and now have some (Black) Rage
aight so I started reading this book. Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits, written by Too Black and Rasul A. Mowatt. Me and the homie are reading it together actually, over the next few weeks, so I might keep circling back to and citing it for the next chunk of time cause whewwwww
yeah this is one of those works that reassure me that I’m not out here completely unhinged in my analysis and in my reactions to ah recent developments in the world
or at the very least it reassures me that I’m the right kind of crazy (especially irt to what I’m tryna do with the rest of this life while I got it)
This upsurge in Black Rage plagued scores of cities across the United States. One pacifying solution was the creation of Black Lives Matter (BLM) murals in various downtowns . . . . Gullibly following in Bowser’s duplicitous footsteps, Indianapolis and a multitude of frenzied cities across the country organized their own BLM mural, recruiting Black artists to participate. . . . Unfortunately, we Black artists were like the public art used to beautify a blighted ‘hood, so city planning (gentrification) could push out the undesirables. Here, Black art done by Black artists, whether intentionally or not, had helped push out Black Rage. . . .
see and THAT’S why……………trxmp dem making DC paint over that Black Lives Matter plaza/street mural or whatever didn’t……move me??? yes it was a clear statement being made that the administration does not think black lives matter but we already knew that, just like we know that’s the main reason his voters voted for him, but also I mean liiiiike…………amerikkka as a whole don’t think black lives matter beyond the labor they provide (physical emotional psychological metaphysical spiritual libidinal) to nonblacks, sooooooo………
but that stupid street painting wasn’t really FOR black people either, how have Black DC residents’ lives improved since then?? that painting was meant to shut us up and get us out the streets and back into our ~place~
trxmp removing that shit was fundamentally an inter-racist community beef imo
[also apologies for the lack of page numbers cited, for some reason my pdf copy doesn’t have page numbers in it at all womp womp]
Honestly, this dumbfounding phenomenon had happened multiple times in my lifetime. It happened in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown when some activists arose from Ferguson as national icons of the Democratic Party, while several local ones died from question able causes. It happened when former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick protested police brutality in 2016. First, he flat out sat during the National Anthem; then, he compromised by kneeling instead of sitting; next, it became a strawman conversation about patriotism; after that, it was about Kaepernick getting a job; finally, rapper Jay Z decided “we’ve moved past kneeling”; and in the end, we got a Dr. Dre-led Super Bowl Halftime Show performance for all our Black Rage. It happened during the 2020 NBA bubble when NBA players threatened a league-wide strike after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Instead, the 44th President intervened to shut down the strike and help LeBron James push his “More Than a Vote” campaign.
What was happening both at home and across the United States began to look like a formula akin to money laundering. Through repression and bribery, Black Rage was the dirty money being cleaned from a threat to the State — into a commodity that served it. It looked as if the Black execs getting promotions, Black celebrities receiving new branding deals, and local Black artists gaining exposure — all over top the graves of mostly dead poor Black males — were the mules for the fronts of White capital, relocating the site of struggle from State violence to Black elite careerism.
Therefore, this is not a book promoting a trauma bonding escape route to some bourgeois Black Joy nor a ploy to seek White liberal pity. This is a book that attempts to form a theory to comprehend how the Black Rage we feel after watching another “nigga get killed”, as well as all the other death-breeding forms of oppression that invoke a similar Rage, is weaponized against us — often without us even noticing.
(god “death-breeding” is such a great term)
and in THIS moment not only has the Black Rage of 2020 dissipated but so has the pacifying white capital, all them lil jobs and fellowships and chairs and grants and gigs that were hastily pulled out of capital/ism’s ass to keep the niggas off the warpath, yeah they’re all getting defunded and pink slip’d and quietly let go and “reconsideration of our goals and objections”-ed, so all that careerism for what exactly, because Black Rage is just that terrifying because of what it can bring about - black liberation, and once Too Black (what a NAME) and Mowatt started talking about how Black Rage cannot be managed I remembered this bit of writing from Frank Wilderson that really just rocked me out my socks when I first read it many years ago:
Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a “program of complete disorder.” One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one's politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down. . . .
There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself: no one, for example, has ever been known to say ‘gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all.’ But few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness — and the state of political movements in America today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: ‘gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all.’
“The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal.” Frank B Wilderson III Social Justice; 2003; 30, 2; Criminal Justice Periodicals pg. 18—27; p. 25—26. https://ill-will-editions.tumblr.com/post/122612851859/the-prison-slave-as-hegemonys-silent-scandal
black liberation, i.e. the creation of a world where black love can flourish, back to Too Black and Mowatt:
Black Rage won’t pick up the assault rifle for a parade and rally, march. Black Rage won’t develop clever chants and vibrant posters, to march. Black Rage won’ts it on a panel or hold a microphone, to march. There is no stage for Black Rage. Black Rage if it goes some where meaningful will have to stock pantry shelves, and read to children so that they can finally learn to read, pitching tents to provide an inadequate shelter when other types of shelter are desired but resources are limited, delivering food five days a week to elders who may not be alive the next time you are making your rounds.
cause Black Rage is grounded in Black Love, at the end of the day. and there’s an implicit acknowledgement of this fact by the state when you think about how Black Love was (and still is) regulated or outlawed entirely neither Black Rage nor Black Love can freely exist under the State, which, you know, yes another reason to get rid of the State if not the PRIMARY one
[also: I think Black Love is stronger than Black Joy and that’s why one is one sloganable than the other imho]
I’m still early in the book but the questions that Too black and Mowatt are pushing me to contemplate include: so then what happens when we stop showing up for panels and promotions and start showing up for each other? What does the egoic work of decolonization look like? what happens if we remove Fred Hampton’s words from the archive and turn them into a guiding ethos: "I'll live for the people, I'll work for the people, I'll die for the people, because I LOVE the people"?
Black Rage is grounded in Black Love though. I think love is stronger than joy.
And so, with this, it is important to understand that Black Rage is borne of love and not anger, per se. Because the anger is not about what happens to you. The outlets are not about what needs to change in your life. Black Rage is about looking out in to the world and seeing what is happening to those like you, those with you, and more importantly using yourself as a barometer, those worse off than you. The enough is enough is of watching the whipping of the other. The enough is enough is of hearing the cries of the other. The enough is enough is of not wanting oppression to exist anymore, anywhere, anyhow, and in anyway.