'A Defense of Blackness As Drag, In Passing'
W.S. Paul Jackson |Aug 23.2016| 5:02 CST
Blackness and the will to organize around Blackness as a performative identity, as a vast and loosely related set of shared experiences, and as a material political culture, as the historical consequences of people’s resistances and survival is not problematic, even if it is employed, utilized, weaponized, or analyzed problematically.
Blackness does not belong to those who identify it, identify with it, nor to those who reject it. Blackness as a blank canvas on which to re-create lost realities, lost wealth, lost questions, lost trains of historical, cultural, and creative thought cannot be possessed lest the possessor is willing to also be possessed. Blackness as construct, concept, and creative space is not so much in our care as we are in its.
Blackness is not carried on the body, but is a means by which bodies manage to carry themselves, beginning with interminable realities and materialities about the political and economy space in which we’ve come to be. Blackness is what happens when we will to be, whilst the world wills that we not. Blackness is a self-determination, resting on ancient over-comings, while conceptually always already starting from scratch.
Blackness is drag. Blackness is a drag in which those who so choose are momentarily empowered, temporarily liberated, and permanently energized to persist in being their true selves, for themselves, and for those others they willfully or unconditionally love.
Blackness is performative. Blackness is conceptual. Blackness is creative. Blackness is elastic. Blackness is undefinable. Blackness is merely a conceptual space that takes dank and near demolished spaces– project buildings, abandoned buildings, whole ghettos, dead-end streets, viaducts dripping rusty muck, broken down playscapes, Basketball courts without nets, inner-tubes all the way from the Caribbean, cleaning jobs on the Upper East Side, busted up warehouses that can still accommodate turntables and speakers, religions that contradict themselves, storefront buildings, empty lots– and makes spaces for individuals who have been violently defined and confined by the state and its supportive society, space for those people to breathe at last and even sometimes at once.
Who dares to contest or problematize that?
Again, Blackness is performative. Blackness is conceptual. Blackness is creative. Blackness is elastic. Blackness is undefinable. Blackness is of course constructed in many ways for different positions and purposes. Blackness is always already contestable and personal and political and in the making, in progress, in process.
And yet, so is the ‘agent’, the 'actor’, the 'individual’, the 'self’. And so, Blackness has been so helpful to so many actors, individuals, and selves as they seek to become. Blackness has the thankless job of being both invisible as an inspirational catalyst when in it our breathtaking individualities we find and yet being totally to blame under the hyper-visibility of erratically percussive spotlights when we are smushed down as nameless numbers under the standard issued boot of the local PD.
Many have pushed beyond Blackness as an essential-ness or a defined or even definable Being. Many have insisted that it is now permanent. I see the merits and limits to both understandings. But none have given it the intimate analysis that it deserves in actually saying the simple, “I’ve lived around people who are treated like me, I’ve lived with people who treat people like me the same as me for being who we are in their eyes, and I know that for me to be treated better, people like me must be treated better too.” We declare this candidly not because we trace to the same tribe or because we listened to all the same music, not because no one ever questioned our Blackness, but simply because all questions about our Blackness or our basic being came back to the enduring question– “Who are you and why do you matter to me”– and such a question is only possible in a humanist modernity where “all are created equal” for those who are excluded from “all”. We understand Blackness as that contestable site of impossible tension in racial modernity– that it is both that thing which makes us visible and 'real’ to the world that at the same time wishes to erase us from visible, audible, tangible, legible possibility, that is that Blackness is both the product and process of our life and our death. Are we wrong to in that existential context respond?
Blackness is drag. It is put together out of pieces found in recovery bins, garage sales, hand-me-downs, thrift stores, and the products of occasional splurge. It is a unique reflection of the subject who seeks to be seen, known, and found in it. It does not limit the subject, even if in seeing it, some see limits (which are really limits of their understanding), and even if fad emerge within it to impress upon some by some or by others that a mode of unity may produce a new energy or direction of creative flow.
Why isn’t Blackness understood in this limitless way by those new Black scholars who love to focus on its organizational and historical limits? What’s militant about Blackness as drag, the non-uniform dresscode of a liberating and pulsating underworld? What’s critical about failing to see drag, Blackness, and Blackness as drag as both simultaneously soothing and exciting to both militants and queen mothers alike?
To date, all of the arguments for post-Black agency, for more multiple performativities, for individualisms, and for self actualizations fail to overshadow the fact that Blackness has always been about the collective, strained, and strengthened experiences of individuals finding themselves in the midst of non-consensual governmental groupings. Blackness has always been agentive, resistant, active, individual, and self-affirming, in that individuals, actors, selves have located and actualized within the context of their material and political reality.
Far too often, the victim, people who’ve been identified as Black, are blamed in responding to their oppression for participating in their oppression. Most problematic in this has been ironically the nouveau class of Black intellectuals who rightly push beyond old dogmas about Blackness as a guide or parameter for Being, but slip into repeating old conceptions of race that subtly assume that 'race’ is only thought into being or is only an 'experience’ of the Being or the person, when in fact we are all living in material and physical realities within systems and structures of governance.
The state does succeed in segregating, in unifying, and captivating persons in manageable ways, so we do come into being with shared lived experiences within. None can speak for the other. Diversity, multiplicity, free extensities and intensities persist, and none of that relies on an overpaid academic to articulate.
Black people all over, everywhere you go, know they are individuals, who think for themselves, who account for their own personal survival, and who have complexities that could never be contained in sociological categorization. Blackness or any honest and realistic conception thereof has never claimed that any thing else was true, or even possible.
[Black] people are people with all the creative uniqueness and personal experiences of any– where it fits Blackness is simply an asterisk, an essential footnote in all of our personal and unique stories that says “on top of all of this, it took a hell of a lot of struggle, resistance, pain, honor, enduring, and spiritual persistence for me to be here and I lift that up and I glorify that for those who did not make it and those who will make it because of me.”
On either side we should stop problematizing the way people choose to identify, we should stop criticizing how communities organize harmlessly for their own uplift, and stop trying to focus on illuminating some unseen way in which the oppressed are foolishly complicit in their own oppression and be about the simple and mandatory work of resisting, exposing, indicting, and disestablishing the state authorities of colonialism in this here Western Modernity.
