Bernice Afriyie
Supplement Coordinator
I’m not concerned with what it means to be black. My hyperpigmentation is nothing more than the side effects of hyper-socialization. The acne meds, bleaching cream, and miracle foundations only mask the problem. The blemishes and lesions go deeper than skin to blood and mind, but there’s no black soap for that.
To be black without the awareness of my social roots is to passively associate myself with a term that overgeneralizes yet says nothing about my identity.
Black is what a white man called a dark-skinned person long ago. Black is the hatred, misconceptions, and insecurities of one group of people projected onto another.
Black is a reduction of our complexities, it’s a refusal to look at us for who we are rather than an acknowledgement of our person.
Black is a sum. It’s a conclusion that no matter where we hail from, who we know, what we know, and who we are, the product of our individual quirks is always the same.
Black has no shades. When we are made to identify as black, we can’t escape the grievances of being black because we are seeing ourselves through white lenses that taint our vision. Black exists as an assertion of whiteness.
The doctrine of whiteness is something that persists and thrives as an ideology. That is to say, that like patriarchy, neat how they lend themselves to comparison, anybody is capable of sustaining it.
White supremacy needs black to contrast and compliment it. We must be black, ugly, uneducated, and poor so that by contrast, white people don’t have to be. As bell hooks notes in Black Looks, black functions as “a vision of cultural homogeneity that seeks to deflect attention away from or even excuse the oppressive, dehumanizing impact of white supremacy on the lives of black people.” Not only does dominant white culture limit the vastness of blackness to a term that inadequately speaks to blackness, but it demands that we forget that we are inadequately represented to begin with.
I refuse to identify as “black” because of the connotations of what it means to be black—despite racial progress, black successes, education, and other social factors, or in spite of it—has not changed since the first slave ships docked on African soil, taking our freedom and giving us colour.
hooks notes that “as black folks who ‘love blackness,’ that is, who have decolonized our minds with the kind of white supremacist thinking that suggests we are inferior, inadequate, marked by victimization, etc., often find that we are punished by society for daring to break with the status quo.”As we realize how society has wronged us and challenge systematic forms of oppression, our words are not silenced, our hands cuffed, our bodies mutilated, our movements crippled and starved so much as we are made invisible. In society’s eyes, we escape logical perception. But black, and its many connotations, are not inherent features or qualities of our bodies. When we look at a black person, what we are seeing is not necessarily colour, but a series of predigested associations. Society has conditioned us to see the colour black by making black bodies a sacrificial site. We are supposed to absorb the world’s negativity, hatred, and wavelengths of racism, yet if we accept our blackness we see that we are the only colour that exists without needing to be perceived.
Racism desires to subjugate our identities, but we evade objectification. To be objectified is to be dehumanized and stripped of all humanity. More than anything, it means that you cannot exist without being perceived by the subject of your objectification. Myths of whiteness assume the position of supremacy without acknowledging that the very notion of whiteness is derivative of blackness. James Baldwin’s work comments on the contradictions of whiteness, “addressing the way in which whiteness exists without knowledge of blackness even as it collectively asserts control.” Black needs to represent darkness in order for white to be light, black evil, or white good. Whiteness is slave to its misguided notions of blackness, yet thinks to seat itself as completely independent and superior to it. In the confusion that arises from such an usurpation, only dead black bodies pepper the earth.
Whiteness is contingent on whether or not we choose to accept faulty constructions of truth and meaning. To apply that logic to race and ethnicity is a larger transgression involving even less logic. There is no reason for meaning to precede colour, in racist understandings of darkness and light, especially when we consider that, scientifically speaking of course, whiteness represents a complete absence of light.
By not capitalizing “black” and “blackness,” I am consciously protesting the systematic institutions that oppress black existence. In the standardized system of signs and meanings, black is meant to achieve legitimate status as a racial group, yet black English has no place in serious scholarly study. Visually, black has the same propriety as Canadian, American, or German, yet we are fit only to be the objects of anthropology studies, not the scholars. Formally, we have uppercase status, but our social conditions, access to education, treatment by the police, and representation by the media spell out our lower class status. The capitalization of “B” is a mockery of the very capitalism that breeds sexism and racism in our communities.
As you can imagine, choosing a cover image for this supplement that captured all these sentiments was challenging.
The cover of this supplement depicts a black woman stepping out of a mask, strong and smiling as an old white man fades away into the darkness, his mask a part of his face.
The theatrical background and the drama masks suggest the performative nature of race and gender.
As she boldly removes the black mask, she actively creates her own blackness.
There’s a clear distinction between colour as performance and colour as a natural part of the body.
As she looks beyond the invisible fourth wall and at us, the audience, she steps out of racial performance and into her own person.
As hooks associates with a need to reshape Western theories in Yearning, that “African Americans are empowered to break with old ways of seeing reality that suggest there is only one audience for our work and only one aesthetic measure of its value.” The woman on the cover of this supplement isn’t looking at herself or at us through the veil of being black, but with her own personal awareness. Nor does she bow her head in submission, tyrannized by the ghost of the white gaze that terrorized her ancestors, a disembodied white gaze that assigned value to black slaves.
Even though she has been looking through that guise, she shows that it is possible to break that cycle of perception. The relationship between black and white shifts as well.
Rather than white defining itself against black, the man is in the background. He is unable to see the world without racial associations and he erodes for this because “without the capacity to inspire terror, whiteness no longers signifies the right to dominate.”
He fades into black obscurity, becoming the new “black” as we cannot see the person behind the mask.
The woman represents the discussion of black-ness, the active construction and reconstruction of identity.
Now, in the reformed world of the painting, to be black is to be a hybridity of sexuality, age, class, religion, and gender. The hyphenation of black-ness is a reminder of this.
The hyphen connects other aspects of our identity to our colour, while still acknowledging with its visual break that it’s a patterning, not melting, of identity.
For each of us, the hyphen bridges different aspects of our identity: sexuality, class, gender, nationality, and so on. As “-ness” means different things to different individuals, its meaning cannot be regulated by society.
To dress our muse in completely nondescript clothing would be to negate the aims of this supplement. Attending to all geographic and cultural ideas of being black with a paired-down template of blackness would be to suggest that blackness can in fact be reduced and concentrated. The specificity of her entuma reminds us of the cultural diversity of blackness and our personal heritage.
The following pieces demonstrate this elasticity. Every writer and artist highlights the problematic associations of “black” in their own way, but still shows how blackness is beautiful and worth fighting for.
Black people are here. We are alive, we breathe, we love, we hurt, and we feel.
We are present. Though social institutions, popular culture, and the media may try to stifle our voices, sweep us off into a single month or cuff our wrists, we still tell our stories and persevere. We stand, hand in hand, cuff-link to cuff-link, and we ask not so much as to be heard by the institutions that oppress us, but demand to speak.
