Introduction: Back to Living Again

When we are not “public,” with all that the word connotes for black people then how do we live and who are we?

—elizabeth alexander, the black interior

The notion that black culture is some kind of backwater or tributary of an American “mainstream” is well established in much popular as well as standard social science literature. To the prudent black American masses, however, core black culture is the mainstream.

—john langston gwaltney, drylongso

First, a story.

I was twenty-one years old, a senior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, when, after three years of immersion into what passed as “the college experience” on that campus, I achieved the ultimate in adult-lite independence: I moved into my own apartment. It was the top unit of an old but well-maintained three-unit building on Eighty-First Street nestled between Ashland and Damen in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, which, as you might know, is the South Side of Chicago. And what you might also know, or at least suspect, is that this was not the South Side of the Obamas. We’re not talking about Hyde Park here. I was living on the South Side of the “people” whose reputation for violence has made any number of national headlines but where, despite said reputation, all manner of black folk freely roam, the residents routinely put trash cans and fold-out chairs in their parking spots to keep them from being taken, the streets and sidewalks transform into playgrounds and waterparks on sticky summer days, and there are as many storefront churches as there are liquor stores and chicken joints.

Though I do not come from the great state of Chicago, I do come from one of its suburbs. Actually, that’s not true. My hometown is not a suburb of Chicago and neither is Chicago a state, of course, but when you come from Peoria, a city with a total population of about 116,000 and a black population of approximately 30,000, you learn to think of it as such. You learn that the best way to explain to non-Illinoisans, as well as many Chicagoans, where Peoria is located is in reference to Chicago (Peoria is approximately 170 miles southwest) and that its significance is typically best understood in relationship to two of its most noteworthy successes: Caterpillar, the Fortune 500 heavy-machinery manufacturer that is headquartered there and has historically employed a significant number of its residents, and the late great social commentator Richard Pryor, who was born there in 1940 (and not necessarily in that order). Anyway, the point is, the South Side of Peoria, with its masses of black people cordoned off into the most underresourced area of the city, the place where I was born and raised, is not unlike the South Side of Chicago, which became the location of my first real foray into adulthood.

For five hundred dollars a month plus utilities I had a space that was all mine, where I could come and go as I pleased, where I didn’t have to check my guests in and out, where I didn’t have a curfew, where I didn’t have to pick up and search out a place to sleep when my roommate had “company,” where I could decorate without getting anyone else’s input, where I could be as clean or as messy as I wanted (though, as it turned out, I was much less inclined toward messiness when I was the one paying the bills). I was ecstatic. My parents, I later found out, were not. They were slightly terrified—particularly my dad, a self-proclaimed “country boy” who is currently a resident of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Delta town of Gunnison, Mississippi (population: 452), who never did approve of “that big ole raggedy city” anyway. But, alas, that little third-floor, one-bedroom apartment, complete with its second hand furniture and rodent interlopers, was where I established my first self-made home.

Despite what ever fears my dads—my biological father and my stepfather—might have had about their young, single, relatively sheltered daughter living alone on the South Side of Chicago, they did what they have always done and rallied together with my mothers—my biological mother and stepmother—and grand mothers to support me in my big-girl endeavors. But I remember it being my Grammy, my mother’s mother, who, though she was never to see my apartment in person herself, seemed most excited for me. Soon after moving into my place I received a care package from her containing house hold provisions, including a recipe book made up of her own handed-down recipes and a document she’d typed up outlining remedies for various minor catastrophes like ink-stained clothing and stubborn grease stains. Not long after that I went to visit her, and as we were sitting in her kitchen catching up on things and talking about my adventures in homemaking, I told her about how I was rather liking “keeping house.” And I still remember very clearly her turning to me and saying, “See, it’s not so bad taking care of your home and family, is it?”

It was such a simple, unassuming, and, ultimately, rhetorical question, but for reasons I did not at all understand at the time, that moment stayed with me. It was not until after she died in August 2007, while I was a graduate student in the thick of studying for my PhD comprehensive exams, that I began to fully appreciate what Grammy had been saying to me all those years before. Because it was not until then that I really began to contemplate the meaning of my grand mother’s life and its impact not just on my life but also on the shaping of my life’s work.

My grand mother, whose full name was Bernice Lee Turner (née Collier), was born in 1931, the fourth of five children, and lived most of her life in Danville, Illinois, a city about 150 miles southeast of Peoria that is so small Peoria is a “big ole raggedy city” in comparison. She had three children, a son named Jacque and my mother, Kim, who were born to her first husband, whom she divorced in 1960, and another son, Brett, who was born to her second husband, who died unexpectedly of health complications in 1970. She married for the final time in 1987. She worked at several different companies throughout her life, including the Internal Revenue Service in Detroit, where she lived for several years with her first husband before returning to Danville, and the Danville Housing Authority. Her longest continuous period of employment was at the First Midwest Bank in Danville, where she held various positions, including manager of teller operations, before retiring in 1993 after more than twenty-five years of service.

