The Nigga a Rejection of Black Humanism and the Future of Blackness

The Nigga: A Rejection of Black Humanism And The Future Of Blackness A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Race and Ethnic Studies 2021 ________________________ ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Abstract ............................................................................................................................... v Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Section I The Birth of Blackness: Where’s Me Pa? ......................................................... 11 Section II Why Black Lives Do NOT Matter ................................................................... 18 Section III I Am A Nigga.................................................................................................. 28 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 40 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 43 iii Acknowledgements iv Abstract At each stage of this process of Blackness, the ontological and material conditions of Black folks have remained relatively the same and have been marked by profound dehumanization. Even though Blackness, as a concept, has been differently understood in time and space, the conditions of life under which many Black folks are subject have not been altered to reflect the trajectory of progress which modernity and White civil society proudly boast and enjoy. Within this project, I will do a genealogy of Blackness. Drawing on thinkers such as Orlando Patterson and Frank Wilderson, I posit that Blackness, as an ontological category, is distinct from its ancestor, the African. I will adopt an AfroPessimistic reading of Blackness as a political code word for the continuation of the Slave. Using this backdrop, I will contest Humanism’s integration of Blackness. From here, through a theorization of what I call Niggaism, I will embark on a process of rethinking the future of Blackness. In other words, I will expand on my reasons for envisioning the Nigga as the refuge and a possible future for Black folks. In conclusion, this theoretical project will argue for a process of affirming the negation of Blackness. In turn, it sees humanist discourse as providing a metaphysical stable point of departure for understanding anti-blackness in the United States and across the World. Subsequently, I advocate for a replacement of Humanism’s exploitative metaphysics with a form of Newness, embodied by Niggaism, that takes coherency away from White civil society. In doing so, the structures which posit White supremacy and anti-blackness as normative and status quos are perpetually being broken down, voided, and are essentially done away with. v Nigga Congress They call it the White House, Nigga, that shit should be the Nigga House. It was Nigga sweat, tears, and blood that built it Nigga Mothers’ cries create the rap that was played The sounds of the Massah’s lashes became its rhythm. They put Slave owners in its highest seat but what about the slaves who made it? Congress is a lie that tells itself it’s true But unless y’all change it to a Nigga Congress There’ll be nothing more than Nigga unres’ - vi J.Crawford Introduction On Saturday, January 25, 2020, I was the victim of a hate crime on my walk back to my apartment. Like many Black folks across the globe, this was not a particularly shocking experience for me. I can't count the many times that I've been subjected to the hate that comes with being born Black. But, still, there was something peculiar about this incident, something so mentally and emotionally jarring that I am still working through with my therapist and with myself. I was walking home from my fraternity's initiation. I was filled with happiness. We had initiated a few men of color that night, and the semblance of continued diversity and inclusion within this historically white fraternity filled me with overwhelming joy. But, like most euphoric moments in my life, that, too, quickly ended. As I made my way to my off-campus studio apartment on Marcus Street in Walla Walla, I walked through the Reid Campus Center parking lot. This was a usual part of the route I took home, and I had grown comfortable in walking through there, after all it's only a 30-45 second walk from my door. As I walked, I heard the screams of a woman shouting, "I love Trump, Trump is amazing." I continued walking, I mean, what else should I have done? As we got closer and were about to pass by each other, the white woman, who was being accompanied by a white man in a black jacket, proceeded to stop me. On stopping me, she decided that for some reason, it was befitting to call me a Nigger. Not only did she think that was right to do, but she also repeated it eight times, as if the trauma and hurt upon hearing it once were not sufficient. After all of this, it seemed like she still wasn't satisfied. On about the 7th repetition, she shoved me at the shoulder, laughing as she and her partner walked away. I ran home as I left the parking lot. I called campus security, reported the incident, and I stayed home with my doors and windows locked. But I was still so infuriated by what had just transpired. I remembered myself thinking, “it's 2020– why is shit like this still happening?” I found myself at a loss for words to explain this predicament. How does one find an explanation for that which is inexplicable? How could such profound hate stem from the very sight of the color of one’s skin that differed from that of your own? It simply made no sense to me. And, like most victims of trauma, I began to internalize it as a fault of my own. Perhaps if I had not taken that route, if I had skipped my fraternity’s initiation ceremony, maybe if I had stayed a bit longer and had not run out on my friends who begged me to stay, maybe then, this horrible act would not have happened to me. But as I ruminated on the events of that night I realized that this was not any doing of my own. On one hand, this traumatic event made the dissonance between the inexplicability of the first-person experience of anti-blackness and the collective even more pronounced. As a black person majoring in Race and Ethnic Studies, I was more than aware of racism and its existence. I read books by Black and Brown authors, like Patricia Williams, about their experiences with racism, and I thought I had a firm grasp on how destabilizing such an event might have been. However, no amount of reading or studying can prepare one for the vicious and dehumanizing blow that comprises antiblack racism. Indeed, the experience of anti-black trauma escapes theorization, and it brings many of the premises upon which Western metaphysics rest into disrepute. What 2 happens when the subject cannot describe or identify their subjecthood because of its constant obliteration in the world? How does trauma get reconciled when your abuser constitutes the world in which you find yourself? However, despite the feeling of isolation that followed me in this deeply dehumanizing act, there was a kind of solidarity in the experience of being degraded to the status of a nigger. The resemblance between this introduction and the fifth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s text, Black Skin, White Masks 1, is striking. Fanon, a man of profound intellect and accomplishment, was also denigrated and called a “dirty nigger.” 2 Similarly to me, Fanon was perturbed by what happened to him. Coming also from the Caribbean, by way of Martinique, Fanon’s story seems identical to mine. Like me, he left home to study and work, but his arrival in his new home in France was not as accepting as he expected it to be. Fanon’s words summarized the reality of his new context perfectly: “[he] came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, [his] soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here [he is] an object among other objects.” 3 Like Fanon, this experience of being called a nigger and being treated differently because of the attributes that are ascribed to niggerness severely dehumanized and objectified me. It shattered any sense of meaning or purpose that I had come to establish for myself. I felt inanimate. Or, to draw upon Ralph Ellison’s renowned work, I felt like an “Invisible Man.” 4 In his text, Ellison’s protagonist comes in contact with the invisibilization of his Blackness through a racist, anti-black interaction where he is called a nigger. Much like him, this project emerged from a context of invisibilization, where Fanon, Frantz, and Charles L. Markmann. Black Skin, White Masks., 1967. Print. Fanon, 89 3 Fanon, ibid 4 Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1995. 1 2 3 my being, or, to use Heideggerian terminology, my dasein was obliterated. How can such a word have such profound power over not only one’s psyche but one’s sense of being in the world? And, more importantly, what forms of refuge, redemption, or compensation can be afforded to one who undergoes such a process of dehumanization that is associated with that word? This project is an academic and liberatory piece of work. It will serve as a space for me to critically engage in Black Studies by rethinking the current material conditions of Black folks, particularly in an American context. However, the nature of antiblackness is not to be understood as an exclusively American phenomenon. Instead, I ask the reader to consider how the arguments that are made within this work may be extrapolated to understand anti-blackness in a global context in this age of racial capitalism. 