Richard and Mildred Loving are made to feel unwelcome by society. J.N. Martin and T. K. Nakayama (2010) describe how migrants are often made to feel unwanted by host cultures, stating: “[T]he host society sends messages that migrants do not really belong” (326). Despite Mildred not being a “migrant,” she is still considered an “outsider” within the community she lives, Virginia, because of her race. Therefore, Richard and Mildred Loving constantly receive nonverbal communication that their relationship is not condoned by the people in Virginia. In one scene, the Lovings share a kiss after watching a car race. The white men observing them show their displeasure with the kiss by shaking their heads in disapproval. Martin and Nakayama (2010) elaborate that “Stereotyping or prejudice [can] lead to overt nonverbal actions to exclude, avoid, or distance and are called discrimination” (284). The group of white men create physical distance between themselves and the couple by standing on the opposite side of the track. In addition, couples can be made to feel like an outcast because people and/or institutions may, according to Martin and Nakayama (2010), “closely [watch the couple] to see what they are up to” (284). In the movie, this can be seen when the white men closely observe the Loving’s relationship from across the racetrack. Thereby, the white men create an uncomfortable environment that Richard and Mildred must “deal with.” The nonverbal acts that these hegemonic forces display communicates a staunch objection to such interracial coupling.

Furthermore, the dominant power perpetuates its ideology through verbal means. Martin and Nakayama (2010) argue that “those in power consciously or unconsciously, maintain communication systems that reflect, reinforce, and promote their own ways of thinking” (110). For example, Mildred is arrested, and Richard is told he cannot bail her out of jail. He goes back the next day to attempt to bail her out, but once again is told he cannot. After walking out of the jail, Richard is approached by a white police officer, Sheriff Brooks (Marton Csokas), who tries appealing to Richard’s whiteness. The police officer and Richard have a discussion and Richard ultimately confesses Mildred is pregnant. The police officer responds to this by stating: “I’ll throw your ass back in there for that. You know better.” The Lovings threaten the dominant power’s way of doing things by having mixed-race children. Martin and Nakayama (2010) argue that dominant powers have often feared interracial families for the disruption their reproduction could cause – “[interracial] families will produce more children who challenge the current race and gender stereotypes” (407). White men fear interracial relationships because such relationships could cause “the structural barriers of intermarriage [to] erode,” thereby diminishing the validity of the white man’s influence (407). The white authority tries to reinforce their ideology in order to validate their control.

If interracial couples refuse to conform, they pose a threat. Martin and Nakayama (2010) argue, “the dominant power retaliates against this open exposure of the presumed way of doing things” (237). Despite receiving nonverbal cues of disapproval, the Lovings proceed to get married. The normalized culture perceives their defiance as a threat to their system; therefore, the police retaliate by arresting the couple under the pretense that they are not technically married in Virginia. Once arrested, white institutions attempt to reinforce the ideology that interracial marriages are unacceptable an example of “power relations influenc[ing] who (or what) get to claim who (or what) and under what conditions” (Martin & Nakayama, 293). Arresting the Lovings reinforces the idea that white people get to claim marriage as an act only afforded to white couples. If the Lovings wish to be married and share the same bed, they must do so outside the state of Virginia. Non-conforming couples resist normalized ideologies, but white powers often react in destructive and oppressive ways, making it more difficult for such couples to stay together. 

An interracial couple’s ability to function is effectively stopped by such reactions. In Loving, the court declares that, if the Lovings wish to be together, they are not allowed to return to Virginia together for the next 25 years. Virginia’s demands hinder the Loving’s functional fitness, which involves “being able to function in daily life in many different contexts,” by completely eradicating their ability to live within their place of origin (326). Instead of the Lovings “mak[ing] waves,” they non-assertively assimilate into the dominant culture (235). The pressure from the dominant group to conform causes the Lovings to adopt a compromising style of interaction. Martin and Nakayama (2010) state “[In a] compromise style, each partner gives up some of his or her own culturally bound habits or beliefs to accommodate the other person” (409). Rather than staying in Virginia, the Lovings decide to move. Mildred is forced to live apart from her immediate family, stop working, and become the caretaker of the children; however, Richard retains his position as a contractor. Richard is part of the dominant culture in Virginia due to his whiteness, and rather than fighting against Richard’s white culture, Mildred sacrifices her cultural freedom for the benefit of their family. In the film, systems of dominant whiteness ultimately dictate the couple’s interactions. This control puts stress on the idea of interracial coupling and inhibits full interaction with society.

Relationships can cause individuals to lose membership to other groups if they do not conform to the demands of institutional forces. In the movie Loving, the dominant power (white men) exert ideologies of anti-miscegenation towards the central interracial couple in order to maintain their control. They discriminate against Richard and Mildred through nonverbal communication to make them feel unwelcome, causing them to become self-conscious about their interactions. For whiteness to maintain authority, white institutions delimit the contexts in which interracial couples can interact which the Lovings challenge by conceiving children together. To deter more interracial couples from reproducing, racist institutions of dominant whiteness impose their power on the couple and, by preventing them from living their lives unencumbered, portray them as outcasts. The Lovings ultimately comply to this whiteness by allowing the court to decide how and where they can interact with one another.