Despite a seemingly rewarding career, the center of my grand mother’s joy was her family, and there was nothing she loved as much as gathering with her children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews, and whoever else might happen to stop through, around a meal she had labored over for hours (years after my parents divorced, my father would still go into a near drool when talking about my Grammy’s macaroni and cheese, arguably the most famous of her famous dishes). And because I was her oldest and, for a number of years, only biological grand child and her only daughter’s only daughter, I had an especially close relationship with her. Growing up, I spent countless hours standing by her side and, occasionally, helping as she cooked in her kitchen; laying in her living-room floor cutting paper dolls out of the Jet and Ebony magazines she would save for me; sitting under neath her arm at Union Missionary Baptist Church while the organist, my uncle, played what was to me at that time absolutely terrifying “shouting” music; watching movies with her that I’d convinced her to rent because they were R-rated and my mother never would; making sugary-sweet coffee under her watch (because, like R-rated movies, coffee was something my mother did not allow her adolescent daughter); and going on summer vacations with her and my grand father and younger cousin to places like St. Louis and the Wisconsin Dells. And we would talk and talk. There was very little that was off-limits between my grand mother and me. I never felt from her the judgment that I felt in other places and with other people, and it was with her alone that I was my most vulnerable, most joyful, most complete self.

But for all our talking and all our sharing, there are particular things I do not remember about my grand mother. I do not, for instance, remember her talking much about money, at least, not about how to get more of it—although she never, at any point in her life, had a whole lot more than just enough to get by. Nor do I remember her ever spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to amass material things. Now, please believe, Aunt Becie (as my cousins called her) was quite the fashion plate, and she enjoyed the finer things in life when she could. But the material things she enjoyed were by-products of a life well lived and not, in and of themselves, her reason for living. Moreover, even before her retirement she never prioritized material or immaterial “stuff” so much that she did not have time to cook for her family or spend time in her garden or sing in the church choir or visit with her friends or tend to her children. Which is to say, her life was full of doing the things she loved to do.

And when it came to me, her beloved grand daughter, I never remember my grand mother telling me that I needed to go out and make a “success” of myself. Her stated goals for me never did include attending prestigious schools or earning a lot of money or having elite degrees or fancy titles or having a high-profile job. This is not to say that she was not extremely proud of me when I did do some of those things. I remember, for instance, near the end of her life when I was in law school and had published my first journal article. I had given my mother a reprint of the article to give to my grand mother when she went to visit her at the nursing home she was living in by then, and afterward my mother called me, laughter in her voice. She told me that when Grammy saw it she had broken into tears, saying she didn’t really know what in the world I was talking about but she was just happy because I was “so smart.” But the thing is this: Grammy did indeed know what I was talking about. Perhaps she did not understand all of the intricacies of tribal sovereignty and the like that I was attempting to work through in that elusive document that is the law review note (and, to be quite honest, neither did I), but she did understand the struggle for self-governance, the need to carve out a space of one’s own, to claim it and to hold onto it and to demand it. And in the relay between my Grammy’s tears and my Mama’s laugh was, and is, a whole realm of comprehension that I am only now able to lay even a modicum of claim to.

Though my grand mother was most certainly one of my biggest cheerleaders and supporters while she was living, what she wanted most for me was bound up in that long-ago statement she made to me affirming the value of homemaking. The point is not to be taken literally; she was not saying that I necessarily had to become a wife and mother as she did. Instead, what I eventually heard my grand mother telling me, via both our conversations and the example of her life, was that tending to her home, cooking, cleaning, and the like, were not burdens from which she hoped to escape but acts of love that helped to sustain her as much as they did her family. Further, she was telling me that her life was not circumscribed by the conditions of its possibility but was instead enriched and enlarged by her embrace of the mundane and the everyday. I believe that more than outward signifiers of success, what my grand mother ultimately wanted for me and all of her children and grandchildren was that we realize, in accordance with Ralph Ellison and a whole host of other black folks who came before and after her, “the attitudes and values which give Negro American life its sense of wholeness and which render it bearable and human and, when measured by our own terms, desirable.”¹Close

This desire of my grand mother’s resonates with the experience Rita Dove relates of making a dress for her daughter during a sabbatical she took not long after winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1987. Despite the protests of her husband, who thought she was wasting her precious sabbatical time by making her daughter a lace “princess dress” for her fifth birthday that she was sure to destroy before her party’s end, Dove spent the time necessary to make it so that her daughter would “ha[ve] the dress she wanted,” referring to the making of it as “fieldwork” for a poem she was working on.²Close Though my grand mother was neither a poet nor a scholar in the traditional sense, her cooking functioned similarly to Dove’s dressmaking. She would spend hours shopping, prepping, cleaning, picking, cutting, dicing, chopping, baking, and frying in preparation for a meal that would often be devoured without much fanfare in a matter of minutes. But I imagine Grammy might have also thought about this as fieldwork, perhaps not for a poem, but for the making of a life worth living.

Telling this story of my grand mother is meant neither to glamorize her life nor to suggest that her life was wholly unique (though she was, of course, uniquely special to me). Indeed, as a black woman who came of age in the segregated North of the 1930s and 1940s, who did not have much in the way of a formal education beyond high school, who divorced one husband, buried another, and had a tumultuous relationship with the third, who experienced a seventeen-year stretch during which she was, in her words, “looking for love,” who was episodically a single mother of multiple children, and who was ravaged for years by Parkinson’s disease before her eventual death, there was much that was difficult and painful in her life.³Close And it is, by most accounts, a story black women know well.