5 At the heart of this project is a desire to engage in the ongoing debates on the conditions of Blackness in the United States of America and the world. In the wake of the second wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, ushered into American consciousness by the gruesome murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, many Black folks have fallen into a profound state of pessimism around the state of Blackness. I see my work as interceding in this discussion of Black futurity within civil society. To be clear, this work will center a kind of Afro-Pessimism as the guiding philosophical body of knowledge with which I will approach this conundrum. By drawing on Afro-Pessimist thinkers like Wilderson and Sexton, I theorize the essentiality of anti-black violence to the operation and coherency of White civil society. Wilderson distinguishes between the importance of Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 5 4 Blacks and the essentiality of Blackness. In The Argument of Afro-Pessimism 6, Wilderson argues that the “spectacle of Black death is essential to the mental health of the world” and that “Blackness is coterminous with Slavery.” For him, it is not simply the case that the imperfections of society momentarily produce forms of anti-blackness that might be overcome with hard work and revision. Instead, the exploitation of Black bodies is the proverbial water that makes the soup boil. Jared Sexton weighs in on the conversation through his theorization of anti-blackness. In his work titled Afropessimism: The Unclear Word 7, Sexton points to the differences between White civil society’s incapacity to combat anti-blackness and its incapability to do so. For him, it is not simply a matter of lack of effort on society’s part to counter anti-black violence. One could point to various political and legal apparatus, such as the 13th and 14th Amendment as proof of such attempts. Instead, Sexton points attention to the ways in which White civil society, via the coupling of political and libidinal economies, necessitates anti-black violence and suffering. My project emerged out of an internal battle with the fundamental arguments of Afro-Pessimists. While their sway is both convincing and strong, the implications were quite depressing and gave me difficulty to accept as a kind of definitive truth. If Black futurity is a concept that is being invoked in vain, what say have those of us who are interpreted and live our lives as Blacks? What forms of recourse do we have to look to? What do we tell our children who we will undoubtedly have? I struggled in accepting what could be read as Afro-Pessimists’ diagnosis of anti-blackness as an incurable Cunningham, Vishon, The Argument of Afro Pessimism., The New York Times. 2020. Sexton, Jared. Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. 2016 6 7 5 ailment. To combat this, I am coining Niggaism as a conceptual field of knowledge that simultaneously complements and problematizes one of the central tenets of AfroPessimism, that is, the potential for Black futurity. I argue that the Nigga is the future of Blackness and that it will be the process through which anti-black violence and white supremacy becomes void. In a sense, this project shares a kind of paradoxical logic, that is, it is pessimistically optimistic in how it goes about deconstructing the Human and imagining a world that is safe for Blacks. Niggaism is both a negation as well as a process of rendering White civil society/anti-blackness binary as void. I see negation and voiding as different. Whereas the former disproves the validity of White Supremacy as a moral or politically effective way of structuring society, I see the latter as making desolate and promoting a replacement for White Supremacy and anti-blackness. I thought it important to add void because there is a tendency within societal discourse to assume that negation is inclusive of the promotion of alterity. In the case of Blackness and its proximity to White Supremacy, the negation of anti-blackness has never or rarely resulted in the rejection and replacement of the systems and structures which perpetuate anti-blackness. Only through a coupling of Niggaism's negation and making void the White civil society/antiBlackness binary will the ontological and material conditions of Black ever be ameliorated. To embark on this endeavor, I plan on differentiating between Nigga and Nigger. Central to this project is an attempt to intervene in an ongoing debate within Black American studies on the transformative capacity of the word nigga. Herein, I take up 6 Frank Wilderson’s claim that nigga is “a word with no transformative capacity.” 8 Drawing on David Marriott’s On Decadence: Bling Bling 9, I will offer a critique of Wilderson’s totalization of language. Additionally, I problematize the implication of Wilderson’s argument for Black folks who take refuge in the transformative opportunities afforded to them by the word, through reflecting on how nigga becomes a term of endearment and solidarity for Black folks. By showing the ways in which Humanism is steeped in a context of decadence and reinforces forms of capitalist logic on to the Black body, Marriott argues that the Nigga becomes an appropriate and important way of deconstructing Blackness as intrinsically slavish and in need of submission. Subsequently, Black and Nigga, while affiliated, become conceptually two different terms. I argue that the former is staunched with the residue of capitalist production via its reminiscence of slavery and the plantation. Alternatively, Niggaism, through an affirmation of Niggas, is a manifestation of forms of active resistance and negates the essentialization of the Black body as primarily a laboring body. I will advance the argument that to be a Nigga is to no longer be a slave, whether on the plantation or in White civil society. In that way, Niggaism becomes a transformative paradigm through which one can imagine a type of Black Futurity which disaffiliates the Nigga from capital, and modes of exploitation and production. Lastly, I intend to intercede on the relevance of having a framework that is inclusive of the importance of the Nigga as a point of transcendence rather than reclamation. Herein, I argue that Niggaism provides a paradigm that allows Blacks Linette Park, AfroPessimism and Futures of...: A Conversation with Frank Wilderson. The Black Scholar, 50:3, 29-41. 2020 9 Marriott, David, On Decadence: Bling Bling, 2017 8 7 (Niggas) to be in the world. In this way, it is not falling into the trap of essentializing any fixed particularity which defines the Nigga. Indeed, Niggaism transcends the basic forms of reclamation which surround most of the current forms of discourse around the use of the word Nigga. It forces us to look at the ways in which the ontological and material conditions of Blacks are governed by forms of capitalist production and capitalist logic, ranging from the slavish labor production on the plantation to forms of modern-day prison labor. Only through the Nigga can Blacks ever transcend the limitations of White civil society and exist ontologically and socially. The project will be organized into three main sections. Section I, entitled The Birth of Blackness, will comprise a genealogical tracing of how Blacks became to be known as Blacks. Subtitled Where’s Me Pa, this section will embark on a process of defining Blackness as a conceptual tool and point of departure for understanding antiBlackness. It will interrogate the ways in which the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade obliterated Africanness and created Blackness as a pejorative and exclusively slavish terminology. Section II or Why Black Lives Do NOT Matter, responds to debates pertaining to Black Humanism. Herein, I will take up the Afro-Pessimists claim that Black is the codeword for the Slave, and I will evaluate how the law functions as an apparatus for the promotion of anti-black violence. The project will culminate in Section III, the largest of this project, entitled I Am A Nigga. In this part of the project, I will take up the age-old debate between Nigger and Nigga. I will attempt to delineate between the two words, moving the conversation from one centered around reclamation to one based on transcendence. 