Works Cited

Doherty, G., Firth, C., Buirski, N., Green, S., Turtletaub, M., Saraf, P. (Producer), & Nichols, J. (Director). (2016). Loving [Motion Picture]. United States of America: Big Beach. Accessed 31 October 2019.

Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2010). Intercultural communication in contexts. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Accessed 17 October 2019. 

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Not only do I think Citizen is simply a beautiful collection of work, but it is also a fantastic pedagogical tool for teaching students the imperatives of race and racial projects. This semester, I’ve been teaching the English department’s 100 level course on Race and Literary Texts. For many of my students, my class is the first time they’ve explicitly discussed race in an academic space. We’ve spent much of the semester discussing the ways that anti-blackness is an ongoing project in the United States. We’ve looked at films such as Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and even The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. I think Citizen has been impactful for connecting the institutional and structural dimensions of racial discrimination to the isolated moments, conversations, and interactions that students see in their own lives.

One of the reasons why I think Citizen is so effective as a teaching tool is because it is a multimedia experience. Claudia Rankine collaborated with her husband John Lucas on a number of  “Situation Videos,” to accompany the text. In the classroom, the situation videos are equally instructive, if not more so. For example, Situation 6 “Stop-and-Frisk” visually and sonically demonstrates how anti-black racism shapes the everyday lives of Black people. In the video, we view two Black young men shopping for clothing. The footage of them trying on clothing is overlaid with red and blue police lights. As viewers watch the Black men move through the store viewing and purchasing items, they also hear police sirens, as well as Rankine reading her poem “Stop-and-Frisk.” Upon showing the video to my students, they told me that they expected to see something much worse in the video, such as a display of police violence, and were surprised that the video simply depicted the young Black men shopping. My students were surprised by the melancholy, monotone tone Rankine employs to recite the words. This wasn’t the affect they expected from a poem detailing a violent encounter with the police. In the short film, they took note of Rankine’s repetition of the lines “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description / because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description” (Rankine 106). All these elements together solidified for my students the ways in which criminalization, policing, and surveillance are integrated into the everyday lives of Black people. As they articulated to me, Situation Video 6 demonstrates that Black people can become subjects of violence at any moment. Our conversation about these elements was incredibly generative.

However, as a Black woman, reading and teaching Citizen is difficult. It’s hard, and it’s wearing. When I read, I feel the narrator’s exhaustion, or, perhaps, become increasingly aware of my own. I find myself attempting to breathe along with the narrator’s every “sigh.” (Rankine 59). I’ve read the book four or five times, and the more I read it, the more I struggle to get through it. The microaggressions described in the book are numerous, yet nearly every situation mirrors moments in my own life. The poems are reminders of the racist actions and comments I’ve received for simply existing in primarily white spaces. Every time I read the book, I’m confronted with just how invisible I can be in many spaces I inhabit. How much anti-blackness I’ve been made to brush off and how much I’ve internalized despite my best efforts.

In reading Citizen, confronting my own deep sadness for the innumerable lives lost due to anti-black violence is unavoidable. Each time I’ve sat down to read the book in full, Rankine’s poem, “July 29-August 18, 2014 / Making Room,” increases in length. This is a poem which ends by repeating “In Memory of,” listing numerous, recognizable names of Black men and women who have been murdered by police. And while this list only consisted of Jordan Russell Davis, Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Michael Brown’s names when I read it in fall 2014, the book has continually been reprinted to include more and more names. When we discussed the poem in class, my students were in awe of the fact that this list now includes over 30 household names. The list of those we must mourn only keeps getting longer.

This time around, the difficulty with reading Citizen is compounded by another anxiety: While the book has been generative and eye opening for some students, I worry that reading the book may be an added burden for my most vulnerable students. I worry that that they too struggle to get through the book. I worry that rather than affirming my Black students and other students of color, reading Citizen instead requires them to confront the racism they experience every day. I worry that while discussing Citizen offers white students an opportunity to exercise and explore their capacity for empathy, it only demonstrates to my Black students insights they already knew.

In my last Broadly Textual post, I began to question how we handle Black trauma inside cinema’s depictions of enslavement. This week, I question the best way to manage and negotiate the circulation of Black trauma in our classrooms. I think that our conversations around Citizen must always keep in mind the intersecting racial and gender dynamics of the classroom. Engaging Citizen requires holding space for our most vulnerable students, without putting them on the spot, or positioning them as objects of study. Teaching Citizen might require us to reach out to students and offer words of encouragement. It might even require sharing our own reservations and struggles with the subject of the text. While I’ve outlined here how Citizen can be an effective means to engage students on the topic of anti-black racism, teaching it involves a certain amount of precarity. While I’m still working out answers to my question, what I do know is that educators should always listen carefully to responses from their students of color, never taking for granted how closely Citizen might mirror their everyday lives.

^[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpREs2WTbWA

^[2] Still from Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’s Situation Video 6, “Stop-and-Frisk” https://vimeo.com/157537847

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 However, in June 2021, at the request of Wright’s estate, the nonprofit Library of America published the novel in full which gives readers a look into circumstances that preceded the protagonist’s escape. He is not simply a mysterious and unnamed man on the run; rather, he is Fred Daniels: a devoted husband and soon-to-be father, a devout Christian, and above all, an innocent man. This full release, titled The Man Who Lived Underground: The Novel,follows Fred’s journey as he flees into the sewers after the police violently coerce a false homicide confession from him. Deprived of light and social contact, Fred’s sensory disorientation opens the possibility for a reevaluation of conventional meaning making systems. The absence of the white gaze allows Fred to occupy and move through otherwise inaccessible spaces such as the vault of an insurance office and behind the counters of a jewelry store. This new mobility reveals the arbitrary nature of socially constructed symbols of value such as money, jewelry, time, and, most centrally, the notion of freedom as an American ideal.

