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the lessons that an institution imagines it is imparting—or the ones that we imagine the institution imagining it is imparting—like racism is bad or look how far we’ve come—is not the only, or even, perhaps, the primary, lesson or note to take hold. The imagination of whiteness is also at work, undoing the lesson, restructuring, and constantly renewing antiblack racism. These ordinary notes multiply.
There is the violence of the baying crowd and there is the violence of reasonableness, each part necessary to maintain something called an all-white neighborhood. The Bakers “faced three years of constant terroristic harassment and racial violence while raising their two children.”14 In 1966 they sold the house and moved to the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia.
To move visitors, these sculptures could not be adults. The curatorial decision had followed the affective principles that coalesce around Black presence, in which adults won’t generate sympathy in the past as they don’t into this future. Adults are reminders of the stakes, the culpability, the debt, the entanglements, and the ongoing brutality of slavery’s afterlives.
“What is obscene [here] is not a relation to The Past, but the dishonesty of that relation as it would happen in our present. The trivialization of slavery—and of the suffering it caused—inheres in that present. The ‘past’ fails to stay in the past.
“What needs to be denounced here to restore authenticity is much less slavery than the racist present within which representations of slavery are produced.”21 The “past” fails to stay in the past.
How does one come to terms with a brutal imagination by engaging and representing (over and over again) the materialization of that imagination? To stand in Gates’s and Stevenson’s “I,” “we,” “us,” and “our” requires a certain innocence and belief in, as well as a commitment to, reforming the nation. Entering this space, one is asked to assume a certain position; asked to embrace memorial narratives that offer Black suffering as a pathway to knowledge, national and “racial” healing, reparation, and reconciliation; asked to embrace a narrative that acknowledges violence only to frame it as
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“We” are not approaching healing; nor should “we” be reconciled.
In the face of the murders of Black people, murders that endlessly repeat, how can one presume, still, that there is an “us” and a “we” that are in something together? This register assumes that “we” are all in the world in the same way, that we experience suffering on the same plain, that we can be “repaired” in the same way, that the structures, the architectures of violence and of affect, reach us in the same ways.
The architectures of violence fracture we; affect does not reach us in the same ways.
One time had been enough to never forget, and watching them (hearing them) successively, spliced together as a long Black death made no new revelations. It compelled no new understandings, forced no new action. It renewed traumas.
Spectacle is not repair.
Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure.
How many more lookings? “[A]ll them beatings and killings wasn’t nothing but sex circuses, and all them white peoples, mens, womens, and childrens crowding around to see…”28
to look into other people’s faces for your therapy is a dangerous proposition.
The language of the whistle at Angola echoes the language of the whip in chattel slavery, echoes in the language of the rifle in Alfred, Georgia, in Morrison’s Beloved. “All forty-six men woke to rifle shot. All forty-six.”
The echoes of history. We are all an echo of something else.
I do not reply to her because with her apology, she tries to hand me her sorrow and whatever else she is carrying, to super-add her burden to my own. It is not mine to bear. I have my own sorrows.
In “The Cruelty Is the Point,”38 Adam Serwer,
They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.”
“hatred is learned in the context of love.”42
What if the project that white people took up was to locate each of the white people who appear in the crowds of those lynchings, those who posed for photographs and those others who appear in the background? What if their project was to identify them and their families and to link their present circumstances to the before of those photographs and the after? That is, what if the work was to draw a line or to map new or continued wealth, accumulation of property and status, access to education and health to those mass murders—a Legacy of Lynching Participants database—that would join the past
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What if white visitors to a memorial to the victims of lynching were met with the enlarged photographs of faces of those white people who were participant in and witness to that terror then and now? What if they had to face themselves? Might that not be a different endeavor? Might that not hit a different note?
In Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, when Jessica Marie Johnson
Marie Ursule walks with a limp, her leg drags, and still, she covers considerable distances at night in order to gather curare to fulfill the destruction of the slaveowners, in order to send her daughter Bola, her one vanity, into a space that is something like freedom. In their act of mass suicide, Marie Ursule holds her comrades, the women and men who together make up the Convoi Sans Peur, comforts them, steels them, in their last ragged breaths.
They embodied the knowledge that in every moment not everything could be claimed by them, but neither could everything be claimed from them.
Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.61 TONI CADE BAMBARA
Knowing that every day that I left the house, many of the people whom I encountered did not think me precious and showed me so, my mother gave me space to be precious—as in vulnerable, as in cherished. It is through her that I first learned that beauty is a practice, that beauty is a method, and that a vessel is also “a person into whom some quality (such as grace) is infused.”
I was a vessel for all of my mother’s ambitions for me—ambitions that found their own shapes.
birthdays always included gifts for the body, gifts for the mind, and gifts for the soul. The mind and the soul came together in books:
My mother gave me space to dream. For whole days at a time, she left me with and to words, curled up in a living room windowsill, uninterrupted in my reading and imagining other worlds.
That window was my loophole of retreat—
Part of the work of white supremacy and antiblackness is to mire us in the same conversations, at the same junctures, in reference to our lives;
Time collapses in on itself; it is not linear; it is a boomerang.
Bonnie Honig outlines when she tells us that to care is “to cultivate anticipation of another world and to live now dedicated to the task of turning this world into a better one.”
My mother survives to become my mother.
elegance is not the province of leisure or the domain of wealth; it is not fashion; it is the persistence of style. He could never imagine nor see the sapeurs of Brazzaville and Kinshasa.
I cannot tell you how moving this is. You describe a mother who had a life in the world, friends who came to visit—these are things that I did not experience with her while my father was alive.
Who is the version of my mother i didnt know? Was she happy? Did she have lots of friends?
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature,
Perhaps brutality enables one to recognize what tenderness is.”142
Harriet Jacobs’s Loophole of Retreat.
What are the angles and dimensions of Black freedom? What is a Black/African sustaining architecture? Where are those coordinates on a map? How do we break them? Make them?
“We arrived spectacular”
Gaze A set of viewing relations that refuses to reduce individuals to the status of objects to be consumed. A practice of looking that bears witness to the simultaneous precarity and possibility of Black life.
So much of Black life and work and resistance goes missing. Black people work to hold all of this information in our heads, oftentimes unbolstered by institutions, oftentimes against such institutions’ purposeful forgetting. We have to function as a living library: as an institution.
A word might hold you close when the world does not,
Ishiguro’s vast imagination utterly falters when it encounters blackness. And he is not alone.
Bessie Head’s A Question of Power.”
“Beauty is not uncomplicated … beauty is the ability to see everything; to confront everything.”
visual and sonic Black aesthetic of care that is subtended by regard.
Or maybe she understood that the kind of comfort I meant was that those books were full of complicated feelings and the resolve to live in them.
What these books share is that they produced in me the feeling that I needed.