Yet the story of my grand mother is important to this project for a couple of reasons. For one, it helps to reveal the contours of a black feminist practice that need not be tethered to discussions of movements, organizations, or overt political activism. To my knowledge, my grand mother was never actively involved in any national or local social justice or political organizations—her organizational commitments were mostly limited to church groups like the choir and usher board—and I doubt that at any point in her life she would have identified herself as a feminist. The same is prob ably also true of my mother. But my mother and grand mother have both been instrumental in my own coming to feminism. Because although they may not be or have been feminists in the academic sense of the term, and despite certain ideological differences we may have or have had, they have taught me more about what it means to resist oppression, demand accountability, struggle for voice, and cherish all people than anyone or anything else.

I am not treading any particularly new ground here, for black feminist thinkers within the academy have often been concerned with grounding their work in the experiences of women working outside the academy, particularly those from poor and working-class backgrounds. In Black Feminist Thought, one of the seminal texts in the black feminist “canon,” Patricia Hill Collins discusses the tremendous influence black women who are not academics have had on the evolution of black feminist thought:

Developing Black feminist thought as critical social theory involves including the ideas of Black women not previously considered intellectuals—many of whom may be working-class women with jobs outside academia—as well as those emanating from more formal, legitimated scholarship. The ideas we share with one another as mothers in extended families, as othermothers in Black communities, as members of Black churches, and as teachers to the Black community’s children have formed one pivotal area where African-American women have hammered out multifaceted Black women’s standpoint.⁴Close

For Hill Collins black feminist practice is a distinct outgrowth of black feminist thought, which is to say it is an outcome of black feminism.⁵Close Here I make a different sort of distinction. While I do not draw a dividing line between thought and practice, I do distinguish between black feminist practice and black feminism, which, in alignment with the Combahee River Collective and other black feminist thinkers, I define as a sustained sociopolitical commitment to centering the lives of black women and girls while actively struggling against racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and other intersecting modalities of oppression that affect even those who do not identify as either black or female.⁶Close I define black feminist practice as a radical commitment to the significance of black female life and the humanity of all black peoples, regardless of whether the practitioner identifies with feminism as a formalized ideological commitment or holds some views that might ultimately be deemed antithetical to feminism itself. Under these terms, thought is not a separate endeavor but a constituent element of the critical engagement. Thus what it means to take up “practice” here is to turn our attention to “the politics of the everyday,”⁷Close the places “where the subject lives as theorist, consumer, grocery shopper, got-to-pick-up-the-mail-now, let’s go to the bank.”⁸Close

My grand mother’s story is also important because it works to turn the aspirational posturing that often characterizes black racial uplift narratives on its head. By way of example, in an interview actor Kerry Washington gave to Oprah Winfrey in late 2012, she discussed the intersection of two of her most high-profile roles—Olivia Pope, the powerful D.C. fixer and onetime presidential mistress who headlines Scandal, the hit television series produced for ABC by Shonda Rhimes, and Broomhilda Von Shaft, the slave wife in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained. In the interview Washington stated that Olivia Pope is “the answer to Broomhilda’s prayers about what might be possible someday” and that Olivia Pope and Broom-hilda Von Shaft are “the same woman hundreds of years apart.” To which Winfrey responded, “That is so perfect I could weep.”⁹Close

Washington’s proclamation on its face might be innocent enough and, aside from Pope’s stint as a mistress, one that perhaps many black women would agree with. To be sure, Olivia Pope lives a life that is hard to imagine for many black women today, let alone a slave woman living in the mid-nineteenth century. But this is actually the heart of the thing. Because for the vast majority of black women living today, becoming an Olivia Pope is about as likely a possibility as it would have been for Broomhilda Von Shaft in 1858, and the reasons for this have little if anything to do with ability or work ethic. And so one wonders about the ascription of those values and traits that would be required for a black woman to become Olivia Pope, an expensively dressed, prototypically beautiful, incidentally black, upper-class Washington insider who is bedding the presumptive leader of the free world, to the slave woman.¹⁰Close

It is a quandary that actually does matter, not because there is necessarily anything wrong with wanting to be wealthy or powerful or successful (although we might contemplate just what it means to attain these things in the face of modern-day capitalism and its organizing principles) but because the line of descent Washington and Winfrey mark out for black women ignores a whole range of black female possibility. It would be one thing if this moment could be simply dismissed as the inconsequential ramblings of a couple of black elites. But I would submit that this brief exchange is indicative of a larger uplift narrative that celebrates black “achievement” at the expense of black folks who, like my grand mother, either failed to do or simply did not desire to do what it would have taken for them to become firmly entrenched within the ranks of the black bourgeoisie (aka “bougie”) or the “upwardly mobile.”¹¹Close

The final reason I believe the telling of Grammy’s story is important is because, rather than being seen merely as the relics of a bygone era whose lives have no bearing on the lives of post–civil rights black women other than as historical lore, our grand mothers, mothers, and othermothers help us to reckon with what it means to live wholly and completely, in spite of. To speak of black social life is to speak of this radical capacity to live—to live deeply righteous lives even in the midst of all that brings death close or, as Lucille Clifton puts it, to celebrate “everyday/something has tried to kill me/and has failed.”¹²Close It is to affirm the “tragicomic confrontation with life” that characterizes so much of black humanity and to assert “those qualities which are of value beyond any question of segregation, economics or previous conditions of servitude.”¹³Close Black social life is, fundamentally, the register of black experience that is not reducible to the terror that calls it into existence but is the rich remainder, the multifaceted artifact of black communal resistance and resilience that is expressed in black idioms, cultural forms, traditions, and ways of being.