The novel troubles the meaning of freedom, in and of itself a vexed term. Many American studies scholars have worked to complicate abstract understandings of American freedom by tracing its genealogy from the nation’s founding. The possessive individualist conception of freedom is predicated upon racialized, gendered, and classed systems of exclusion and domination that are structurally embedded into our legal system. This leaves some subjects hyper-vulnerable to injustices on both the individual and structural levels. Legally vulnerable subjects are not simply excluded from the protections of the legal system, but rather, as Lisa Marie Cacho argues “form the foundation of the U.S. legal system” and are “imagined to be the reason why a punitive (in)justice system exists” (Cacho 5). That is to say that freedom, as it is understood in the context of the United States, was never meant to be extended to or exercised equally by all citizens. Wright explores the material reality of how freedom comes to be understood by legally vulnerable subjects, such as Fred, whom the law was not created to protect.

 Once he reemerges, Fred implores the officers to see his underground cave papered with money and jewels as proof of his activity underground. Officer Murphy comments that “colored boys sure go off their nut easily,” and Officer Johnson replies knowingly that it is because “they live in a white man’s world” (Wright 154). As Fred frantically tries to get the officers to come underground with him, Officer Lawson shoots him and lets his body fall into the sewer and get swept away by the water, claiming that “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They would wreck things.” (Wright 159). The “things” the officers are bent on protecting are clearly not any kind of justice, but rather the established order of society that is threatened by Fred’s vision of freedom. Executing Fred and relegating him underground puts a stop to the potential for ideas like his to spread.

This is where the narrative ends, and it is usually read as Wright’s eviscerating critique of the structural injustices of society. While it is surely critical of the inequalities embedded into our supposed “justice” system, the ending does not foreclose upon the possibility for change. As Rebecca Fisher writes, Wright attempts to move “the reader toward a sense of moral outrage that would ideally extend beyond the act of reading and compel the reader toward constructive social action” (162). I agree with this reading and want to add that not only does Wright hope for readers to feel pushed towards taking constructive social action, but that they should move forward collectively when confronting systems of power. Fred attempts to confront the legal system alone, as one man with an enlightened vision, which ultimately fails. However, as he established at the beginning of the novel, he is not without kinship networks or community connections. His family, church, and employers, those who would have attested to the police of his character and innocence, may also have been allies in his struggle against such an unjust system. This is not to condemn Fred’s choices, as his trauma and positionality stack the odds so significantly against him in this larger societal conflict. Nor is it to suggest that working collectively is a utopian solution to issues of oppression, violence, and marginalization. The addition of the previously unpublished passages prompts a reconsideration of the entire text as an assertion of Black futurism rather than futility in the face of structural inequality. While these systems of power and domination work to create feelings of isolation and powerlessness, there are ways to work against these aims towards positive social change.

Works Cited

Cacho, Lisa M. Introduction: The Violence of Value. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, by Cacho, New York University Press, New York, 2012, pp. 1-34.

Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge. “Richard Wright’s Poetics of Black Being: Metaphor, Desire and Doing” in Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century, ed. by Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi. Liverpool University Press, 2013, pp.158-176.

Literary Classics of the United States. Note on the Texts. The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel, by Richard Wright, Library of America, 2021, pp. 220-228.

Wright, Richard, and Malcolm Wright. The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel. Library of America, New York, 2021.

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Sharpe’s work is firmly grounded in the Black feminist theoretical tradition as she engages in conversation with Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Claudia Rankine, and Dionne Brand, among others, to lay bare the intricacies of living in the space of the unthought and unremembered. In Chapter 1, “The Wake”, she details the various definitions of the word “wake” and how those definitions permeate black life. The first instantiation of the wake that Sharpe describes is that of the slave ships bound across the Atlantic and what propelled those ships forward: “Racism, the engine that drives the ship of state’s national and imperial project…cuts through all of our lives and deaths inside and outside the nation, in the wake of its purposeful flow” (3). Sharpe at once gestures to the way anti-Black racism operates beyond the boundaries of nation-states and beyond time itself. Particularly within the context of the United States, anti-black racism is not incidental to the country’s founding, but is rather the basis upon which its entire democracy is predicated.

In Chapter 2, “The Ship”, Sharpe uses the documentary film The Forgotten Space (2010) as a touchstone by which to extend her ship metaphor. The ocean acts as the literal and metaphorical space for thinking about a modernity and globalization which, Sharpe argues, cannot be understood without centering the effects of transatlantic chattel slavery. The ship operates in the ocean backdrop as a space where individuals undergo a negative transformation from people to cargo, subject to object. She also introduces her concept of the “Trans*Atlantic” as “that s/place, condition, or process that appears alongside and in relation to the Black Atlantic but also in excess of its currents….to get at something about or toward the range of trans*formations enacted on and by Black bodies” (30). Her play with language is purposeful as she works to reimagine the limits, boundaries, and expectations inherent within language and explore how it can have radical, transformative potential for those occupying that unthought space. Wake work then functions to theorize “the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation, that is, through living them in and as consciousness” (33).  This necessitates reexamining the commonly used disciplinary approaches for working with the archives of slavery and beyond. How does one look at such an archive ethically? When faced with the ongoing disasters of police brutality, various refugee crises, and natural disasters, how do we look without commodifying that pain for our own consumption? Sharpe interrogates the efficacy of memorials for such tragedies and their potential to do wake work. While monuments may be dedicated to those affected by disasters both natural and manufactured, their essence often relegates their subjects squarely to the past. In doing so, the ongoing effects of such events become obscured. These monuments function as commemoration and reparation without needing to contend with the structural inequalities and injustice inherent in their construction.

