Tag: race

Capitalizing “Black”

A slew of news organizations, including the New York Times and the Associated Press have announced that they will now capitalize “Black.” The NYT invokes W.E.B. Du Bois’s push for “Negro” to be capitalized back in the 1920s. Du Bois’s colleague and rival, Alain Locke, shared Du Bois’s desire to leave behind the negative connotations of the “old negro” sharecropper in favor of a sophisticated New Negro brimming with political will and artistic potential. Another of their peers, James Weldon Johnson, preferred the term “Aframerican.”

AP explains that capitalizing “Black” conveys an “essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa.” Despite its focus on shared history, by using “essential,” this statement invokes the specter of racial essentialism, the belief that members of a race share a common, static identity. Racial essentialism has largely defined white people’s characterizations of Black people, from religion to crime. Positive examples, such as that Black people are–inherently–good at sports, are harmful in the long run because they reduce a group of people to a narrow, fixed identity. With a few caveats, the past several decades of scholarship have considered racial essentialism to be a major cultural and intellectual error.

An earlier generation of African American artists and intellectuals opposed racial essentialism by replacing “Negro” with “black.” In “Racism and Science Fiction,” Samuel R. Delany recalls “breaking into libraries through the summer of ’68 and taking down the signs saying Negro Literature and replacing them with signs saying ‘black literature.’” He explains that the “small ‘b’ on ‘black’ is a very significant letter, an attempt to ironize and de-transcendentalize the whole concept of race, to render it provisional and contingent.” When Delany saw “Negro Literature” signs at the library, it seemed to proclaim “All these books are the same. All these authors are the same.” For a pioneer of Black sci-fi, “Negro Literature” sounded like a ghetto.

Whereas Du Bois, whose writing often flirts with racial essentialism, wanted “Negro” to be capitalized, Delany, who grew up with “Negro” as the predominant label, preferred “black” because it mitigated against racial essentialism. In our current moment, however, it seems that the pendulum has swung back the other way, as the desire to inscribe the dignity of Black lives in print outweighs fears of racial essentialism.

It is, of course, entirely possible to support capitalizing Black without appealing to racial essentialism. Historian Nicholas Guyatt, for instance, emphasizes people of African descent’s shared heritage and experiences:

Another argument for capitalizing Black is that it draws attention to race as a constructed identity, rather than a biological reality. As Kwame Anthony Appiah notes, capitalization can “help signal that races aren’t natural categories, to be discovered in the world, but products of social forces.” The idea that race is socially constructed–that it isn’t rooted in biology–is a central tenet of scholarship on race across academic disciplines. In the words of the AP statement, “The lowercase black is a color, not a person.” Blackness was created first by racism, as people from all across Africa were artificially categorized as a single “race” and then imbued with new meaning by Black people themselves as they created a shared culture.

From Negro to colored to black to African American to Black, people of African descent identify more readily with different nomenclature as the cultural context shifts.

White Supremacy’s Specious Origins in Watchmen

As Watchmen unfolds, we learn not only that beloved sheriff Judd Crawford was secretly a white supremacist, but also that the anti-crime Senator Joe Keene is actually directing the Seventh Kavalry. In fact, the Keene and Crawford families are blue bloods of Cyclops.

In the original comic, Senator John David Keene sponsored the Keene Act, which banned masked vigilantes in 1977. Thanks to Petey’s research, we can read a 1955 letter from Keene to Sheriff Dale Dixon Crawford. Keene identifies himself and his fellow Klansmen with figures from the bible and Greek mythology. Keene admires the “valiant men guided by a vision of Manifest Destiny” who first settled the “American Canaan.” His language echoes the Puritans’ identification of white settlers with God’s chosen people, the Israelites.

Even before the Arabella anchored in Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop described the still nascent colony as a “city on a hill” in his famous 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” As Sacvan Bercovitch explains in The American Jeremiad, John Winthrop, John Cotton, and other Puritan ministers believed that New England held a special place in the divine plan. By identifying themselves with the Israelites, they relegated the indigenous people they displaced to the role of heathen Canaanites. Similarly, the 19th century idea of Manifest Destiny–that Americans should expand to the Pacific Ocean–came at Mexico’s expense and relied on the labor of Chinese workers. This idea of America as a divinely chosen nation became ingrained in the national consciousness and a favorite trope of white supremacists.