For all that Ellison gets charged with elitism and racial neglect, his writings and commentary forcefully reveal something of this form of life I am concerned with addressing, and it is perhaps best revealed in an interview he gave to Richard Stern in 1961. Upon being asked by Stern when he “became conscious that there was something precious about being a Negro in this country at this time,” Ellison told the story of a cotton patch. He reminisced on the period of his childhood in Oklahoma when some children would have to leave school periodically to work in the cotton fields with their parents. Although this was work most parents fervently wished they did not have to do and did not want for their children, he remembered being envious of those children who went away to the cotton fields. For Ellison realized the significance of what those children came home with, which was about something other than the odious conditions under which they and their families labored.

And it wasn’t the hard work which they stressed, but the communion, the playing, the eating, the dancing and the singing. And they brought back jokes, our Negro jokes—not those told about Negroes by whites—and they always returned with Negro folk stories which I’d never heard before and which couldn’t be found in any books I knew about. This was something to affirm and I felt there was a richness in it. I didn’t think too much about it, but what my schoolmates shared in the country and what I felt in their accounts of it—it seemed much more real than the Negro middle-class values which were taught in school.¹⁴Close

Later in that same interview Ellison refers to the black barbershop as the place where one could find “more unself-conscious affirmation … on a Saturday than you can find in a Negro college in a month.” And later still, he talks about how the “Negro farm people” who visited Tuskegee University during graduation week while he was a student there would skip out on the “big-shot word artists … making their most impressive speeches” during the commencement exercises in order to visit and celebrate among themselves on the athletic fields. It was these “festivals” Ellison would sneak off to watch because he “found their unrhetorical activities on the old football field the more meaningful.”¹⁵Close

The cotton field, the barbershop, and the athletic field. In Ellison’s day and in our own, these and other places like them that we could name—the hair salon, the front porch, the church basement, the street corner, the backyard barbecue, the house party, the kitchen table—are where black social life fulfills its greatest potential. These places where everyday, ordinary, or what John Langston Gwaltney’s respondents might call “drylongso,” black folks gather together in the name of perhaps nothing more than themselves are fundamental to reckoning with “that same pain and that same plea sure” that constitutes blackness.¹⁶Close And so my concern here is to think about how these gatherings are extended across the terrain of black female experience and made legible by black women’s lives and bodies in the making of a sociality that is firmly rooted in the black imaginary.

My discussion of black social life here is intentionally at odds with social death theory, or theoretical positions that posit black life as little more than a vestige of slavery and therefore largely uninhabitable or degraded and thus something to be “escaped” in one way or another. Under this line of reasoning, the escape artists turn out to be those Exceptional Negroes who are successfully able to throw off the shackles of nihilism and defeatism and what ever other “isms” plague the black masses in order to become exemplary citizens who are, within the logics of black achievement, “credits” to the race—so that “the race” ostensibly becomes something other than what it is, something that is at a remove from its genesis, something that is defined against those entities that or who are critical to its very existence.

This fleecing of black life takes multiple forms and occurs in any number of different locations both within and beyond academia. First, it is at the heart of the revulsion to the ghetto, people who inhabit the ghetto, and people who supposedly “act” ghetto.¹⁷Close As David Wellman explains, this revulsion in everyday interactions among lay black people and black social critics à la Bill Cosby, Alvin Poussaint, Orlando Patterson, and Juan Williams, as well as among black neoconservatives such as Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, and Shelby Steele, is often situated today within the rhetoric of “personal responsibility” and is out of alignment with “an abundance of evidence [that] has been generated over the past couple of decades which credibly argues that neither culture nor personal deficiencies cause the problems that haunt inner cities.”¹⁸Close Wellman goes on to outline the assumptions that undergird this rhetoric:

They assume the “underclass” is largely an African American formation found in inner cities; that it subscribes to a value system at odds with both mainstream American sentiments and middle-class Black culture; that it is poor because house holds are headed by females and males who refuse to work. They also assume that male criminal behavior in combination with female dependency on welfare are powerful deterrents to gainful employment. As a result, they suppose, the work ethic has been subverted and moral order has collapsed in the inner cities. They think access to employment opportunity structures is available to qualified applicants regardless of residence or race, and joblessness in inner cities is therefore the result of deficient motivation, self-esteem, or education. They also believe inner cities are isolated from the communities that surround them and that, complicating matters, the tensions between innercity gangs and their neighborhoods divide these two groups.¹⁹Close

These “folk theories of social identity” that Wellman convincingly shows are riddled with conceptual and methodological defects and are largely debunked by ethnographic research thus do not reveal any actionable causes of sustained black poverty, “underachievement,” or “failure.”²⁰Close They are instead used in the service of a class-based distancing of the “good” blacks from the “bad” blacks that thereby absolves the “good” or “respectable” blacks of any collective responsibility for attending to the real causes of black suffering or of black middle-class decline, disciplines and further stigmatizes those individuals who do not act in accordance with normative middle-class values, and buffers themselves against that same stigma.