8 A Note to the Reader: On Tone, Audience, and Approach This project is unapologetically a work of and for soon-to-be Niggas. What do I mean by this? I see this work as discursively and practically troubling the apathy of antiblack violence and discourse. To this end, the project will be divided along word usage. In the beginning, I will invoke Black and Blackness as synonyms to refer to the descendants of African slaves. Half-way through, I will mark a shift to using the Nigga as a signifier of the embodiment of Black futurity. This is a conscious and deliberate move. On one hand, I see this as an explicit way of weighing in on the contemporary debate happening in Black Studies around the validity of using the word Nigga. Additionally, I see the frequency of the word Nigga within the latter parts of my project as a form of resistance to whiteness and its hegemonic hold in society. Seeing the word Nigga so frequently is intended to force non-Black readers to contemplate on and try to reconcile the reasons surrounding the discomfort which they feel upon its mere presence. In a world that renders Blackness void of agency and power, I see the usage of this word within my project as a dialectical power grab for the Nigga. In the confines of White civil society, marked by its exuberance of politeness and the belief that substantial racial progress has been achieved, the word Nigga is to be understood as being only for Niggas. As Niggas, this project is ours. It marks the journey that we are on to be. NonNiggas do not have access to this word, and I see this work as a way of unsettling the comfort with which many have the privilege of enjoying. Nigga and Niggaism are for us until this shithole of a world is radically done away with. As to-be Niggas, this project will draw on the lived experiences that we face while we are still Blacks. The reader will see and hear my Black voice as it strives to 9 reach for a Nigga future. I will use diary entries and poems that I have used as survival mechanisms within this project to give a vivid depiction of the ways in which anti-black violence operates and distorts Black life, making a clear advocacy for the need of Niggaism. In a sense, this is an incoherent project because the Nigga is incoherent in the context of the Human and white civil society. A part of this methodology is to create a feeling of ambiguity and uncertainty because to completely understand the Nigga within a Black or Humanistic context is simply not the point. Niggaism is outside of the paradigm of the Human, so a Human conception of the Nigga is impossible, without transcendence. The employment of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) will beckon to what is, but will also point to what will not and what shouldn’t be. That is, the usage of AAVE within this work points us to consider the precarity of Black speech in our current world, and asks us to imagine a new kind of arrangement where Nigga speech is not stifled or restrained. I argue that only through embracing the Nigga will Blackness, as we know it, be free. 10 Section I The Birth of Blackness: Where’s Me Pa? As a young child growing up in Jamaica, I never considered myself Black. After all, the identifier was not necessary. Unlike the United States and Germany, two other countries that I have lived in, the need for a racial identifier to express difference was not relevant nor was it even conceptualized by my young brain. Jamaica, a country of roughly 2.9 million people, 10 was largely homogeneous in its racial composition. The island has about 97% of its population being of partial or total African descent, 11 and other ethnic groups include East Indians (1.3%), Chinese (0.2%), Europeans (0.2%). 12 For most, if not all, of my childhood, I considered myself Jamaican, and my identity was largely mediated through my nationality and my class. While I was phenotypically Black, my race did not primarily shape the ways in which I consciously interacted with the world and vice versa. However, that soon changed. When I arrived in the United States for the first time in 2017 for college, I was struck with the country’s fascination with race. At the airport, my international student document branded a section entitled “Race/Ethnicity” and affixed to it was the descriptor “Black/Caribbean.” Back then, I thought nothing of it, but I would soon come to be unable to not think of its implications. Instead of being Jordon, a Jamaican man who is Black, I quickly became Jordon, the Black man from Jamaica. This swap of identifiers Worldometers.info. 2021. Jamaica Demographics 2020 (Population, Age, Sex, Trends) Nationsencyclopedia.com. 2021. Ethnic groups - Jamaica. 12 Ibid 10 11 11 puzzled me. What is Blackness, and why was there such an obsession with its implication in the United States? Almost four years later, I’m still on a quest to figure this out. During my time as an orientation leader for the incoming First years at my college, I remember talking to a student from Zambia. He had asked me about my experience as an international student at Whitman. I began to elaborate on the ways in which my identity shifted in the United States from that of prioritizing my ethnicity or nationality to centering my race– my Blackness. What followed inspired the basis of this section for this thesis. The student looked at me and proudly stated that he was not Black, but rather African. I couldn’t discern what was happening. I asked him what he meant. He continued to say that his ancestors were never slaves and that he was not born in the Americas. For him, his place of birth and ancestry precluded him from Blackness. And, despite brandishing quite a dark skin tone– one even darker in complexion than my own– he refused to accept Blackness as a central part of his identity. I was admittedly perturbed. I was reminded of my journey with Blackness. I, too, struggled with accepting Blackness as the sole indicator of my identity upon coming to the United States, and I remember outwardly rejecting these claims that my American friends would make about Blackness. But, in retrospect, I am forced to pause and think about the parameters along which Blackness was being defined by my friends and how it differed from how this international student and my younger self-perceived the term. To understand the discrepancy between our conceptions of Blackness, one has to start with a larger discussion of the origins and implications of race. Contemporary understandings of race denote it as a “human-invention, shorthand term used to describe and categorize people into various social groups based on characteristics like skin color, 12 physical features, and genetic heredity.” 13 For many, race and its implications have now become a normalized and valid paradigm of seeing and comprehending different types of people in the United States. However, the term was “used infrequently before the 1500s [and] was used to identify groups of people with a kinship or group connection.” 14 It was not a means of ascribing any particular innate characteristic to a particular group of people. Put differently, “the world got along without race for the overwhelming majority of its history.” 15 If race as a conceptual tool is historically recent, why does it encapsulate such a pervasive power in its employment? The concept of “race,” as we understand it today, evolved alongside the formation of the United States and was deeply connected with the evolution of two other terms, “white” and “slave.” 16 In fact, “the words ‘race’, ‘white’, and ‘slave’ were all used by Europeans in the 1500s, and they brought these words with them to North America.” 17 Over time, “the false notion that “white” people were inherently smarter, more capable, and more human than nonwhite [black] people became accepted worldwide.” 18 However, this was not always the case. Whiteness evolved in meaning, and “the concept did not occur until 1613 when the English society first encountered and contrasted themselves against the East Indians through their colonial pursuits.” 19 It was not until the 1550s to 1600 [that] “white” was exclusively used to describe elite English women, because the whiteness of [their] skin signaled that they were persons of high social class who did not National Museum of African American History and Culture. n.d. Historical Foundations of Race. Ibid 15 Ibid 16 Ibid 17 Ibid 18 Ibid 19 Ibid 13 14 13 go outside to labor.” 20 Furthermore, as a racial identity, “white” only referred to AngloSaxon people, and even that designation has changed due to time and geography. Like whiteness, Blackness as a conceptual tool was not always used to denote a racial identity. In Old English, “blaec'' was used, much as “dark” is now, of people with black hair and/or dark complexions. There is no indication that this implied ugliness or evil character until the connotations of “black” that emerged in the 1700s onwards. 21 With the advent of slavery as the primary source of forced labor in many of the colonies, African people were seen as more desirable slaves because they brought advanced farming skills, carpentry, and bricklaying skills, as well as metal and leatherworking skills.22 And, even then “enslavement was not an automatic condition, nor did it uniformly apply to all [dark-skinned] African and African-descended people.” 23 Being enslaved was not necessarily a permanent lifetime status, and “characterizations of [enslaved] Africans in the early period of colonial America were mostly positive, and the colonists saw their future as dependent on this source of labor.” 24 Instead, Blackness as a conceptual signifier of inferiority and slavishness emerged from the system of chattel slavery that brought with it anti-black sentiment and was structurally codified in colonial America. The conceptual transformation of Blackness from a phenotypical descriptor denoting darker-skin tone to that of a racial pejorative began “in 1662 when Virginia enacted a law of hereditary slavery, which meant the status of the mother determined the Ibid James, A., 1981. ‘Black’: An inquiry into the pejorative associations of an English word. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 9(1), pp.19-30. 22 Historical Foundations of Race 23 Ibid 24 Ibid 20 21 14 status of the child.” 