Race, Theodicy, and the Normative Emancipatory Challenges of Blackness (original) (raw)
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Rhetorical Criticisms of Anti-Blackness; Interrogating Ontology Before Sociality
Racial rhetorical criticisms should not be conducted through race-focused means. In 2016, L.A. Flores termed the three-step process by which scholars should conduct rhetorical criticisms with a framework of tracking, unpacking, and rendering intelligible "manifestations of both race and racism" (pg. 16). This process has been replicated numerous times in the mere four years since Flores' publication with a variety of applications. Most notably, the concepts have been applied to Black church burnings (Houdek 2018), Donald Trump's rhetoric and "demagoguery" (Johnson 2017), and white feminism as a result of the #metoo movement (Moon & Holling 2020). Proving to be an effective mechanism through which to conduct a rhetorical criticism (Baugh-Harris & Wanzer-Serrano 2018), this project takes up the task of such process with two distinct differences; replacing race with blackness and racism with antiblackness. These distinctions, when utilized in a rhetorical criticism, serve as mechanisms by which non-black, specifically, White scholars can simultaneously atone for their ontological existence being predicted on the alienation of Blackness while serving as workers for the abolition of white society as constructed by an inherently whitened rhetorical situation. To do so, this section serves as a review of three literature bases whom contribute to the overall call to action stated above regarding avoiding racial frames for rhetorical criticisms; afro-pessimism, rhetorical criticism studies, and rhetorical situation studies. Through these authors, this section provides the warrants for the two distinctions made from Flores' original process: replacing race with blackness and racism with antiblackness. Literature Review Diverging from Flores. The distinction between race and blackness is important as it defines the foundation through which this work theorizes the relationship between Black and non-Black persons. Numerous authors have contributed to the claim that the term 'race' is one that was created for the sole purpose of displacing conversations regarding genocide and exploitation to the realm of innate facets of being.
Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being
Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2020
Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law has been wholly insufficient to understand how law encounters human life. These articles are about the hermeneutics of law. While I center case history and Black letter law, I am also arguing explicitly that the law has a dynamic life beyond the courtroom, a life of constructing and dissembling Black life. Together, these essays and exercises in legal philosophy are pointing toward a new method of thinking about law, a method that makes central the material reality of the Black in black letter law. They examine the semiotic relationships between race, gender, sexuality, and the law. While Furtive Blackness is primarily concerned with regimes of policing—both by badged officers and deputized citizens—Strict Scrutiny examines how the reconstruction amendments have been deployed and redeployed to strictly scrutinize Black presence and appeals to justice and make them unintelligible, irrelevant claims without justiciable and therefore outside of law the concern of law. Strict Scrutiny is a riff on the phrase of judicial review that is primarily concerned with the Court’s inversion of the term to tightly regulate and foreclose Black access to legal redress, as well as the police practice of strictly scrutinizing Black presence and movement in public and private places. In essence, the ascription of furtivity makes way for strict scrutinization; while the Black interior strategy of furtivity and refusal creates a survival praxis that allows for a reprieve in the wake of these indignities. These articles are an interpretation of the law as a tool of anti-blackness and an exposition of Black thought and deed in response to anti Blackness, both in black letter law and day to day life. Both articles are descriptive, interdisciplinary and rooted in traditional law and accented by Black queer and feminist theory, critical race studies, performance studies and literary analysis. Specifically, Furtive Blackness engages the Fugitive Slave Law, Black (and Slave) Codes, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments jurisprudence and current cases of racialized and gendered policing to develop an analytic to Fourth Amendment law, criminal procedure, and policing as practiced by officers of the law and deputized white citizens. This analytic seeks to shed light on how Black and BlaQueer (LGBTQ) people—and bodies—have come to exist both in and outside of law; reachable through its policing arm, yet unreachable by many of its fundamental protections. In other words, this work seeks to articulate a framework that maps how American jurisprudence renders Black and BlaQueer people furtive—what I am titling “Furtive Blackness”—and how this furtivity exists as an afterlife of slavery and operates as a social and legal pretext for police encounters. Furtive Blackness is primarily interested in how Black culture, flesh and movement come to operate—well outside the auspices of the Fourth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment—as bodies of evidence for probable cause, reasonable suspicion and the logics for the deployment of quotidian searches, excessive force and mass incarceration; Strict Scrutiny is primarily concerned with how Black presence appeals to justice are turned aside and viewed skeptically as always, already faulty and often, outside of justiciability. As such, I’m also interested in how this experience with being rendered furtive simultaneously marks Black citizens as outside of the protection of law, yet easily and routinely within its disciplinary reach.
Review: Critique of Black Reason - Rethinking the Relation of the Particular and the Universal
This article reviews the 2017 English translation of Achille Mbembe’s book Critique of Black Reason. It suggests that a key to understanding the work concerns the theme of the double, for instance, the critique of the double discourse on Blackness which explains the title of the book. Despite some passages of the text being overly poetic and difficult to understand, Mbembe’s critical contribution in this work, to not only the philosophical debate on otherness but also critical race theory, is the attempt to rethink the relation of the particular and the universal, or in this instance Africa and the world, in order to think more critically about the responsibility of repairing the dignity of humanity in thinking our shared world beyond race and racism.
The Pursuit of Being: Reflections on Blackness
Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 2020
The Black Register calls for the uprooting of a world structured by the systems of oppression imposed by whiteness throughout the centuries. Colonialism, imperialism, and racism have long been weaponized against black-skinned peoples, denying them life and voice. In this book review, the author analyzes Tendayi Sithole’s propositions to establish a new world system where blackness will not be lifeless or voiceless anymore.
Transformation in Higher Education , 2018
In an era and an academic milieu that glamour at post-racialist and globalist theoretical frameworks in philosophy and sociology, our paper posits a critical philosophical-phenomenological and political review of the experience of being-black-in-the-world as a factor that justifies the establishment and maintenance of Black Studies Programmes. Blackness is introduced as an existential-ontological reality that should function as a cardinal category in educational planning. Blackhood, conceived as the an external recognition and an internally self-negotiated consciousness of the meaning of black existential reality within the immanence of Whiteness, it is argued, justifies the institutionalisation of learning spaces and programmes that are aimed at nurturing anti-colonial and anti-racist black self-realisation, namely Black Studies. This appreciation of Blackhood as a methodological imperative is achieved through a constructivist reflection that is derived from a Fanonian existential phenomenology and Steve Biko’s perspectives, as contrasted against Achille Mbembe’s semiological-hermeneutic and cosmopolitan treatment of blackness. The paper seeks to contribute to the debate on the vagaries accompanying the institutionalisation of culturo-epistemic exclusive spaces for socially suppressed selfhoods in a postmodern academy.