The degradation of black social life also occurs by way of discourses that hold that social problems plaguing black communities (gang violence, what gets referred to as “black-on-black crime,” illicit drug use, teenage pregnancy, etc.) and particular cultural practices and traditions (hair straightening and the use of hair extensions, gangsta rap, wearing baggy clothing, the prohibition against “acting white,” use of the word “nigga,” etc.) are primarily the consequences of low self-esteem and the internalization of negative stereotypes among black people. These are certainly factors in some cases and for some people, but there is evidence to suggest such claims are often largely overstated and/or fail to consider viable alternative readings. For example, John Jackson uses the term “ghetto fabulous” in his inventive ethnographic study of Harlem residents to refer to the “embrace [of] a sense of self utterly irreducible to one’s assumed location at the residential and spatial bottom of national or international pecking orders. Ghetto fabulousness takes the quantified assumptions of localized marginality and transforms them into a qualitatively different kind of lived experience.”²¹Close For Jackson, the knock-off consumerism of black people living in poor and underresourced communities cannot be explained away as rote materialism and excess on the behalf of people who can little afford it and who should consequently be directing their attentions elsewhere but is a creative articulation of life at the margins and a rejection of the pathologization of ghetto life.

In another instance Kobena Mercer takes issue “with the widespread argument that, because it involves straightening, the curly-perm hairstyle represents either a wretched imitation of white people’s hair or, what amounts to the same thing, a diseased state of black consciousness.”²²Close Though he references a hairstyle that is by now largely out of fashion, the larger point Mercer makes remains valid and could very well be rearticulated in reference to the more con temporary conversations happening around natural hair care.²³Close That is, he argues the need to “depsychologize” hair straightening and other black hairstyles, recognizing them as aesthetic cultural practices that hold social and symbolic meaning, rather than being merely evidence of rampant self-loathing and inferiority complexes among black people. He goes on to discuss how, historically, “natural” styles such as the Afro and (dread)locks have been used in the service of a romanticized “counterhegemonic tactic of inversion” that fails to actually invoke the connection to Africa such hairstyles are often meant or understood to signal.²⁴Close Similarly, Robin Kelley situates the Afro within the historical context out of which it emerged, noting its origins as a mod fashion statement in bourgeois high society that was subsequently commodified in the marketplace in the 1960s and 1970s as a signifier of “soul.” The ultimate point, Kelley contends, is that by overinterpreting black cultural practices like hairstyling as if they are political treatises, “the stylistic and aesthetic conventions that render the form and performance more attractive than the message” are missed, and the meaning of such practices to the actual people who engage them are disregarded or misinterpreted.²⁵Close

A final example of an alternative reading of purported black pathology is Gwen Bergner’s discussion of the doll experiments conducted by Kenneth and Mamie Clark that were used to buttress the Brown v. Board of Education ruling handed down by the Supreme Court in 1954. The Clarks’ study famously found that when given the choice between a brown doll and a white doll, black children tended to identify with the brown doll but ultimately chose the white doll as the “nice” one and the one they preferred to play with. The Clarks ultimately concluded that this preference meant black children had internalized negative societal messages regarding blackness and therefore suffered from damaged self-esteems. Although the Clark doll experiments have been discredited on methodological grounds by researchers since at least the late 1960s, they and their progeny continue to be used as evidence to support the widespread notion that black people as a group suffer from low self-esteem due to racism.²⁶Close Yet, as Bergner notes, later racial preference tests that controlled for factors the Clarks did not consider, such as region, sex, class, age, and the interviewer’s race, produced contradictory results, and these results suggest the purported link between racial identity and self-esteem is precarious at best.²⁷Close

Black social life is also impugned when social programs such as affirmative action, WIC, food stamps, and welfare are targeted for reduction or elimination in the name of “color-blind” policies meant to encourage “self-help”—which is but another formulation of personal responsibility aimed at marginalized communities, people of color in particular. Here again, these anguished calls for self-help are premised on assumptions about black people that do not actually bear themselves out but are good for making scapegoats of the most vulnerable. Ange-Marie Hancock, for example, notes how welfare queen mythology influenced the development and eventual passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act that was supposed to “reform” welfare but has subsequently had devastating consequences for welfare recipients—most of whom are not black.²⁸Close Likewise, Dorothy Roberts notes how this same deviant black mother mythology has influenced governmental policies affecting black women’s reproductive capacities historically, including the coerced and involuntary sterilizations of black women that occurred throughout the twentieth century and the disparate treatment of black women in prosecutions of drug-addicted mothers.²⁹Close