25 Also known as partus sequitur ventrem, this legal doctrine enshrined within political and social directives that the “children of enslaved women would automatically share the legal status of ‘slave’.” 26 As Harawa and Ford point out, “only members of one group were both born into slavery and died as slaves: Africans with dark skins.” 27 This broke from legal precedence previously established in English Common Law and Virginia. Put simply, this decree validated black servitude as a designation based on race rather than the earlier religious justification. It would follow that “by the mid-1700s, new laws and societal norms linked Africans to perpetual labor and the American colonies made formal social distinctions among its people based on appearance, place of origin, and heredity.” 28 With this new law as the basis for delineating one’s status in society, “Africans' physical distinctiveness marked their newly created subordinate position.” 29 Subsequently, physical differences were merged with status differences and coalesced to form a social hierarchy that placed “white” at the top and “black” at the bottom. It is no surprise that “by the beginning of the 19th century, “white” was an identity that designated a privileged, landholding, (usually male) status.” 30 Having “whiteness meant having clear rights in the society while not being white, i.e., blacks, signified your freedoms, rights, and property were unstable, if not, nonexistent.” 31 To say that one’s race dictated their ability, or inability, to advance within the socio-political context of the Ibid Ibid 27 Nina T. Harawa, Chandra L. Ford. The foundation of modern racial categories and implications for research on black/white disparities in health. Ethnicity and Disease, Volume 19, Spring 2009 28 Ibid, 10 29 Ibid, 10 30 Ibid, 12 31 Ibid 25 26 15 United States is an understatement. Racism, and particularly anti-black racism, is an intrinsic component of an American polity and identity. To quote one of the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson from Notes of the State of Virginia, “the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind.” 32 Mr. Jefferson solidified the American conceptualization of Blackness in this very statement. For him, Blackness, regardless of the process by which it became subhuman, is less than whiteness as an ontological imperative. It has been over three centuries since Jefferson uttered these words, but the relegation of Blackness to a place of inferiority and sub-humanness persists to today. 33 Stereotypes and tropes of Blackness still harken to slavery even now. In our contemporary moment, the disproportionate incarceration 34 and murder 35 of Black folks by the State have extended the notion of Blackness as perpetually requiring imprisonment, correction, and control. Regardless of the illusion of agency that Black folks seem to have over our lives, our Blackness is deeply stained with a slavish residue that appears to be beyond redemption or reclamation. Subsequently, because of its coterminous status with that of chattel slavery, Blackness is inherently excluded from the realm of citizenship, since to be a slave is to be property and void of inalienable and/or conferred upon rights. Similar to the slave, Black agency is constantly the subject of theft by the non-Black. Whether it be through forms of appropriation of Black creativity or the Historical Foundations of Race The importance of racism and anti-blackness as modes of understanding the American polity is also found in the Three-Fifths compromise of The U.S. Constitution, Article 1. Section 2. Additionally, one need not look further than the circumstances leading to the Civil War of 1861, where the Confederacy defended slavery under the guise of economic necessity, which led to the passing of the 13th Amendment. 34 NAACP | Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, n.d. 35 Ibid 32 33 16 ways in which Blackness is continually being surveilled and monitored, the intrinsic human characteristic of expression is disabled and rendered obsolete in mainstream society as it pertains to Blacks. To be Black connotes and reinscribes a particular trajectory for the subject upon whom Blackness is being prescribed, which can only be read as already robbing that subject of the freedom to be. Because Blackness is so stained with the history and the implications of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Blacks are trapped in a temporal cycle that reinforces slavery. If Blackness is precluded from the categories of the non-slave, the free, and the Human, then what promise is there for discourse and praxis of Black futurity? How can one say that Black Lives Matter when over 400 years of history and politics point to the complete opposite of that sentiment? 17 Section II Why Black Lives Do NOT Matter My homeland of Jamaica is renowned for many stories of athleticism, reggae, and good food. However, Jamaica is also home to a story belonging to one of the most distressing and horrific genres of history, or as I like to call it, the Slave genre. Although not one of the most popular stories throughout history, The Zong Massacre has some very important lessons for this project. As told by Ian Bernard, “the slave ship Zong departed the coast of Africa on 6 September 1781 with 470 slaves. Since this human chattel was such a valuable commodity at that time, many captains took on more slaves than their ships could accommodate in order to maximize profits.” 36 The ship was overloaded with slaves and soon after departure, many of them had begun to die from disease and malnutrition. It follows that along the journey, the ship got stranded, and sickness caused the deaths of seven of the 17 crew members and over 50 slaves. Subsequently, the ship’s captain, Luke Collingwood, decided to “jettison” some of the cargo in order to save the ship and provide the shipowners the opportunity to claim for the loss on their insurance. Over the next week, the remaining crew members threw 132 slaves who were sick and dying over the side. 37 On arriving in Jamaica, James Gregson, the ship’s owner, filed an insurance claim for their loss. He argued that the Zong did not have enough water to sustain both crew and the human commodities. 38 However, the insurance underwriter, Bernard, I., 2011. The Zong Massacre (1781) Ibid 38 Ibid 36 37 18 Thomas Gilbert, disputed the claim citing that the Zong had 420 gallons of water aboard when she was inventoried in Jamaica. 39 The ruling of the case is particularly of importance for this section of my project. Despite the insurance underwriter’s claims that disproved the ship owner's arguments, the Jamaican court in 1782 ruled in favour of the owners. The case was brought to the highest court in Great Britain to order a second trial. Once more, the court ruled in favour of the owners, and it held that the cargo had been poorly managed as the captain should have made a suitable allowance of water for each slave. 40 Sharp, one of the leading abolitionists at the time, attempted to have criminal charges brought against the Captain, crew, and the owners, but he was unsuccessful. Great Britain’s Solicitor General, Justice John Lee, however, refused to take up the criminal charges claiming “What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honourable men of murder... The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.” 41 The Zong massacre is one of several historical events that still haunts Black folks across the world today, and as ludicrous and unsettling as Justice Lee’s words might be, its absurdity is constantly being reinforced by the subpar material conditions which encapsulate the Black reality. It is very easy for us to discard Lee’s words as simply racist and the product of their time. However, imbued within his words, particularly his comparison between Black lives and wood, is an intrinsic form of dehumanization that would transcend time and space. Put differently, Lee was cementing a conception of Ibid Bernard, 2011 41 Ibid 39 40 19 Blackness which Fanon describes as a “zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which genuine new departure can emerge.” 42 The sheer objectification of Black life that could permit its ejection off a ship and into the depths of the sea with no prospect for rescue or survival is a fate that will forever be burnt into Black memory. In the minds of many of you who will read this project or the complete story of the Zong Massacre, there is no sound rationale that would uphold the court's ruling. How could such an atrocity occur and no justice served? As Christina Sharpe explains in her book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being 43, “it would not be murder that was at issue. The events on board the Zong would be committed to historical memory first as the insurance claim in the case of Gregson v. Gilbert and only later as the murders (injury to ‘subjects’) of 132 Africans not seen in the court to be murders.” 44 She goes on to add that “the decision of the court was achieved through an act of lexicolegal transubstantiation that declared that ‘the case [of the Zong] was a simple one of maritime insurance,’ that is, a case of property loss and not murder.” 