Grappling with such systemic injustice first necessitates being able to recognize and acknowledge how they may manifest in contemporary contexts. In Chapter 3, “The Hold”, Sharpe traces the genealogies of stop-and-frisk police practice, family detention centers, and the school-to-prison pipeline back to the hold of the slave ship. Again, she emphasizes the role of language in shaping reality as “[the] first language the keepers of the hold use on the captives is the language of violence: the language of thirst and hunger and sore and heat, the language of the gun and the gun butt, the foot and the fist, the knife and the throwing overboard” (70). These violences haunt the lives of Black people living in the diaspora from birth. Partus sequitur ventrem, the slave code that mandated that the condition of slavery passes from mother to child, propagates into the present; Black birth becomes Black death, birthed in the shadow of the slave ship. We must conceive of blackness as “a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made” (76). While this deterioration of language and meaning can be weaponized against Black subjects to render them less than human, it may also open the space for imagining new potentials. 

Chapter 4, “The Weather”, explores some of those potentialities and offers alternative methods for pushing back against the anti-Black structures that shape Black lives today. Sharpe conceptualizes “the weather” as “the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack” (104). Despite such an overwhelmingly negative environment, Sharpe does not resort to pessimism. Rather she notes how surviving in such a hostile environment calls for improvisation and adaptability to resist the push towards premature death. Sharpe calls us to “aspirate” those figures occupying forgotten spaces, to breathe life into them by remembering their names and giving voice to their experiences. Through this practice, we may exercise a form of care for them. Care and remembrance become radical acts in the wake when these experiences of subjection and dehumanization often pass unacknowledged. She also offers Black annotation and redaction as techniques that can be used when approaching archives. She notes that “so much of Black intramural life and social and political work is redacted, made invisible to the present and future, subtended by plantation logics, detached optics, and brutal architectures” (114). Sharpe implores us to look upon archives as actively working on the behalf of those forgotten voices. That is not to say we speculate wildly to fill in all the gaps of the archive, but rather that we try to listen for the silences and let them speak for themselves when supported by the proper context, unencumbered by the pre-scripted narratives of the story of slavery and its afterlives.

Sharpe poetically shifts between the personal and the political, the local and the transnational, to demonstrate how arbitrary those divisions truly are. She asks us to look at these texts and archives as extensions of the people that comprise them, imploring us to engage archives with an ethic of care and empathy. Through this, she asks us to never surrender to the wake’s powerful current.

Works Cited

Sharpe, Christina E. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, Durham, 2016.

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This week, I want to talk about the ways in which history can also be a locus of different types of privilege. Though this might appear counterintuitive to some (how can history be a site of privilege?), I would argue that history is always saturated with various types of privilege and raises significant questions about the function that history serves and in whose interests it is often purveyed. For example, who has the privilege of having a history in the first place? On the flip side, who has the privilege of forgetting (or at least selectively choosing) moments of historical importance?

This has become a particularly pressing question in light of the recent attention being paid to the long history of police violence and brutality against people of color, as well as the deeper, far more insidious racist histories of which said violence is but the most recent manifestation. The protests of Colin Kaepernick and others expose these histories, forcing all Americans to take a piercing look at the ways in which racism and the exploitation of bodies of color has structured and undergirded the entire expanse of American history.

Those who strenuously condemn Kaepernick continue to insist that those who are protesting lack an awareness or a proper appreciation for the sacrifices made by those who have served. Embedded within this criticism is an assumption that somehow those who kneel for the National Anthem are either ignorant or dismissive of a history that should make them proud and willing to uncritically accept American society as it is, rather than dare to raise the specter of criticism.

Naturally, those who make those claims conveniently overlook and ignore the deep roots that make systemic racism and exploitation possible  Just as importantly, these also critiques also overlook the fact that, as Jason Johnson has observed, the song in question (unsurprisingly) contains racist lyrics (that are, it has to be said, frequently not sung during performances). History, in this instance, troubles the very stability that it purportedly supports.

All of which leads me to ask again:  who has the privilege of ignoring history? Who has the ability to pretend that somehow the unpleasant realities of the past several hundred years have not taken place? Who benefits from the ability to pretend that the past is safely buried and has no bearing on the present and the structures that currently impact the daily lives of people everywhere? Who gets to pretend, who is able to pretend, that we somehow live in a perpetual present?

The easy answer, of course, is those who benefit the most from forgetting about the past so that they can go on about their everyday lives as if they do not and have never participated in the racist legacies that remain baked into the collective social, cultural, legal, and political DNA of the United States of America. For them, this colossal act of forgetting is in some sense necessary in order for them to continue going on about their daily lives. Confronting these realities in any meaningful way would, in most cases, simply be too painful, too complex (or so the argument goes) to be adequately addressed.

