Why ‘Reading the Diaspora’? (what’s this thing all about?)
(The photo above is one I took myself at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art. It’s titled Hommage a Bessie Smith by Iba Ndiaye, a Senegalese artist. It’s one of my favorite pieces there, and I visit it often.)
I came up with the name of this “blog” at least five years ago, maybe more than that in the hopes of reading through the diaspora, i.e. read work by scholars, thinkers who are of the African diaspora and/or write about the diaspora. I came up with the name during a time when I had just formally given up on completing a graduate degree I had started but not finished. I still held out hopes, though, of completing some magical, wonderful project that would allow me to successfully reapply and complete that degree. The fact that I’m even calling this a blog (and using this platform, sorry Tumblr) indicates just how long ago that time was and how long I’ve let this space languish.
I’m writing three months into when the U.S. finally started to take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously, i.e. the weeks of March 9 and 16, 2020. So much has happened with respect to race:
COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities, as these communities are more likely to have pre-existing conditions, e.g. hypertension, diabetes, asthma, which make them more susceptible to having more intense symptoms and more likely to die, if they contract the disease. They’re more likely to have jobs deemed essential, e.g. they’re hospital workers, grocery store workers, janitors, postal workers, thus increasing their chance of exposure. They’re also more likely to be of lower income—because of the jobs they hold—which means increased likelihood of not owning vehicles and thus more reliant on public transportation. This last point caused me so much distress during the first three to four weeks of lockdown, because my nearly 70-years-old mother and my sister, and my 80-year-old aunt, rely on public transportation to get around. I also had an uncle who nearly died from this disease. He lives in Manhattan, and we believe he contracted it when he took the bus home after grocery shopping.
Once the public health, medical, and scientific communities released the news that Black and Brown people were dying from this disease at higher rates, states under lockdown started to protest the lockdown orders. Coincidence is not correlation is, I think, the statement you make before “Correlation is not causation,” but the coincidence was not lost on many Black people. And, in white supremacist America, to ignore this coincidence is foolish.
Fatal instances of police and white vigilante violence, á la Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Sandra Bland, have become prominent. Protests kicked off the week of Memorial Day when a Black man in Minneapolis, George Floyd, was murdered by a police officer while three other officers looked on and civilians begged the officer to take his knee off of Mr. Floyd’s neck. Mr. Floyd was under that cop’s knee for 8 minutes 46 seconds; he continually stated “I can’t breathe;” and as he approached death he called out for his mother, which breaks my heart every time I think of it.
George Floyd’s death was not the only death during pandemic/quarantine times. Breonna Taylor, an EMT from Louisville, Kentucky, was shot to death by police officers illegally executing a no-knock warrant. Ahmaud Arbery was followed/hunted and eventually killed by two white men (a father and son?) who said they were on the lookout for a burglar. Mr. Arbery was out for a run in his own neighborhood.
There was also the case of Christian Cooper, a Black man and avid birder from New York. He was in Central Park doing his birding thing in a part of the Park known as the Ramble. He encountered a woman, Amy Cooper, who had her dog unleashed. He asked her to leash her dog, per park regulations. I’m not sure at what point Mr. Cooper decided to start filming the interaction, but thank goodness he did. What we see on the recording is Amy Cooper trying to weaponize the police against Christian Cooper. She very clearly said she was going to call the police to tell them that an “African-American” man was “harassing” her in the park. She then calls the police, feigning hysteria and emphasizing Mr. Cooper’s Af-Am identity. If you’re reading this, you know how things played out, and that Christian Cooper is still, thankfully, alive.
As I’m writing, we’re entering the third week of Black Lives Matter protests across the nation, precipitated most immediately by the murder of George Floyd, but in response to all of the Black death that has happened over the past few months, as we all sit in lockdown as many face, including, disproportionately, Black people, face economic uncertainty in addition to mortal uncertainty. To add on top of all of this there have been more Black deaths in the wake of the protests—David McAtee for example—and the deaths of Black trans women which continue to go unnoticed outside of the trans community even amongst all of the talk about Black Lives Matter(-ing). (Another “as I’m writing note:” I’m listening to Weekend Edition Sunday, and I’m hearing the stories of Robert Fuller, a young man whose body was found hanging from a tree in Palmdale, California, and the fatal police shooting of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man shot outside of a Wendy’s in Atlanta, Georgia. Mr. Brooks was approached simply because he was sleeping in his car, and the interaction continued because he failed a sobriety test. I can only assume that Mr. Brooks was sleeping some alcohol off, and I’m amazed, but sadly not surprised, that he died at the hands of police because of it.)
All of this is a long preamble to the thing that most directly ties to this post. I started diving into some Stuart Hall books I’ve had sitting on my shelf for months. I’m currently reading a series of lectures Hall delivered at Princeton in 1994 (The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation). He’s talking about how slippery the notions of “race,” “ethnicity,” and “nation” are. I’ve only gotten through the race and part of the ethnicity lecture, but terms that have stuck with me are “sliding signifier,” “regimes of truth,” and “chains of equivalence,” which speak to how the discourses of race (and ethnicity and nation, I think, once I get through them) have shifted since the European “encounter” with populations unlike them in Asia, Africa, and the America. They also speak to how race has somehow become rooted in the “biological” (despite their being no biological basis for it) and how ethnicity and nation have somehow become rooted in the timeless “natural.” From those biological and natural starting points, regimes of truth and chains of equivalence have been built to cement our minds in understandings of essential racial, (ethnic, and national) difference. What Hall is ultimately trying to do in unpacking these terms, I think, is highlight the ways in which the persistence of race, ethnicity, and nation speaks to an inability--for Euro-descended persons in particular--to equitably navigate difference. It’s important to note, although, I won’t dive into it now, that capitalist critique is central to the rise of these terms as signifiers of difference.
I’m struggling with/trying to work through my own understandings of race at this time, specifically what has been circulating discursively in the wake of COVID and the protests. I’ll write more as I progress on working things out in my own mind, but I wanted to get this out there first, because it’s been percolating for a while.
If there’s interest, feel free to comment below. Racist screeds (as I deem them) will be deleted.
[ETA: This blog is actually eight years ago, according to a Tumblr email I found. Go figure!]