45 The apathetic and secondary response from the court only reaffirmed the unimportance of Black life and Black being. After all, to be Black was to be perpetually enslaved. It was a status marked by denigration and was nothing more than property in the eyes of the law and whites. Coincidentally, Blackness becomes essential to the Zong Massacre, even as it is treated as an unimportant factor in the ruling. The gruesome murder of Africans in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade paved the way for the development of Maritime insurance. Not only that, it became a way for Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xii Sharpe, C., 2016. In the Wake. London: Duke University Press. 44 Ibid 45 Ibid 42 43 20 whites to make claims about ownership and, subsequently, entitlement. Blackness, through the Slave, was simultaneously a point of Nothingness and Necessity for Whites. The improved wealth and safeguarding of Whiteness necessitated the expendability of Blackness as useful. Modernity became centered around the antagonism between the Master and Slave. That is to say, a sort of Master-Slave dichotomy, in the form of Modernity-Anti-blackness, established the confines of society. In the same way that the Master is only brought into existence with the presence of the Slave and vice versa 46, the same is true for the murder of Africans to maritime insurance and other constituents of modernity. Subsequently, Black life and Black being becomes important and defined only through its necessity to Whiteness. This is why Orlando Patterson defines slavery as a kind of social death 47 that is constituted by three main components, namely that the slave is always the subject of forms of gratuitous violence because of a kind of natal alienation which defines their enslavement and subsequently perpetuates a general dishonouring of the Slave. The forms of gratuitous violence that are inflicted upon the Slave in the Zong Massacre is made clear. Their positionality of being enslaved “opens [them] to the violence of all others.” 48 Wilderson argues that “[the slave] exists in a state of structural or open vulnerability... [that] is not contingent upon his or her transgressing some type of law.” 49 The Slave’s openness to these forms of violence is solely based on the theft of their subjecthood through the modes of natal alienation which encapsulates their enslaved See Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit (1979) Patterson O. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1982. 48 Wilderson, F., n.d. Afro-Pessimism: An introduction. p18 49 Ibid 46 47 21 status. Additionally, “the temporality of one’s life that is manifest in filial and filial relations– the capacity to have families and the capacity to have associative relations– may exist well in their heads” 50 but not in reality. As a result of the infliction of forms of gratuitous violence and the subsequent alienation that the Slave is subjected to, he or she is “dishonored in their very being, [they] are dishonored prior to [their] performance of dishonored actions.” 51 In light of this, the Zong Massacre should not strike us as particularly unprecedented or surprisingly tragic. Indeed, violence is always necessitated to maintain the stability of the Master-Slave dichotomy. Wilderson argues that “violence against the Slave is integral to the production of that psychic space called social life.” 52 For him, “violence against the Slave sustains a kind of psychic stability for all others who are not slaves.” 53 This explains what seems to be the inexplicable decision of the court in Gregson v. Gilbert. The secondary consideration of the Zong as being that of a murder case rather than some trivial maritime insurance jurisprudence tells a lot about the necessary desensitization and normalization of Black death to society. For it to have been interpreted differently and a judgement be made in favor of those who had been brutally killed would have truly been inexplicable and surprising. So, why did I not entitle this section “Why Slaves’ Lives Do NOT Matter”? Why instead did I make such a profound statement about the importance of Black Lives? To fully get at my reason for making such a discursive choice, one must ask themselves an even more pertinent question: what turned the Slave into a human? Or, put differently, Ibid Ibid 52 Wilderson, p 19 53 Ibid 50 51 22 how was the Slave able to escape the plantation? What stopped the institution of Slavery and how was its effectiveness assessed? For Afro-Pessimists, a search for the answer to these questions would be futile since one of their central claims is that “Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from slaveness.” 54 Drawing on Patterson’s earlier work, 55 Wilderson posits that “the concept of community and the concept of freedom, and the concept of communal and interpersonal presence, actually needs a conceptual antithesis.” 56 He continues to add that the ideas and freedom, communal life, and civil relations have to have “a kind of point of attention which is absent of that or different from that.” From him, “this is the function that slavery presents or provides to coherence.” 57 In this way, “violence against Black people is a mechanism for the usurpation of subjectivity, of life, of being.” 58 To get at the quandary at hand, one must examine the ways in which legal and political state apparatus were used to define, imprison, and somehow liberate the enslaved. It is easy for one to call the claims being made by Wilderson and other AfroPessimists extreme and discard them as divisive and stifling prospects for solidarity. As academics, we often fall into the trap of only theorizing the real world and we forget the material and lived conditions that Black folks are constantly living under. Centering the day-to-day forms of violence that Blacks are being subjected to makes it harder to reject the Afro-Pessimists position on the coterminous status of Blackness and enslavement. Wilderson, 20 Patterson, 1982 56 Wilderson, 20 57 Ibid 58 Wilderson, 25 54 55 23 For many of us, the law is a tool of equality and it marks a conceptual body of opportunities that enables a citizenry to engage with those within it in fair and equitable ways. For many Americans, the law is an inherently good system, and if there are any discrepancies within it, the fault does not rest with the law but rather interpretations of the law. Or, as the twist on the common expression goes, “don’t hate the game, hate the player.” But such an outlook on law does not reflect a historically accurate trajectory of the development of legal precedence in the United States as far as Black folks are concerned. The establishment of racial categories and, particularly, the demarcation of Blackness as a perpetual pejorative synonymous to enslavement were products that were handcrafted and sold by the law. We shall not forget that the law legalized the trading and commodification of slaves, as well as the Jim Crow era. And, while the law, on paper, seemed to be a medium through which it self-corrects, that reality was never realized for Black folks in the United States. It would follow that for every occasion where the law showed promise of getting it right for Blacks, another sort of legal framework emerged to undo that attempt. Take for example the Reconstruction Era Amendments to the United States constitution, namely the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Ratified in 1865, 1868, and 1870 respectively, “these three constitutional amendments abolished slavery and guaranteed equal protection of the laws and the right to vote.” 59 Also known as the Civil War Amendments, they emerged out of a context where the validity of slavery, whether as a moral or economic imperative, was being advanced by the South leading to a civil war. But even in these moments of relief and hopefulness, there was pushback. The 13th 59 The Reconstruction Amendments - National Constitution Center, n.d. 24 Amendment contained a loophole that made slavery conditional. To quote the Amendment’s main principle, “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the accused shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” 60 The 13th Amendment, a piece of legislation that at the time of its ratification was lauded for being progressive, became the very tool that the South exploited to ensure the continuation of Slavery. Similarly, the 14th Amendment, which argues that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside {and that] no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” 61 was also taken advantage of. The South interpreted this law to argue that Blacks were “separate but equal,” and, in doing so, retroactively nulled the seemingly progressive agenda of the Amendment. When one thinks of incarceration, one is prone to believe that allegations of criminality must be a part of the equation. What, however, seldom comes to mind is that how we define the crime and, subsequently, the criminal is politically and racially charged. Michele Alexander, in her renowned book entitled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 62 points out a shocking correlation between the past and our current era in terms of legality. She shows us that “today it is perfectly National Constitution Center - The 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, 2021 The Reconstruction Amendments - National Constitution Center, n.d. 62 Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness. The New Press. Jan 20, 2021 60 61 25 legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against [Black] Americans.” 