It is much harder for those who continue to live with the legacies of slavery and genocide that have so profoundly influenced America’s sense of itself to ignore those histories or to pretend that they don’t exist. America’s institutions, its structures, its ways of being are so reliant upon and indebted to a racist and colonialist past that it is hard to imagine an America without them. It is this vast, almost incomprehensible scope and depth that, I suspect, lead to inability of many to even begin to acknowledge, let alone accept, their complicity and their benefit from these histories.

Thus, when I ask my friends and family back home in Appalachia (West Virginia, in particular), about how they think about race and the fact that so many people of color remain systematically cut out of the benefits that American life seemingly offers all of its citizens, they really struggle to understand how the actions and structures of the past continue to exert a smothering pressure on the present. For them, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to think outside of the twinned epistemologies of presentism and individualism that structure their way of understanding and being in the world. For them, they cannot understand how it is that their present position near the bottom of the economic latter constitutes a privilege, nor can they see beyond the fact that their ancestors did not own slaves.

If, as I have repeatedly asserted throughout this month, we are truly invested in making the world a better, more just place for all of its citizens, we must continue to press against and challenge this kind of inherently privileged thinking. We have to recognize and come to terms with the conflicted and painful histories of which we are a part. Continuing to turn a blind eye to the injustices of history and pretending that it hasn’t happened is itself a form of violence, a violence all the more pernicious in that it masks itself as innocence rather than complicity.

As Vann R. Newkirk II remarks in The Atlantic, the recent opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC offers a rare opportunity for America as a whole to meaningfully contend with the painful legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and the other aspects of American history that have proven so intractable in our attempts to make sense of contemporary race relations. While I agree that there is something deeply and powerfully symbolic about erecting a museum devoted to African American history in a city founded upon and built by slave labor, I also think that it will take a great deal more on the part of each and every American citizen to make progress.

It will require frank and uncomfortable conversations within and among our various communities, both in person and in digital spaces. It will require frank and unambiguous acknowledgment and acceptance of the darker parts of history. Going to a museum devoted to the experiences of people of color is definitely an important first step, but it must be followed by an actual change in the way(s) that we collectively think about our past. It will require actual changes in our everyday lived experience and ways of being in the world, actual changes in what we think and how we do it.

I see these posts as one part of the larger cultural conversation. Hopefully, they will resonate with those who, like myself, desire to make the world a better, more just, more peaceful place for everyone.

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What I found most disconcerting about this exchange was the fact that I could not actually think of a singular incident that produced an enhanced awareness.  For an academic who remains committed to political and social justice, this was a startling realization, and I spent many an hour scouring my memory for that elusive moment that I could point to where this consciousness first became viscerally present to me.

Well, as it happened, a few nights later I was pulled over due to turning right on red (when there was a sign forbidding it) and making an illegal U-Turn. I fully expected that the combination of two traffic violations, in addition to the fact that it was 1:30 in the morning, would almost certainly lead to me getting a rather expensive ticket. To my great surprise, however, the cop waved me through without even giving me so much as a written warning. I went on my way, none the worse for the experience.

Now, of course there wasn’t anything particularly extraordinary about this traffic violation. What was extraordinary, at least to me in hindsight, was how much privilege explained the dynamics of this situation and my feelings during it. I could not help thinking:  what if instead of a fairly nondescript white guy I had been a young man of color? Would I have been given such a cursory pass? Would I have even made it out of this encounter alive? I was and am haunted by these questions, precisely because recent events have shown us in no uncertain terms the way(s) in which the legal and justice system implicated in systems of oppression.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you cannot avoid the fact that people of color are exponentially more likely to be murdered by police in the course of routine traffic stops than their white counterparts. Their names are a litany of our collective national shame, and a call to arms for all of those who would like to see this world made safer and more justice for everyone, regardless of skin color:  Sandra Bland was pulled over for failure to signal while changing lanes, was arrested, thrown in jail and ended up dead under mysterious circumstances; Philando Castile was shot in his car while reaching for his identifying information; the list goes on and on.

Even now, weeks later, I am disturbed by the fact that the awareness of my inherent privilege in this incident never even occurred to me until a day later and even then it only happened because my friend had inquired when I became conscious of it. So pervasive was my experience and feeling of privilege that my first response to not getting a ticket was:  “thank goodness I didn’t get an expensive ticket!” rather than “thank goodness I didn’t get shot.” I was not was raised to believe that my life was subject to the whims of a police state intended to continually monitor and discipline bodies that looked like mine. As a young white man, I was never given “the talk” by my parents warning me never to speak back to the police or those in power, to protect myself through silence and docility.

Realizing this was something like a punch in the stomach, one of those deeply unsettling moments when you realize just how much you are embedded in the very systems of oppression and injustice that you have committed your life to ending. (H0w) can one fight against the system from which one stands so much to consciously (and unconsciously) materially benefit?

I can hear some of you asking:  what do we do now with this knowledge that you inhabit a body that has encoded on it certain forms of legal and social privilege? How do we take this kind of self-reflexion and turn it into something politically effective?