There is yet another strand of black social death theory that is loosely organized around the notion of “antiblackness” or “afro-pessimism,” which, per Frank Wilderson, essentially claims that “Blackness is both that outside which makes it possible for White and non-White (i.e., Asians and Latinos) positions to exist and, simultaneously, contest existence.” As such, “the structure of the entire world’s semantic field … is sutured by anti-Black solidarity.”³⁰Close Afro-pessimists are skeptical both of multiculturalism, which they feel does not have the capacity to respond meaningfully or coherently to white supremacy, and of solution-oriented responses to black suffering, because they potentially negate the terror of that suffering.³¹Close It is not enough to say that black people are alienated or degraded or oppressed because, for them, blackness occupies the terrain of the noncommunicable and is predicated on “modalities of accumulation and fungibility,” or an absolute negation.³²Close In other words, black people are not subaltern subjects but nonhuman nonbeings whose very existence is predicated on death and violence. That said, black social death as the afro-pessimists conceive of it cannot be neatly summed up as the opposite of black social life. According to Jared Sexton,

Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting and vitalizing it. A living death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, or people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor—the modern world system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but is lived underground, in outer space. … Black life is not social, or rather … black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death.³³Close

Sexton’s point is well taken, and afro-pessimism as it is synopsized by him and others goes a long way toward helping us understand, even reconceptualize, the mandate of blackness. Indeed, throughout this book I call on several theorists whose work is situated along this particular trajectory of thought to help me make my own case for blackness. Yet where I ultimately depart from the afro-pessimist position is in this concern over “the modern world system” that Sexton so carefully, and I think rightly, delineates. Here I am not concerned as much with thinking about how black social life is ordered according to “the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society” and so forth as I am with thinking about how social life is defined wholly within the parameters of what Hortense Spillers has called in reference to black communal relations the “intramural,”³⁴Close what Elizabeth Alexander refers to in her discussion of “black life and creativity behind the public face of stereotype” as the “black interior,”³⁵Close and what Toni Morrison calls “interior life.”³⁶Close To put a finer point on it, whether “the world” thinks my grand mother and mother and all those folks who live on the South Side of Peoria and the South Side of Chicago and every other hood and ghetto and community and street where black folks gather are “fungible” or not, I want to think about what those folks think about themselves because, in so doing, I am able to consider black social life from the vantage point at which it is lived, rather than at which it is merely viewed or policed or looked in on occasionally.³⁷Close This is meant not to deny the force of the world order on black sociality but to take the view that the way black people go about making themselves, both because of and regardless of the conditions of their making, their own world order, is as appropriate and necessary a starting place as any other.

This, again, is an Ellisonian formulation. Ellison’s ideological disagreements with his one-time mentor Richard Wright are well known, and in his essay “The World and the Jug” Ellison critiques Wright’s most famous work, Native Son, because it begins “with the ideological proposition that what whites think of the Negro’s reality is more important than what Negroes themselves know it to be.”³⁸Close The apparent concern of Ellison’s writing was not to somehow “prove” or reinforce how devastating and tragic black life is or is claimed to be but to express the complexity of black life in all of its fullness according to his own experience of it and the experiences of those black folks who were committed to living it according to their own standards and sense of regard for themselves. And so it is from this line of thinking that Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life emerges.

While the specter of representation looms large over this project, my entry point into thinking about representation is guided by my interest in the interplay between the intramural (black community) and the interior (black self). My focus is consequently turned inside out, having less to do with how black social life is represented than with what the conditions of black social life reveal about the terms of representation itself. Scandalize My Name is thus an inquiry into the representability of black social life primarily by way of poor and working-class black women and the narratives that have come to define them in public culture. But rather than assume the offensiveness or incoherence of said narratives—angry, strong, oversexed, hyperreligious, deviant—or question why black women are represented in particular ways, I consider how the logics of representation, coded by terms such as “value,” “visibility,” “citizenship,” “morality,” “respectability,” and “responsibility,” necessarily fail to account for the reality of black lived experience. Accordingly, the primary issue is not to determine whether particular representations are more or less accurate or inaccurate but to suggest that black social life defies the limitations of representational discourse and practice.

Because I am more interested in thinking about how black women live in, through, and outside of the markers of black female identity that have come to define them publicly than I am with how other people who are not black women respond to those markers, I am less interested in a foray into what I refer to as stereotype discourse. As discussed here, stereotype discourse is the preoccupation with locating pathology or righteousness in certain cultural actors or texts that, in this context, often functions to position black female iconography along a continuum of “positive” or “negative” representations, sometimes even when it explicitly purports to do other wise. Although there has been much scholarly talk about the need to move beyond the good/bad binary at least since Stuart Hall called for the end of the “essential black subject” in the late 1980s, and despite the fact that it’s been more than twenty years since Herman Gray argued that “no longer can our analyses be burdened unnecessarily by the weight of an eternal search for either ‘authen tic’ media representations of ‘blackness’ or accurate reflections of African American social and cultural life,”³⁹Close very often discussions about black female representation in public culture—news and social media, film and televisual texts, political discourses, and the like—continue to revolve around these same divides, both in popular media commentary and in academic work. Accordingly, this work tends to get so mired in “archetype-hunting,”⁴⁰Close the seemingly endless practice of naming how this or that image or representation conforms to this or that foregoing stereotype of black people, that it essentially becomes counterproductive. These critics become so invested in saying what black people are not—they are not angry, they are not lazy, they are not violent, they are not hypersexual—that it becomes difficult to fathom who black people are, other than, perhaps, the inverse of every negative thing that has ever been said about them. And I suppose that is a project, but it is not mine.