63 One cannot help but call to memory Wilderson’s claim that “chattel slavery stuck to the African like velcro.” 64 True to form, the horrors and subjugation of slavery have stuck to Black folks but have changed the ways in which they are manifested. To draw on Alexander, “once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service – are suddenly legal.” 65 It is therefore not surprising to realize the connections between the incarcerated population in the United States and race, in particular blackness. In a publication in the Sentencing Project, entitled The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons, Ashley Nellis points out that “African Americans are incarcerated in state prisons across the country at more than five times the rate of whites, and at least ten times the rate in five states, namely Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, Vermont, and Wisconsin.” 66 This is in a context where, according to the US Census, African Americans make up roughly 13.4% of the entire US population. 67 While laws are looked towards fixing a particular problem, in the case of Blackness, laws have never worked in ameliorating the structural inequalities and discrimination that have shaped the lives of black folks from 1619 68, the day that marked the arrival of the first slave ship to this country, until now. Instead, laws have been used Alexander, ibid. p 2 Wilderson, p 18 65 Alexander, p 2 66 Nellis, A., 2016. The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons | The Sentencing Project. [online] The Sentencing Project. 67 Census Bureau QuickFacts, 2018 68 Nytimes.com. 2019. The 1619 Project. 63 64 26 as a tool of masking, where the subject of race is omitted because of some notion of postraciality or it is included as a facade to make Black folks feel that something is being done to mend the ills of racism in this country. The assumption that the United States could ever recover from the atrocities of slavery by simply passing laws that brought blacks into the realm of being a human, a citizen, of subjectivity, without any material compensation or support was bound to prove baseless and nonsensical. If Blackness is precluded from the realm of humanity, what fate is left for those who are racialized as Black? Is the work of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the organizers and founders of the Black Lives Matter movement 69, rendered in vain? And, most importantly, what types of recourse for liberty and freedom are afforded for Blacks? I take a shot at all of these questions in the next section. Cullors-Brignac, Patrisse Marie (February 23, 2016). "We didn't start a movement. We started a network". Medium. Retrieved December 18, 2016. 69 27 Section III I Am A Nigga Like the other parts of this project, my experiences have influenced the construction and my interest in this section. For many readers, the title might come across as striking. Why would I discursively choose to label the final section of my thesis I Am A Nigga? To get at this and the larger arguments that are made herein, it is important to revisit my introduction to the word Nigga. During my first year at Whitman College, I was one of two students who identified as Black and male in my section of my freshman residence hall. The other young man identified as African American and he was born and raised in Compton, California. One day, as we passed each other on our way to our respective destinations, Darne greeted me in a way that struck me as frightening and uncomfortable. He exclaimed, “what’s up, my Nigga?” I looked at him with bewilderment. Why would a Black student greet me in such a manner? Didn’t he know of the historical stain that was affixed to that word? I nodded and went on my way. As time passed, Darne and I got closer, and, even more frequently did I hear him use the term to refer to others around him. With a growing sense of frustration, one day I confronted him about his employment of the term. His response was simply this; “Bruh, I call you a Nigga cuz you’re like a brother to me. It’s nothing bad, it’s all love, my Nigga.” At that moment, I could not fathom how one could use such a word as an expression of love and comradery. However, almost three years later, here I am centering this word as the title and theoretical point of departure for my undergraduate thesis. 28 Anyone who is at all attentive to the social debates within African/Black American Studies knows of the controversy that surrounds this word. Currently, the debates center a kind of discourse around the word’s history, its utility, and its users. Even more so, the validity and possibility of “the innovative shwa variant, nigga [as having] mostly positive meanings, primarily among Blacks” 70 is questioned since the “rhotic form nigger can only be used as a racial slur used by whites.” 71 To put it simply, there is tension within Black scholarly literature about the usage of the word. In the following pages, I will intercede in these debates by giving a historical synopsis of the evolution of the word, delineating between both of its forms, before engaging in the ways that I am conceptualizing Nigga and Niggaism in this project. The terms nigger and nigga are all linguistic derivatives of the Latin word, niger, which means black, and they have both been used to refer to African Americans. 72 For many, “the racial slur nigger [...] is considered to be one of the worst racial epithets in the United States, if not the worst from a historical and socio-political standpoint.” 73 According to historical records, “by the 18th century, whites, both masters and nonmasters, increasingly used the term nigger to connote American blacks, with accompanying characteristics also identifying them as an inferior race, and the race that was only to be utilized as commodities instead of as humans, and therefore ‘ends’ rather than ‘means to ends,’ i.e. capitalistic profit.” 74 It was also the case that “from an economic perspective, slaves had no power of the purse because they were actually Smith, H., 2019. Has nigga Been Reappropriated as a Term of Endearment? American Speech, 94(4), pp.420-47, p 426 71 Ibid 72 Fogle, C., 2013. The Etymology, Evolution and Social Acceptability of 'Nigger', 'Negro', and 'Nigga'. SSRN Electronic Journal. p 2 73 Ibid 74 Fogel, p 3 70 29 products rather than consumers.” 75 What would follow was that “the slur nigger was also routinely used to “psychologically and publicly” demean slaves, who had no property, funds, or legal rights.” 76 To be identified as a nigger was to be already denigrated beyond the point of human redemption and subjectivity. However, the same was not true for the schwa variation of the word, nigga. As Fogel points out, “while there is likely little excuse for someone, African American or otherwise, to use the word nigger except in an education context (and even that is debatable 77) considering the historical nature behind it, it seems as if the use of the word nigga is only appropriate when said by African Americans.” 78 He continues to say that “[from] an African American perspective, it bears mentioning that for many the terms nigger and nigga may be similar in spelling, but not in meaning.” 79 Unlike the former, which is nearly universally seen as a pejorative and anti-black, nigga is “considered to be uplifting and positive.” 80 Consequently, “the use of nigga can be linked to positive self and racial esteem, and can therefore be a linguistic tool utilized to increase personal and racial esteem for those who have historically been at the bottom rungs of society in terms of race, societal power structures and socioeconomics. 81 As shown above, current debates around the social acceptability of the word nigga, and the rejection of its historically racist form, nigger, is largely linguistic. Rather than elaborating on this already existing body of knowledge, I would like to turn the Ibid Ibid 77 Flaherty, C., 2019. Professor is suspended for using the N-word in class in discussion of language from James Baldwin essay. [online] Insidehighered.com. 78 Fogel, p 3 79 Fogel, p 4 80 Ibid 81 Ibid 75 76 30 reader’s attention to the political and metaphysical opportunities which are offered in using the word Nigga as a conceptual tool to analyze Black futurity and the defeat of White Supremacy. Intrinsic to nigger is a capitalistic mode of Black exploitation that was embodied by the system of chattel slavery. The nigger was defined through their labour and their ability to generate profit. Indeed, the nigger, coterminous to the slave, ceased to exist in excess of their labor. To be a nigger was to be a perpetual site of labor. For Wilderson, it was the perpetuity of the slave’s labor that distinguished them from that of the indentured servant. 82 Unlike the servant, who was hired contractually, even if only symbolically, the nigger was precluded from a contractual relationship since their purpose was exclusively for the satisfaction of the needs of their Master. Similarly, the servant was not completely alienated from their species-being, their dasein. Though the conditions of their servitude limited their access to the enjoyment of their labor, they were not by definition of their work excluded from the world. However, to be a nigger was to be outside of the realm of dasein. Or, to use Patterson’s infamous book title, niggerdom was precisely social death. 