Well, for one thing, we should all be more self-aware of the various types of privilege that we occupy and how this affects the way that we live in the world and engage with other bodies in space. By becoming more aware of your own position(s) of privilege, it becomes more possible to view the ways in which other bodies are not granted that kind of power merely by the way that they appear in the world.

For another, we should all be supporting Black Lives Matter. This is one of the most crucial and needed political movements of our era, and when some attempt to mitigate its effectiveness by shouting “All Lives Matter” in response, we need to explain to them why such a gesture effaces the real-life disparities in power, in violence, and in lived experience that black and brown bodies face on a daily basis. We cannot afford to let vital political movements and gestures be drowned out by the power that seeks to silence them.

It’s all too easy to pay lip service to an increased awareness of privilege and how it works in the world. It’s substantially harder, though, to really take a hard look in the mirror and recognize, despite how difficult your life may seem, the systems of privilege that allow you to take certain aspects of life for granted. And it’s even harder to actually begin to change our everyday lived realities in order to effect larger political and social change. However, if we want to make this world a better place, if we truly believe in a future that is better than the present, then recognizing and deconstructing our own privilege is an important, nay a vital, first step.

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I’m interested in this kiss not for the celebrity gossip, but because I see it an important piece of the current conversation about racism in the United States—and most importantly, as an important site for thinking about how to think through the intersectionality of oppression.

Walter Scott’s murder two weeks ago should ameliorate any reticence about the reality of violence against black men. As I listened to the NPR story, they announced that they were going to play an audio clip of the protesters, whom I fully expected to chant something about the police, or “black lives matter.” Instead, they chanted a different activist slogan and hashtag: All lives matter. This particular chant rose to prominence in response to the slogan “black lives matter” as a way to call attention to the broad oppression that marginalized populations face. In its brief life, “all lives matter” has received due criticism from private bloggers all the way through Judith Butler, who sums up the critique with succinctness that should shock anyone who has ever read Gender Trouble:

It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter— which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve.

To chant “all lives matter” in response to what is perhaps the most blatantly obvious in a series of state-perpetuated crimes that specifically target black men fundamentally misses the point: that these murders happen because black lives are readily swept aside in the flows of power that permeate American culture. Affirming life through mutual respect (a la Appiah) is a perfectly laudable ethics, but it does not address the tangible legal, institutional, and cultural issues that contribute to the systematic assault on black bodies. “All lives matter” is a positive message—but it but it offers a philosophical abstraction in response to a political problem.

More importantly, “all lives” flattens bodies through equivalence. In other words, in its attempt to find commonality, “all lives” erases difference. Cut back to Drake and Madonna. As the internet is wont to be, the internet was very confused about how to respond. Of course, many people suggested that Drake enjoyed it. Drake himself even posted an image on instragram, with the caption “Don’t misinterpret my shock!! I got to make out with the queen.” The picture Drake chose offers a brief moment that appears consensual in an event that seemed predominantly nonconsensual.

Some objected that Drake’s reaction implied that Madonna is disgusting, and so reinforced the idea that women cease to be attractive after they reach a certain age. The Huffington Post pointed toward John Travolta’s sexual harassment of Scarlett Johansson at the Oscars, and asked why Madonna received less criticism than Travolta. All of these responses are part of the same discourse: a discourse that flattens black bodies into mere intensities of violence and sexuality, and through that flattening, dismisses their bodies as bodies that do not matter.

Madonna’s kiss is hardly the first direct exploitation of black musicians by white musicians in recent (let alone longer) memory. I don’t mean the exploitation of culture, like Iggy Azalea’s bizarre code-switching (which Saturday Night Live fabulously lampoons), or the fact that every song Meghan Trainor sings is a poor rendition of doo-wop. I mean the exploitation of black bodies as sex-objects—the transformation of black bodies into just lumps of sexual matter. Think Miley Cyrus’s VMA performance, or Taylor Swift’s music video for “Shake it off” (intentionally not linked to images), which transform the black background dancers into mere ciphers for sex.

And here, we come to the sticking point. The Huffington Post’s article points fingers at an apparent gender bias, and asks: what if Madonna were a man, and Drake a woman? This is precisely the wrong question, driven by a similar impulse to “all lives matter.” Contrary to the impulse behind the discourses of sexual assault that have circulated around Madonna and Drake, one sexual assault does not equal all sexual assaults. Feminists, Madonna included, have struggled against the physical and emotional violence patriarchy directs at them; but that violence is fundamentally different than the violence directed at black men and women (which, of course, fundamentally differ from one another).

Madonna’s kiss was not sexual assault in the same way John Travolta’s kiss was: it was sexual assault in a different way. Violence against black men like Walter Scott is not the same as violence against black women, or Hispanic men or women: these violences differ. To argue that people should or should not be more or less upset because Madonna is a woman misses the critical intersection of race and gender. Drake is not merely a man; he is a black man in a culture that insists on coding black bodies as objects of pure violence and sex. Where a kind of pop-liberalism draws equivalence through common struggle, intersectionality underlines the political and pragmatic differences in the application of oppression.

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Yet, she was a homemaker from a nondescript town in rural America. Right in the thick of things at one of the nation’s largest universities, a colleague complimented me on my perfect English pronunciations and diction. Of course a compliment is a good thing—not when it comes with the hint of unmasked surprise though. It was almost unbelievable to him that my spoken English was so vastly different from The Simpsons’ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. I get it though. I mean how can an ethnic man who speaks perfect English be considered “exotic”? There needs to be at least the slightest hint of an accent.