To be sure, much of the writing and thinking about black female representation has concentrated on the still deeply entrenched stereotypes of black women for good reason, and the concerns that leading black female scholars have had over the historical legacies and continued replication of tropes like the asexual Mammy, the sharp-tongued Sapphire, the tragic mulatto, and the hypersexual Jezebel have been foundational in situating black women within the matrix of U.S. sociopolitical thought and practice. It is, in fact, what initiated my own interest in this work and has been critical in helping me to situate myself as a U.S. black woman. But for the formidable work that scholars such as Deborah Gray White, Trudier Harris, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Dorothy Roberts, Patricia Turner, Michele Wallace, and others have done in naming the various ways black women’s bodies and lives have been constructed/construed in the national mythos via the previously named tropes and their derivatives, my project could not exist at all. My challenge, then, is to extend this work in a way that responds to the exigencies of the current moment but is not overdetermined by the concerns that made such work necessary in the first place.

My argument about the inability of representation to account for black social life is a move in this direction and is occasioned at least in part by Wilderson’s discussion of the black subject, that is, the slave, in American civil society, which he refers to as “a scandal at the level of discourse” who “emerge[s] as the unthought.”⁴¹Close Wilderson contends that Marxism, particularly as it is conceptualized by Antonio Gramsci in Prison Notebooks, assumes a black subject, a worker, that cannot in fact exist because “whereas the positionality of the worker enables the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the slave exists as a destabilizing force within civil society because civil society gains its coherence, the very tabula raza upon which workers and industrialists struggle for hegemony, through the violence of black erasure.”⁴²Close Because black chattel slavery inaugurated U.S. capitalism and U.S. civil society is consequently predicated on the intersection of capitalism and white supremacy, the slave does not enter into the transactions of value but is instead “an articulation of a despotic irrationality [white supremacy] whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality [capitalism].”⁴³Close For Wilderson, the primary referent of blackness is death, and the black subject position threatens the assumptive logic of Gramscian discourse. From the perspective taken here, however, blackness cannot be aligned with death because black social life, the primary measure of black subjectivity, is, as Sexton suggests, fugitive—it coheres, accumulates its sociality, in the wild. Black social life is therefore irreducible to the codes of (white) civil society that it brings into being; the outside of value is its tabula raza.

That point of distinction aside, Wilderson’s critical discussion of the unthought black subject, or what Ntozake Shange calls “the unconscious of the entire Western world,”⁴⁴Close makes way for my consideration of the black woman who both is and causes a scandal within the field of representation. Consequently, what I want to posit is the contemplation of a black female subjectivity that attains meaning by way of an amoral social order that exists beyond the dichotomous regulatory regimes that structure so much of representational discourse. My ultimate concern is with thinking about how representation accounts for, or fails to account for as the case may be, a form of life that, “on the one hand, is not what it is and, on the other hand, is irreducible to what it is used for.”⁴⁵Close That is to say, while I do not disagree about the existence of problematic stereotypes of black women, I want to suggest that the problem is not one that can be gotten at by refuting the stereotype itself. Instead, the stereotype reveals the problem; it is, in fact, an artifact of the problem, which is not the wrongness or rightness of any particular black person or persons or their societal representations but the inability of representational discourse to contend with the unthought black subject who destabilizes “civil society” and, consequently, the very notion of civility itself.⁴⁶Close

Framed in this way, what it means to think can neither be underestimated nor taken for granted, since, as we know from Hannah Arendt, “thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”⁴⁷Close To think about the unthought is to clear space for the question, for “questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.”⁴⁸Close It is about the refinement of the question and deliberation in ways that do not always lead to neat conclusions or demonstrable solutions. And, finally, it is affirmation of and solidarity with a way of life that is not beholden to the mandates, constraints, or allegiances of academic discourse and practice. Scandalize My Name is thus a sustained thought experiment that takes as its premise the irreducible sociality of black life. It contends that black social life is the eschewal and critique of the affliction of privilege that resides in the preoccupation with the individual self. It transforms the principal complaint of stereotype discourse—that the stereotype comes to stand for all of us—into the grounds on which to enact a radical engagement with the self that cannot be itself alone.⁴⁹Close And it asserts that what it means to be with and for black people is not the evisceration of the ego but the recognition that there is and can be no “post” to blackness because blackness is what calls our individual and collective selves into being.⁵⁰Close

This brings me, at last, to the question of methodology. To get at this question, I first return to the work of Hortense Spillers, who more than twenty years ago argued the need for a “cultural demography” in which the meaning and experience of “home” and “community” would be newly, or uniquely, theorized within black studies:

If African-American culture has been transformed by internal divisions of flight and dispersal—and the latter must also mean various repositionings in the national culture and not simple, physical movement, or mobility, alone—then the object of analysis must be grasped in light of it.

