Blackness and the Future Part 2

Black folk’s hyper awareness of being perceived stems from deep historical wounds inflicted by slavery. The idea of being found at the wrong pace at the wrong time is a narrative that has perpetuated throughout Jim Crow and is prevalent today for Black Americans through hyper policing and the result of mass incarceration. The history of policing in America is a great example of this idea of being black at the wrong place and time. One of the laws instituted during Jim Crow was the creation of Sundown Towns also known as Sunset Towns. Sundown towns are small suburban towns in America that black people were not allowed to be in after dark. If found in these towns after dark Black people would be arrested, beaten, and subjected to any and all violence. Many black people worked in these towns during the day and had to return back to the adjacent cities where they resided. This law allowed white people to commit crimes against black people without consequence because it made it the Black person’s fault to be in the small town after dark putting them at the wrong place at the wrong time. 

This was another way for police to have access to Black people without black folk actually committing any crimes. This gave excuses for mass arrest and public violence through lynchings of black individuals for petty crimes or nonexistant crimes. In James A. Manos’s From Commodity Fetishism to Prison Fetishism he addresses the impact of slavery on the modes of punishment “nonetheless, without incorporating the narrative of convict-leasing, we fail to see two things: how the modes of punishment shape the modes of production and how they concentrate and reproduce the ever-increasing dispossession of capitalism as a form of racist dominations.” The prison industry is intrinsically racist. We simply cannot begin to talk about the current prison industrial complex without addressing convict leasing, jim crow laws, and slavery. Current mass incarceration of black folk is directly related to the racist American history at large. Coined by Dr. Angela Davis, the term Prison Industrial Complex helps us understand the involvement of government, and the larger social, political, and economic context of the prison industry. 

Mass incarceration is a legacy of slavery therefore it is directly linked to slavery and its aftermath. We cannot see current day policing and incarceration separate from the violent racist history of America. Achille Mbembe in Six The Clinic on the Subject summarizes,

“To be Black is to be stuck at the foot of a wall with no doors, thinking nonetheless that everything will open up at the end. The Black person knocks, begs, and knocks again, waiting for someone to open a door that does not exist. Many end up getting used to the sensation. They start to recognize themselves in the destiny attributed to them by the name. A name that is meant to be carried, they take something they did not originally create and make it their own.” 

So then my question is now that we are here in a racialized society under a skin and an identity we cannot escape, an experience assigned to us at birth and assigned to our ancestors where then can we go, what then shall we do? Marcus Garvey, similar to other pan african theorists identifies the idea that “for this distinct possibility to be realized” meaning the full liberation of Black people world wide, “ the Blacks of the Americas and the Caribbean had to desert the inhospitable places to which they had been relegated and return to their natural habitat and occupy it once more.”

While I agree that could be one way to restore the full liberation of Black people world wide, I question the possibilities of that happening in this globalized world. The mere system and infrastructure of america is built on genocide and slavery therefore the system was not built on the survival of the oppressed in mind. How can this monstrous system be reversed? Is Africans returning to the homeland the only solution to true liberation? What other ways can we be fully liberated on American soil? 

What now? What is the future like for black folks in America? Many artists, writers, and thinkers have imagined black futures both in reality and fiction. In reality by paving a better path for the following generation in shifting policies and advocating for a better future. Through fiction famously known as Afrofuturism declaring a liberated future for Black folk. Through this genre black authors, thinkers, and artists create a future only they could imagine that puts black folk at the center of a world that is created with them in mind rather than the alternative. People who have created afrofuturist books and movies include Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, Colson Whitehead, and artists including Wangechi Mutu, Sun Ra, Genel Monet, and one of my personal favorites Alisha Wormsley. These individuals and many more are influential in the creation and development of this genre. Alisha Wormsley There are Black People in the Future was about claiming space by declaring this statement repeatedly on billboards, and carrying signs. I think about this piece both in conversation and juxtaposition with Fanon's writing on the consciousness of the black person, and on the idea of recognition. In Black Skin White Mask he navigates the symptom of colonialism which is black people in the Antilles wanting nothing to do with their blackness. Wanting to be more like their oppressors. Because they as black people have been painted inferior and their only way to be worthy is to be more like their oppressors. “The question is always whether he is less intelligent than I, blacker than I, less respectable than I. Every position of one’s own, every effort at security, is based on relations of dependence.” Meaning that the value of a black person is made to be always in relation to either another black person or a white person. Similarly Malcolm X spoke in 1962 and addressed “who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin?...” This is a symptom of slavery and colonialism because the oppressed and the colonized are always made inferior by their oppressor. 

What it means to be Black in the world more specifically on American soil is complicated. But largely it means to wear the skin assigned to you and navigate the world according to the history of your people and your ancestors before you. As many thinkers and theorists investigated in the past, the consciousness of a black person is wrapped up in the consciousness of the constructed racial and colonial world. And the liberation of a black person in these systems is deeply tied to the release of the colonial and systemic bondages. How do we do that? I dont have the full answer to that question. I know the system needs to be brought to question and dismantled. The system that is the people we put in power, the education we teach our young, the prisons system, health care… and many more. 

Written: December 5, 2023