Pictured: A fictional character

Things get more bizarre about halfway across the world or around 8,500 miles away from here. When I was packing my bags to travel the said 8,500 miles from India to the US, a very well-meaning relative of mine quipped, “Please make sure you shower every day. It’s cold up there, so the people don’t shower every day, and they start to stink. Please don’t fall into that mold.” Imagine how surprised she would be if she visited me here and realized that the only ones who don’t shower every day are my new neighbor, my big fat cat and her husband.

However, if you thought my well-meaning relative had bizarre notions, wait till you hear what my other well-meaning relatives’ notions were. Apparently, white girls wear short dresses and lure the good Indian boys, so at no cost was I to fall into their “trap.” I am to go back and marry a good Indian girl who wears a sari and shows off her midriff because, God knows, a woman’s bare legs are more tempting and scandalous than her bare midriff.

The fact is though, if you and I sat down to analyze the psyche of my well-meaning relatives as well as that good American lady and that good white lad, we will realize that they are all inherently nice people who are ignorant of the ways of people who exist miles away from them. They were brought up on cultural stereotypes, compounded with their own embellished imaginings of what the far-east or the far-west might be like. We could shame them or reprimand them for their statements, but we know that that’d be futile. As the small community of students who have the privilege of soaking in the culture of two very different worlds, it is our duty to educate them.

We could politely tell the good ole lady that what she was asking me was mildly racist. We could tell my colleague that even though sometimes art imitates reality often it is a mere exaggeration. And we could tell my well-meaning relatives that their regressive opinions about the west could well be the reason of the growing rape culture in their own nation. It is important to use our knowledge as the ‘glocal’ citizens of this generation to engage in these discussions. It is important to help them realize the need and reality of having bridged the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ It is important to initiate them into cultural and racial sensitivity that us as graduate students have had the privilege of learning and understanding. It is important to help them help us make this world a better place. After all, isn’t that what all of us as a global community eagerly want?

Images from Wikipedia and http://www.missmalini.com/

Aishik Barua is a 2nd-year MBA student concentrating on media marketing. He is particularly in love with TV shows (from The Sopranos to The Flash), books (from The Little Prince to the Harry Clifton series) and a myriad number of modern era conspiracy theories. When he is not screwing his eyes at some website’s Google Analytics page, he could be found doodling with his sketch pencils, cooking a new dish or simply engaging in general goofiness.

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Menhaj Huda’s 2006 film Kidulthood is often identified as one of the first hoodie films.

Hoodies are usually working-class teen delinquents who wear hooded sweatshirts. During the first decade of the 2000s, hoodies became prevalent in a variety of forms of British popular culture. There were frequent news stories citing hoodies as a consequence and contributor to “Broken Britain,” a cultural discourse that maintains that Britain is more lawless, chaotic, and dangerous than ever before. Cinemas screened films like Kidulthood (Menhaj Huda, 2006) and Harry Brown (Daniel Barber, 2009), while various television channels produced and aired programs like Misfits (2009-2013, E4) and the reality series Kick Ass Kung Fu (2013, Sky1 HD), wherein a Shaolin monk trained hoodie-clad teens from “bad areas” to channel their aggression and stop being “rude waste[s] of space,” as one of the show’s hoodies put it. Even Piers Morgan produced and directed a documentary on hoodies for Sky1, Hoodies Attack (2005). At least one London gym began offering a much-publicized “Chav Fighting” class wherein middle class customers could learn to put the world to rights, while the Thames Valley Police had their officers swap their uniforms for hoodies and tracksuit pants in an attempt to blend in and stop anti-social behavior (though the officers did not wear baseball caps, which were thought to make them look “too American”).

Like the Teddy Boys, punk rockers, and, most recently, the club kid ravers, hoodies are set apart from so-called normal society. The Teddy Boys’ association with the rise of American rock and roll, and their reported rioting and dancing in theaters’ aisles during screenings of Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955), positioned them as importing the dangerous violence of American teens via the bad influence of American rock and roll. In particular, their sartorial borrowings from the African-American community set out their cultural borrowings as dangerous not only because of their Americanized nature, but because of their origins in communities of color.

Source: Flashbak

Hoodies are set apart by their mode of dress (face-obscuring hooded sweatshirts), their musical preferences (most often assumed to be rap and hip-hop), and an anti-authoritarian attitude that sometimes places them on the wrong side of the law. And, much like the moral panic surrounding the Teddy Boys in the 1950s, fear of hoodies belies not only a fear and distrust of young people but a fear of the Americanization of British culture.

Still from Johannes Roberts’s hoodie horror film F (2010)

Hoodie teens are seen as having brought American gang culture, as promulgated by American rap and hip hop and American films, to the streets of the UK. In particular, the UK garage music scene was seen as, in the words of political and social commentator Deborah Orr, a “bad-seed” offshoot of UK youth culture that is heavily influenced by US gangsta rap culture (or at least seen by middle class commentators as heavily influenced by gangsta rap). Of course, UK garage music, because of its perceived links to US gangsta rap culture, made an easy scapegoat, and condemning UK garage for promoting violence was a way to more implicitly condemn the working class urban populations and racial and ethnic minorities who listened to UK garage.