83 The nigger was without the leisure of voluntarily transferring their labor from one Master to another in the way that the servant was. Instead, to be a nigger was to be passed around at the appeasement of the Master. The nigger is the definition of capitalist labor. As Eric Williams, in his renowned book entitled Capitalism and Slavery, reveals, the advancement of capitalism depended on the excess, unpaid labor of slaves on the plantation. 84 Rather than centering the development of capitalism as the natural progression of feudalism, the use of nigger labor more Wilderson, F., n.d., p 18 Patterson, 1982. 84 Williams, E. (1994). Capitalism and Slavery (1st ed.). University of North Carolina Press. 82 83 31 accurately encapsulates the success of capitalism as an exploitative system of profit generation. The same is not true for the nigga, and it is at this point of difference where the linguistic variation between the two words becomes important to our discussion at hand. In his article entitled On Decadence: Bling Bling, 85 David Marriott argues that the nigga “subverts every utilitarian classification of blacks as laboring being.” 86 For him, “nigger implies the literalizing of blackness as work [whereas] nigga compels us to conceive of black discourse no longer in terms of a utilitarian and, consequently, slavish nomenclature, but as the very exercise of an extravagant expenditure.” 87 Consequently, “the nigga questions the status of restraint in black history and culture, however virtuous or prudential it may be.” 88 As such, the nigga is outside the threat of fetishization or tokenism like Blacks are. To be a nigga is to constantly disrupt the norm because the norm is inherently anti-nigga. Here, Marriott problematizes Wilderson’s claim that nigga is a “word that has no transformative capacity.” 89 In an interview, Wilderson argues that “the N* word is symptomatic of how impossible it is to do the labor of transformation beyond the destruction of the entire epistemological order; which means there would be neither Blacks nor humans on the other side.” 90 In many ways, Wilderson and Marriott seem to be agreeing. Marriott would probably concur with Wilderson that the destruction of the entire epistemological order would be necessitated for such a transformation. However, Marriott, David, On Decadence: Bling Bling, 2017 Marriott, 2017. P 10 87 Ibid 88 Ibid 89 Park (2020), p. 38 90 Ibid 85 86 32 Marriott’s work suggests that the distinction between nigger and nigga constitutes that transformative capacity. He advances that within the logic of the nigga is a refusal of the current epistemological order. In this way, Marriott can be read as simultaneously agreeing with Wilderson that Blackness is coterminous with labor and the slave, as well as arguing that the Nigga is able to resist configurations of itself as being tied to labor and capital. Wilderson goes on to describe the transformation needed for Nigga as “epistemologically unthinkable.” 91 However, in saying this, Wilderson offers a totalization of the word's meaning. In saying that nigga has no transformative capacity, Wilderson, and many academics alike, neglect the ways in which the word serves as a transformative identifier for Black folks who use it, like Darne for example. In saying that any transformative capacity of Nigga is epistemologically unthinkable, one must be careful to not dismiss the ways in which nigga works within the Black community as a term of endearment and comradery for many who’ve been subjected to anti-black violence. To make such a claim is to reject and invalidate the forms of resistance to antiblackness that Black users of the word find in its usage. It is to totalize a way of thinking as the only correct way of thinking and perpetuate similar forms of epistemological violence as anti-blackness. Moreover, the nigga becomes one of the only possible avenues for black agency. As Marriott shows us, niggaism does not refer to “a temporal verb, but to a presence that cannot be identified and gathered into a presence, a category that cannot be put to work as a meaningful category.” 92 Unlike Blackness, which is constantly being defined and 91 92 Ibid Marriott, 2017. p 10 33 understood against chattel slavery and the nigger via its proximity to usefulness and production, “to be a nigga is not to reduce desire to use-value, or to treat [nigga] life as the expression of what is meaningfully, usefully knowable.” 93 The Nigga is outside the narrative of definition for to be defined is already a violent process of prescription and a theft of Nigga agency. Simply put, the Nigga is what the Nigga is. Subsequently, Niggaism redefines inclusion, not as a process of engulfing differences, but instead through a breaking down of the need for a conceptualization of difference as a necessity. While the Nigga is the descendant of the black, they, themselves, are not black. For to be black is to be socially dead. Marriott succinctly argues that “the nigga is a product of social death, even though s/he is not the one who is socially dead” 94 For him, “black folks have killed themselves by striving to conserve themselves in a willful affect– the productive labor of modern subjects, a.k.a. work.” 95 Niggaism embodies a conceptualization of Blackness as not rooted in a mode of capitalist production, i.e., the slave/the nigger, who is defined by their labor and usefulness to their (capitalist) Master. Niggaism forces us to embark on an imaginary that is anti-exploitation of labor and the means of production. It beckons to that which is outside of excess and cannot be captured by Humanism’s conceptions of sufficiency, abundance, the inside-outside binary. 96 Additionally, Niggaism transcends rather than reclaims Blackness. To say Blackness is reclaimable is to stay in that Humanistic paradigm of history as a project. Whereas, transcendence rejects such a premise and Ibid Marriott, p 11 95 Ibid 96 Here, I coin the inside-outside binary to refer to the ways in which Humanism is always defining itself against what is outside of its mode of comprehension. I am trying to work against the ways in which the Other is constructed as a normal rather than a necessity of White Civil society in an attempt to gain coherency for itself. 93 94 34 complicates Blackness as something beyond and outside of reclamation. Blackness, as a conceptual tool for racializing the African and those of African descent, did not exist without the institution of chattel slavery. A reclamation of Blackness is code word for the reclamation of the slave, the nigger. Instead, Niggaism rejects the moves of Humanist discourse in trying to incorporate Blackness within its vocabulary by calling out these attempts for what they truly are, i.e., exploitation. Niggaism transcends the parameters along which Humanism constructs Blackness by envisioning a world outside of the plantation. It is a mode of being that does not exert meaning to the nigga, but rather it allows the nigga to inscribe meaning onto themselves. It should not be mistaken that Niggaism is only pertinent to niggas. Indeed, Niggaism distorts the paradigm of the Human and, subsequently, whiteness. Conceptually speaking, because of Niggaism’s negation of binarism and metaphysical exploitation to give way to an affirmation of a sort of perpetual fugitive logic 97, the Human loses its antithesis. It is unable to sustain a hold on that which it needs to define itself in opposition to. Because Niggaism refuses to ground its authenticity in a discourse centered in rights or other categories and privileges of the Human, the necessary desire of the Other to be included within the category of the mainstream which drives Humanism and White Supremacy is lost and rendered void. Without the slave, the plantation is useless, and, in the same way, with the Nigga, White Supremacy cannot make sense of itself. 97 See Moten’s The Undercommons (2013) 35 For the Nigga, there is a kind of jouissance, 98 rather than praxis, that embodies their resistance. It is important to center jouissance rather than praxis as a way to think about the tools that the Nigga has at their disposal. For the nigga, the paradigm of praxis, taken to be a defined methodology by which a plan can be achieved, is automatically out of reach. A praxis would have to be known and widespread. It would have to be contained and perpetually be working towards a specific endpoint. However, for the Nigga and Niggaism, it's not a type of praxis that is instrumental in its logic. This, on one hand, makes Niggaism an ambiguous thought experience, since the question of how is inevitably an impossible one to give a succinct response to. However, on the other hand, the open-endedness which centering a kind of jouissance as the instrumental component of Niggaism provides allows for true self-determination of the Nigga. To think that there has to be an objective and defined end goal is to be seen as one of the most narcissistic traits of Humanism. Niggaism refuses to be seduced by this way of being in the world. Subsequently, it doesn't have a goal outside of its open-endedness. For the Nigga, one thing matters, and that is to perpetually be giving Whiteness and the structures which essentialize and promulgate anti-blackness hell. To give a personal example, I have gained a love for the title of my