Not only does Keene identify with the Israelites, but he describes himself and Crawford as “Achaians coming from Troy, beaten off our true course by winds from every direction across the great gulf of the open sea, making for home, by the wrong way, on the wrong courses” as it has “pleased Zeus to arrange it.” Keene likens the Klansmen to the Greek heroes of the Trojan War, like Odysseus and Menelaus who, by Zeus’s will, survived dangerous, circuitous journeys home. As Odysseus violently reclaimed Ithaca from the predatory suitors who assumed him dead, so Keene seeks to reclaim his nation for white men. Sean Illing has observed that contemporary white supremacists treat ancient Greece as the “basis of Western civilization and that these cultures are the exclusive achievements of white men” and Donna Zuckerberg has analyzed the use of “classical imagery to promote a white nationalist agenda.” Keene’s rhetoric, thus, casts white supremacy in a heroic light and implies that his mission is ordained by God.

John David Keene’s son Joe also became a senator and the leader of Cyclops. Joe Keene’s public persona belies his private belief that Redford’s administration has made it “extremely difficult to be a white man in America right now.” With Keene running the Seventh Kavalry and Crawford running Tulsa PD, the apparent war between the two sides could be neatly resolved to make Keene look like a hero and set up his presidential run.

Keene’s plan changed, however, when Angela survived White Night, the Christmas Eve massacre of Tulsa cops. Angela’s husband Cal, who is secretly Dr. Manhattan, instinctively teleported her assailant to New Mexico. Once Keene deduced Cal’s identity, he devised a scheme worthy of a Bond villain to kill Dr. Manhattan and steal his powers. In the show’s finale, Keene delivers a glorious gloating monologue before stepping into a chamber to be transformed into a god. As Lady Trieu informs us, however, Keene forgot to properly filter Dr. Manhattan’s radiation, so all that’s left of Keene is a pool of blood.

While Keene is immolated by his own ambition, Angela inherits Dr. Manhattan’s power. The season ends with the radical image of a black woman as the most powerful being in the galaxy.

Rorschach, Abolition, and the Higher Law

HBO’s Watchmen is set in the universe of Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel. Moore’s central characters are current and former masked vigilantes, anti-heroes, and psychopaths. While Moore’s masterpiece tackles Cold War paranoia, Damon Lindelöf puts white supremacist violence at the heart of his show. The show opens with the razing of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” in 1921. In the graphic novel, Nixon is elected to a third term and the U.S. is on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In the show, the cultural pendulum swings back the other way, as Robert Redford is elected president and institutes a policy of reparations to African Americans for events like the Tulsa Massacre.

In the graphic novel, Walter Kovacs becomes the vigilante Rorschach when he dons his trench coat and mask decorated with the shifting ink blot of a Rorschach test. Rorschach embodies a zealot’s fervor. He wars on crime with Batman’s conviction, but with no compunction about killing. Rorschach believes that drastic action must be taken against evil and immorality. He follows what 19th-century abolitionists called the “higher law.”

Abolitionists had an awkward relationship to the Constitution. The notorious Three-Fifths Compromise enshrined slavery in the nation’s founding charter. From Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward to newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison to Transcendentalist and pond enthusiast Henry David Thoreau, abolitionists turned to the trope of the higher law to escape this bind. According to this idea, God’s law is higher than man’s. While the Constitution might consider slavery legal, God considers it evil. Although we think of them as being “on the right side of history” today, abolitionists were widely considered fanatics in the 1850s.

Perhaps more than any other abolitionist, Rorschach resembles John Brown. In what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, Brown executed five slave holders in Kansas. He also helped fugitive slaves escape to Canada. He felt called by God, like the ancient prophets, to fight the slave power. Leading a small cadre of followers, Brown seized control of the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. After a series of bizarre tactical decisions, his plan to spark a widespread slave uprising failed and Brown was eventually executed for treason. Brown became the ultimate martyr to the abolitionist cause. Unlike more pragmatic figures like Lincoln, John Brown waged a sacred crusade against evil. Brown was uncompromising; he rejected gradualism, pragmatism, and half-measures. He felt justified dispensing with the law to follow the Higher Law.

john brown higher law
John Stewart Curry, The Tragic Prelude

Like Brown, Rorschach becomes a martyr. Dr. Manhattan disintegrates Rorschach because the latter is determined to reveal to the world that Ozymandias staged an alien attack to end the Cold War by creating a common enemy for humanity to fight. Rorschach would rather die than keep quiet about Ozymandias’s plan.