Hoodie horror films often signal this link between hoodies and Americanization through rap-heavy soundtracks or having the evil hoodies listen to or perform rap in the diegesis. For example, in James Watkin’s Eden Lake (2008), the hoodie gang brings a boom box to the beach and plays rap music; this music plays at a lower level of the sound hierarchy, just loud enough to act as a menacing, unintelligible buzz that haunts the scene and foreshadows their coming attack on the middle class protagonists Jenny and Steve.

The imagery of hoodie horror mirrors the aural distinctions between the Americanized hoodies and their respectable victims. In this image, the trailer serves as a clear visual delineation of the line between acceptable, middle-classness, as represented by Jenny on the right, and the film’s villains, on the left: the unacceptable, Americanized, working-class hoodies who antagonize and torture Jenny and her boyfriend throughout the film.

These links to Americanization make it even easier for the media (as well as some filmmakers and audiences) to Other hoodies; they are not only working-class and young, but they can be seen as more influenced by American and Americanized culture than respectable middle-class Brits. Of course, this Othering places an additional mark upon hoodies of color, who are already also Othered by their racial and/or ethnic status.

Lindsey Decker is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate studying Film and Television in the Department of English.  Her dissertation examines questions of transnational cinema in self-reflexive British horror films.

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Who doesn’t love the booty?**

Whether we’re talking about Miley Cyrus’s twerking, Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea’s “Booty,” Kim Kardashian’s “break the internet” photos, Rihanna and Shakira’s “Can’t Remember to Forget You,” or even Taylor Swift crawling between the legs of her mostly black twerking dancers (whose faces we never see) in “Shake It Off,” the discourse of the “booty” is currently almost everywhere in mainstream American culture. One half expects to see mainstream television programs take up the issue in a bid for ratings. Next week on Modern Family: the token angsty teen girl is even more angsty than usual because her step-grandmother has a better butt than she does.

Image credit: DeviantArt user A-Little-Kitty

Vogue has declared, in fairly jejune fashion, that the booty obsession is just the fulfillment of discourses we weren’t ready for 13 years ago — we weren’t “ready for the jelly” in 2001 when Destiny’s Child came out as “Bootylicious,” but we are ready now that J.Lo and white rapper Iggy Azalea are asking us to “Throw up your hands if you love a big booty.” Nicki Minaj is the fulfillment of the promise of J.Lo’s green Versace dress.

Others, including Yomi Adegoke and Susana Morris (of Auburn University, and co-founder of the generally awesome Crunk Feminist Collective) have discussed the booty obsession as cultural appropriation of what has been a desirable body type within black American culture. This appropriation was made perhaps most clear when Miley Cyrus, who has been donning the trappings of black rachet culture for several years now, photoshopped Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” cover photo, literally whitening Minaj’s skin and replacing Minaj’s face with her own. (The racism in the Kim Kardashian photos is also strikingly baldfaced.) The racial appropriation within “booty culture” is more than troubling, particularly during a time when the most pervasive images of black people within mainstream culture are photos of men like Michael Brown and Eric Garner, or the young Cleveland boy with a toy gun who was shot seconds after police arrived on scene. What has come to be thought of as the “black body type” in our culture has become acceptable and celebrated in the mainstream, but this (and other) cultural mainstreaming has not affected the systemic racism that oppresses black Americans. Mainstream culture incorporates and makes equally-available the body type without truly incorporating or making equal the bodies themselves.

Also, the sudden pervasiveness of “booty culture” seems suspicious given how it has taken focus off of the previous, somewhat overlapping female pop star controversy: contemporary feminism. Regardless of whether we personally think Beyonce‘s, Taylor Swift‘s, Miley Cyrus’s, Pharell‘s, Rihanna’s, or Nicki Minaj‘s feminism is substantively advancing equality or just substantively cashing in on millennial desire for commodity activism, conversations were taking place. There were daily opportunities to discuss *feminisms* and break out of the post-feminist backlash discourse of “one man-hating sexually-repressed feminism only for women who are just angry that they can’t consume their way to pretty.” The everydayness of pop feminism, and yes, the trendiness, created space for these conversations to be framed as relevant and timely.

Over the summer, articles were calling 2014 the “year of pop feminism.” Now, it is the year of the booty. Yes, the booty obsession has emphasized “different body types.” But the focus remains on the body. For women, the body is an asset, a marketable commodity, but that also makes women, to some extent, an object, playing into the traditional “to-be-seen”-ness, the “desire to be desired” (to use Mulvey and Doane’s phrases).

Thus, Beyonce’s last album, which contains a voiceover with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explaining the definition of feminism, discursively becomes the album wherein she started a song with the lyric “Let me sit this ass on you.” The conversation returns to its cultural comfort zone — not how we could achieve gender equality so neither women NOR men are disciplined or punished into outmoded and damaging gender roles, but how women can empower themselves by, in bell hooks’ words, playing into “tropes of the existing, imperialist, white supremacist, patriarchal capitalist structure of female sexuality.”

** This post contains no photos of booty. The writer does not wish to participate in the continued objectification of other women by including gifs or images that turn those women into faceless body parts or mark out their bodies as exchangeable.

Lindsey Decker is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate studying Film and Television in the Department of English.  Her dissertation examines questions of transnational cinema in self-reflexive British horror films.

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