The “uncut bond” of black exploitation and trauma under white supremacy meant a folding of black female trauma into the black male frame, from which it receded from common view, typically emerging as spectacle only and not as spectrum. Thus common perceptions of black suffering became embodied in and represented by male trauma—emanating from the lash, shackle, the brand, convict lease, lynch mob, death row, mass imprisonment, and “stop-n-frisk.” With the norm and apex of black suffering centered on violence in the public realm and the public spaces of the private realm (cloistered plantations and prisons), racial rape became subsumed under racial capital. The official chronology of and narratives about violence and terror that constitute U.S. democracy’s borders—chattel slavery, the convict prison lease system, Jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration, “stop-n-frisk”— crowd out the black matrix, displacing it from philosophical inquiries into subjugation. The interiority of this trauma zone has paltry public record and memory. Racial rape, the dominant threat, appears in black women’s writings, memoirs, fiction, and art, but in these forms may be categorized as emotive performance, mere illustrations for rather than inherently forms of critical philosophy.
Joy James, “Afrarealism and the Black Matrix: Maroon Philosophy at Democracy’s Border.” The Black Scholar, Vol. 43, No. 4; p. 126