discourse, writes Trouillot. [T]his course preceded the
north-south fissure of the Mediterranean from which Europe as we know it, was born. Yes,

Homer praised the Ethiopians (ie., the Africans), but Diodorus Siculus found the Ethiopians
'primitive,' and from Pliny the Elder's imagination sprang monstrous subhumans in the heart of
Black Africa men without mouths, noses, voices or eyes, unspeakable ugly monsters. This
foundational idea enabled Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic racial slavery. Indentured servants
and Africans could labor side-by-side, but Aristotle [a pillar of Discourse] had already
formulated the hypothesis of born slaves and born masters, echoed in fifteenth century Spain
(Trouillot). Europe, from the 1200s to the mid-1400s, had rigorously debated and decided that
enslaved Europeans could not be reduced to chattel (Eltis). Columbus sailed to Elmina with that
understanding.The singular horrors of being suddenly ripped from family, whole towns razed in
the process, and the particular conditions of the dungeon and ship's hold, were reserved for the
African.
Bacon's Rebellion (its interracial alliance loses pedagogic appeal if it aimed at assaulting
Indians) had nothing to do with our liberation from this arrangement. Discourse singles out
capitalism and stresses the notion that racial slavery and written categorizations was profit-driven.
Thankfully, current scholarship critiquing, not just the vocabulary of but, Discourse itself shows
how contrary to Discourse's claim, racism and capitalism do not explain the African situation.
Eltis, for instance, finds it was far more expensive and dangerous to sail to W. Africa than to ship
Europe's numerous eligible social outcasts. A clean break from this paradigm unhinges all
from Discourse itself, and not just its contents. Perhaps the deception Sun Tzu cautions against is
in accepting a truncated timeline, contending with the metaphor's shadow, the contents of
language, semantics, the symptom, racism, while sparing what undergirds it.
The term Black can be as problemmatic as Africa, or even God. Some prefer not to
mention God because it feels irrational, like the insanity of repeating a flawed strategy. They
associate the name with superstition, docility, slavery, murder. A similar rationale supports the
posture against the usage of Black. We might as well abandon African if it is because of
slavery that we were named Africans (Anderson). The Human is Discourse's archetypal human.
And for the African, says Eshun, the Human has proven to be a treacherous terrain. Meanwhile,
feelings that come with thoughts of sub-Saharan Africa makes some say they aren't African.
Discourse leads people to identify with Africa, not on the basis of the interminable suffering, but
mainly the euphoria of ancient glories, exotics and market value. It should be easy to take
seriously sisters and brothers who subscribe to Sankofa, are immersed in efforts to rid the world
of anti-blackness while upholding the name Black if KMT is the Black land/land of Black
people. Choosing a more effective name here, in the Caribbean, in Africa or elsewhere hasn't
removed the life-and-death implications of Africa's Slave designation. Maybe it's really not
adherence to the term Black, but our replication of Discourse, the genome of antiblackness,
that sabotages the new levels of hopes and dreams.

References:
Jared Sexton, The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism & Black Optimism,
yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf, InTension, York University, Toronto,
Canada, 2011
Tommy J. Curry, Ethnological Theories of Race/Sex in 19th Century Black Thought:
Implications for the Race/Gender Debate of the 21st Century,
academia.edu/16368703/Ethnological_Theories_of_Race_in_19th_Century_Black_Thought_Im
plications_for_the_Race_Gender_Debate_of_the_21st_Century
Tunde Adeleke, Primacy of 'Condition': The Moral Suasion Debate among Afro-Americas in the
1830s. dept.sophia.ac.jp/is/americana/Journal/12-2.htm
Ronald A.T. Judy, Disforming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives & the
Vernacular, University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, 1964
David Marriot, Whither Fanon?, Textual Practice, 25:1, 33-69, Routeledge, 2011
Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema & the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Duke
University Press, 2009 (For David Eltis' findings, see pp. 13-23)
Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks
S. E. Anderson, The Black Holocaust for Beginner, For Beginners, 2007
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, (Translated by Libby Meintjes), Public Culture, 15(1): 1140,
Duke University Press, 2003
Stephen Best & Saidya Hartman, Fugitive Justice, Representations, Vol. 92. No. 1 (Fall 2005), pp.
1-15, University of California Press, 2005
Michael-Ralph Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation: Origins & Legacy of Duvalierism,
Monthly Review Press, 2000