In “The Abolitionist Imagination,” Andrew Delbanco argues that abolitionism left us a troubling legacy. The trope of the higher law and the abolitionist fervor to defeat evil leaves no room for compromise, negotiation, or gradualism. While the logic of the higher law is inflexible, its content is infinitely flexible. The KKK follow a higher law diametrically opposed to the one cherished by abolitionists, but both groups justify violence for the sake of their cause.

Inspired by Rorschach, the Seventh Kavalry are a fictionalized version of the Klan. The Seventh Kavalry are terrorists who believe they are carrying on Rorschach’s legacy by killing cops. Lindelöf seems to be satirizing misguided fans’ love for Rorschach. This is a world of masks: like super heroes and super villains, the Kavalry are the eerie doppelgangers of the masked cops they fight.

The show’s third episode features a fascinating encounter between Angela Abar, an undercover cop known as Sister Night, who survived an assassination attempt by the Kavalry, and Laurie Blake, who has forsaken her identity as the heroine Silk Specter in favor of becoming an FBI agent on the anti-vigilante task force. Laurie asks Angela, “What’s the difference between a masked cop and a vigilante?” When Angela replies that she doesn’t know, Laurie says, “Me neither.” Laurie has totally disavowed her past as a costumed heroine and now sees masked vigilantes as dangerous, even when their intentions are good.

Race, Space, and Claustrophobia

A number of African American novels set in urban spaces focus on the motif of claustrophobia to convey the effects of racism. Richard Wright’s Native Son, for instance, opens with a rat trapped an killed in the apartment of a black family. The trapped rat serves as an allegory for the novel’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, who is as trapped in the South Side of Chicago as the rat is in his apartment. Bigger frequently laments the feeling of claustrophobia, of having his mobility–both physical and socio-economic–severely restricted by white people. Bigger can only live in certain slums and occupy certain jobs. He is trapped in the ghetto and it enrages him. Similarly, Lutie Johnson, the protagonist of Anne Petry’s somewhat less deterministic novel, The Street, also feels a sense of claustrophobia. She desperately wants to get an apartment on a better street, but she realizes that without substantially more money than she, a single mother, can earn, she will never be able to move to a cleaner, brighter neighborhood. Like Bigger, she also feels trapped, walled-in by inaccessible white people. Interestingly, Helga Crane, the biracial protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand expresses a sense of claustrophobia toward her fellow African Americans. Helga feels ambivalent toward blackness, both attracted to and repelled by it. Helga feels a sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped as a member of a race with which she feels no kinship.

Double Consciousness vs. The Freemasonry of the Race

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois famously described the African American psyche in terms of double consciousness–two warring ideals in one body, yoked together by violence alone. The African self and the American self always in conflict, but desiring to be merged into a single, higher self. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, DuBois’s colleague, James Weldon Johnson, offers a slightly different framework for black experience–the freemasonry of the race. Johnson’s concept implies that blackness consists of a set of secret signs, rituals, and common experiences, much like participation in a society of free masons. Johnson’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, the ex-colored man who narrates the novel, is fair-skinned enough that he eventually chooses to pass as white. This experience leads him sometimes to long for connection with other black people.

Albion Tourgee vs. Booker T. Washington

Tourgee and Washington both emphasize the importance of education in elevating Southern black people during Reconstruction. Much of Tourgee’s Bricks Without Straw revolves around the creation of a school for the black children of Red Wing. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, chronicles his own education at Hampton and his founding of Tuskegee. Tourgee and Washington, however, disagree on the importance of politics. While Washington eschewed a career in politics for one in education, Tourgee emphasizes how white Southerners forced black men out of politics and contested their voting rights. Whereas Tourgee portrays Southern whites as being hostile to black voters and politicians, as well as their white allies, Washington focuses on harmony between the races. For Washington, commercial interdependence, such as when white Southerners buy bricks from Tuskegee, is more essential than political participation.

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