thesis. From the very onset, this project’s title disrupts the normalcy of the apathetic response to anti-black violence by centering the Nigga. Particularly, it is expected that such an important work, like my thesis, would be more palatable and in support of the perpetuation of the White space that historically embodies academia. Instead, the striking title of this project is confrontational. So, too, is the Nigga and the agenda of Niggaism. Here, I’m drawing on Lacan’s idea of jouissance as “an enjoyment that goes beyond the pleasure principle.” See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety (2014) 98 36 The ways in which Niggaism reveals itself are not rooted in the expected modes of resistance with which we have grown comfortable. Intrinsic to Niggalogic is perpetual surprise. In this way, Nigga is untraceable. Unlike the black, who is always subject to navigation and surveillance, the Nigga is without GPS. Essential to the hegemonic power of White Supremacy is its ability to engulf and suppress that which threatens it. But, unlike the black, who is constantly the subject of mass incarceration and police brutality, all instruments of White Supremacy, the Nigga is outside of the realm of capture and imprisonment. To capture the Nigga, you would need to pin them down – and that’s nigger shit. With the Nigga, the ease of access that defines White Supremacy is always troubled, and, once you take away Massah’s 99 slave, then what does Massah have? Lastly, for many readers, this project might raise a lot of skepticism about its theorization of the Nigga and, subsequently, Niggaism. One might argue that this project actively fetishizes the word Nigga as the saviour from anti-blackness. To be sure, that is not the intention or the work at play here. Instead, I see Nigga as using a familiar term to many Black folks and theorizing an already existing reality for many Black folks. Like any theorization, Niggaism is not the objectively right way of seeing the demise of antiblackness. However, it is a way for me to theorize the forms of anti-blackness that are rampant and constitutive of White Civil Society. Disagreement is invited and makes for an even stronger revision to the theory of knowledge that is being considered within this project. The other suspicion which might arise out of this theorization is that the practice and normalization of Black folks simply saying and identifying with the word, Nigga, is 99 Massah is AAVE for Master, particularly the slave master. 37 what brings about the end of anti-blackness. This would be a grave misreading of what I have tried to do in this project. Rather than trivializing the validity of this project to simply who can and cannot say the word – even though I think that is a part of its work– this project advances that Niggaism represents a paradigm shift that is instrumental in negating and making void the forms of anti-black logic upon which our current society is constructed. The agency of the disruption is therefore located not in simply saying the word, but in understanding that the Nigga is outside of the parameters of labor and slavishness which White Supremacy and anti-blackness necessitate. Similar to the philosophy in which Marriott’s piece is rooted, Niggaism is interested in reimagining an alternative future in the world for Black folks. Unlike Afro-Pessimists diagnosis of antiblackness and chattel slavery as precluding any forms of futurity for Black folks, Niggaism, conceptually and paradigmatically, offers Black folks an alternative way of seeing themselves in the world. It is not that Black folks will be going around permanently referring to each other only as Niggas. Instead, Niggaism, unlike the AfroPessimists, does not totalize Black futurity as futile or impossible. It strives to conceive of a world where the exploitation of Black folks is not the foundational condition needed for society. In this way, Niggaism is a form of hopeful pessimism. It recognizes the problems with our current society in similar ways that Afro-Pessimists do. But it distinguishes itself from them in how it thinks of possible treatments for anti-blackness. While it acknowledges that anti-black violence is an incurable ailment in the world we live in today, it refuses to accept that the plight of Black folks is unchangeable for such an acceptance relegates Black folks to a realm of perpetual suffering with no reprieve. Instead, as I have tried to articulate throughout this section, Niggaism creates a 38 conceptual and paradigmatic opening through which Black folks might begin to rethink liberation and being in the world. 39 Conclusion The peculiarity of the question pertaining to the status of Blackness as a conceptual tool for understanding the metaphysical positioning of Black folks carries with it a great deal of intrigue for Black scholars and ordinary Black folks alike. Why does the material reality of Black folks perpetually mimic that of the slave? How is it that temporality and spatiality for Black life seem to be stuck on the plantation, despite the “upward” progression of modernity? This project began with all of these questions at its point of departure but refuses to stop there as a way of understanding the future of Blackness or the fate of Black peoples. Through a historical tracing of the ways in which Blackness has been conceptually defined as the subhuman or the Slave, I argue that Blackness is ontologically a position of nonbeing. To be Black is to be stained with the unremovable residue of the plantation and to be constantly the object of surveillance. While many might argue that Blackness is open to an expansive range of interpretations and that its definition and employment are contingent on the ways in which those who are racialized as Black perceive it, history would suggest otherwise. Regardless of the sorts of emancipative notions that are being bestowed upon Blackness, such as #BlackGirlMagic or #BlackLives Matter, there seems to be a pushback suggesting the complete opposite of those sentiments. For every advancement that Blackness attempts to make, to push itself in the direction of liberation, anti-blackness presents itself as an obstacle. Whether it be mass incarceration as a form of replacement for the institution of chattel slavery, or voter suppression to deny the ability to participate in the franchise, Black folks are never able 40 to enjoy the promises of Humanism and modernity. Indeed the American dream was framed with the intrinsic exclusion of Black folks in mind. So, if this is the case, if the evidence points overwhelmingly to the permanent abjection of Blackness by White civil society, it would suggest that the Afro-Pessimists got it correct. Perhaps the afterlives of slavery is impossible to be removed from the contemporary embodiment of Blackness. If this is indeed the reality of the Black situation, what are Blacks to make of their lives and the possibility for liberation? This lies at the heart of the conceptual innovation which this project calls Niggaism. In this project, I have embarked on a thought process that imagines a world which is void of anti-blackness and binarism. Herein, Niggaism theorizes a world that is free from anti-black violence and the inside-outside binary among other humanist logics. The Nigga is a term of endearment whose popularity among Black Americans was born out of a context of being denigrated through its racist variant, the nigger. Unlike nigger, an identifier which exclusively depicts and interpret Black life as a commodity and a means to generate capital through exploitative modes of production, i.e., slavish labor, Nigga obliterates that humanist paradigm of Blackness by subverting every utilitarian classification of Blacks as laboring beings. In this way, the Nigga is the unlaboring Black, a term which is inherently paradoxical and, subsequently, incoherent to white civility. The Nigga is always a conceptualization that is in opposition to Blackness, even though it stems from the very existence of Blackness. That is, if Blackness is to be understood as the embodiment of that which is social dead, Niggaism is the air that is blown into Black corpses transforming them into Niggas. However, this proverbial air is not to be understood as a trivial reincarnation of Blackness, since that would only 41 perpetuate the reality of anti-blackness. Instead, this Nigga air that is blown into Blackness enables a kind of transcendence that affirms a negation of the Human and its carceral desires. The Nigga is undefinable, for the process of definition is inherently a violent act of trivialization which boxes in that which it defines. Unlike Blackness, which is to be forever externally defined by enslavement and the plantation regardless of any positive affiliations Blacks might attempt to make with it, Niggaism enables Niggas to be what Niggas want to be. It is a field of openness that has been precluded from those racialized as Blacks. Niggaism is the conceptual tool that Black kids can look up to and aspire to be without being constantly disappointed. The Nigga is outside of the realm of legitimized police brutality and mass incarceration because in a Nigga world, the backative which affirms these acts of anti-Blackness will be done away with and replaced with institutions that push for a pro-Nigganess. 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