For those outside of reality, coonery exists as a tight fitting hat.
By Don Allen
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” becomes more
timely and relevant in 2015 than ever before with the talk about the New Black.
Hip Hop music artist Pharrell, interviewed by Oprah said, "The New Black doesn't blame other races
for our issues.” Then, one of the world's most successful musicians, said to
Oprah, the billionaire queen of the world. "The New Black dreams and
realizes that it's not pigmentation: it's a mentality and it's either going to
work for you or it's going to work against you. And you've got to pick the side
you're going to be on."
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Pharrell lays bare huge blind spots in his cognitive
thinking of picking the side you are going to be. Choice and the operant
construction of race, in step with severe structural violence for those who do
not have it like the Pharrell (money, fame, women and prestige), is the
spectacle for those on the outside looking in can only dream of obtaining,
which makes Pharrell’s statements about the New Black even more arguable. Pharrell's comments are ultimately folly to
people who do not fit in with his narrow ideas. He misses the point that “black
outsiders” exist.
Spillers thoughts on the erasure of blackness, as it
“inscribe[s] ‘ethnicity’ as a scene of negation,” through the construction of a
binary opposition between “white” (or normalized American) and “black” family
structures is a point that must be considered as fact. In the analysis of any blind extension of blackness,
we (scholars) must address statements from the people who perpetrate unoccupied materialism as a platform for the most
absurd rhetoric.
In Spillers feminist-focused argument, the road of
identification is shrouded and unclear: To her point, we (Blacks), are not in
control of our identity, but assigned to an infrastructure by historical
placement. “Embedded in a bizarre axiological ground, they demonstrate a sort
of telegraphic coding; they are markers so loaded with mythical prepossession
that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come
clean. In that regard, the names by
which I am called in the public place render an example of signifying property
plus. In order for me to speak a truer
word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated
meanings, made in excess over time, assigned by a particular historical order,
and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness,” (67).
Rapper/actor Common fell into the same trap as Pharrell, while
discussing the legacy of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and the current
tensions in an interview with John Stewart. Common said, “We all know there’s
been some bad history in our country. We know that racism exists,” the star
conceded, before adding, “I’m…extending a hand. In addition, I think many
generations and different cultures are saying ‘Hey, we want to get past this.
We have been bullied and we have been beat down, but we do not want it anymore.
We’re not extending a fist and saying, ‘Hey, you did us wrong.’ It is more like
‘Hey, I am extending my hand in love. Let us forget about the past as much as
we can, and let us move from where we are now. How can we help each other? Can
you try to help us because we’re going to help ourselves, too.’ That’s really
where we are right now.”
Again, Common presents a gaping blind spot in not
understanding America is fixed. We can access Spillers and her argument in reflecting
back on its major points. It leaves us
with the challenging supposition that maybe the ways in which historically gender
and race has been configured for black men and women through slavery and its
aftermath will always be a part of the constructed identity by the dominant
white patriarchal structure. We (Blacks) sit outside of a dominant “American
grammar.”
The so-called legitimacy of white, normative gender
constructions as potentially radical ways of re-conceptualizing what it means
to be a man or woman, black or white, rather than banishing the “illegitimacy”
of black family structures as lacking something fundamentally in the American
landscape.
Works Cited
Spillers,
Hortense J. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book."
Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64-81. Print.
References
Stewart, John. “The John Stewart Show”. 2015.
Winfrey, Oprah. “The Oprah Show”. 2015.