But the intellectual has imagined flight only in its negative instance as a supposed rejection, when his very status, or standing, as an intellectual requires that he take on a language and disposition that are “foreign.” In other words, the work of the academy, or more specifically, the “cognitive apparatus,” is defined, symbolically speaking, as “not-mother,” a “not-my-own.” I am referring less to the maternal and paternal objects here as gendered actants of precisely defined sexual role than as the ground of intimacy that the subject assumes: the more or less harmonious ensemble of impressions that bound me not only to my body, but my body as it is reflected back to me in the eyes of others that I recognize as like myself. Whether or not this relation is troubled is less the point than that its complexities convey to one the sense of ease—the relay of constitutive continuities among particular kinetic, linguistic, sensual, and material gestures—through which one comes to experience home. From this point of view, community describes both the extension of home as well as its spatial/temporal genesis. As I understand it, community, however, is already a cross-weave—its local economisms linked into a larger network of sociopolitical/cultural relations and the messages that traverse it consequently—that prepares its subjects to receive the supplemental. We cannot imagine learning, acquisition, the foreign language, precisely as the various pains of intrusion unless we first understand how community has intimately prepared the ground as the apparent continuing unity against which “unhome” is measured.⁵¹Close

In sum, Spillers asserts the critical significance of contemplating dispersal in black studies, where dispersal is distinguished both from flight, or the pathological desire to flee or reject one’s community, and the physical movement away from home. Here dispersal refers to what it means to “leave home to learn to remember,”⁵²Close physically and other wise, and the various ways in which the community prepares us for, and is transformed by, our leave-taking. The community is thus “my primary speech,”⁵³Close an “internal diaspora”⁵⁴Close to which it is not necessary to “go back” because it is always with me wherever I go. And what this “going” requires is that I have the capacity to perceive community neither as a dereliction in need of a “representative hero” nor as an undifferentiated mass bereft of critical thought but as a “layering of negotiable differences” that informs and shapes the work I do.⁵⁵Close

Since I have left or, more precisely, because I have left my natal community for the “cognitive apparatus,” this primary concern that Spillers enumerates with attending to where and how one is from constitutes the scaffolding of this text. I consequently engage a form of storytelling, what I consider to be the consummate methodology and an outcome and condition of black social life—the craft of which is honed by way of various rhetorical occasions within the black life-world that include, among others, signifyin’, shooting the shit, playing the dozens, lyin’, testifying, and testilyin’.⁵⁶Close Because I recognize storytelling as “the way human beings organize their human knowledge”⁵⁷Close and because it has been so essential in my own coming to knowledge, from the anecdotal wisdom of my grandmother to the ever-evolving tall tales of my dad and his brothers to the bedtime stories my mother read to me right up until I anointed myself too old for such things, I privilege it here as a way of comprehending the “negotiable differences” that are so fundamental to black life.

The methodological practice I occasion here, aside from its roots in communal and familial storytelling, is most readily referred to in academe as “autoethnography,” or “the method and product of researching and writing about personal lived experiences and their relationship to culture.”⁵⁸Close Autoethnography is most firmly established as a practice in the social sciences, anthropology in particular, but I use it as the staging ground of my inquiries here because of its usefulness in thinking through “the bigger story,”⁵⁹Close which in the case at hand is the (re)conceptualization of community as an “object of knowledge”⁶⁰Close that has something critically important to tell us about the conditions of black sociality. I am quite clear that my own experience as a black, female, working-class Peoria native turned academic is a singular experience that cannot adequately stand in for any other. Victor Anderson, for example, relates a very different experience of home, one no less significant than my own, that reminds us of the terror and ambiguity that can and does accompany the notion of home and its auxiliaries for many people, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, among others, outlines the threat home too often poses for women, particularly women of color, who are subject to routinized violence as a consequence of home.⁶¹Close Still, in the vein of Toni Morrison, who contends that discourses about race are ultimately discourses about home and the “devastations, pleasures, and imperatives of homelessness” as manifested across a range of subject formations,⁶²Close I offer up this experience as a sort of ideological sight line, a way of thinking the place and project of home and all of its enabling (and disabling) conditions, not the least of which are black women, in the making of black social life.

I begin this inquiry in chapter 1 with a discussion of anger. Here I am interested neither in contextualizing anger as a positive mechanism for feminist engagement nor in disavowing it as antithetical to the feminist cause but in considering what staking a claim for anger might reveal about black female subjectivity. “Getting Happy,” chapter 2, uses two significant moments in the black Christian life-world—the outing of gospel singer Tonéx and the phenomenon that was Juanita Bynum’s “No More Sheets” sermon—to get at the socioreligious meaning and significance of those whom James Baldwin references as “God’s decoys.” Chapter 3, “The Way It Is,” uses the moment of an in-home bachelorette party to stage a discussion about what Daphne Brooks calls “black feminist surrogation”⁶³Close and posits the R&B singer as a key surrogate figure in contemplating the contours of black women’s social intimacy. In “Baby Mama,” chapter 4, I use the black teenage mother and the rhetoric of pathology surrounding her, particularly as it played out in the pages of Peoria’s newspaper, the Journal Star, in 1994, to enable a discussion about what Lindon Barrett refers to as the “spectre of bla(n)ckness.”⁶⁴Close Finally, in chapter 5, “In the Life,” I discuss the deaths of eight black women that occurred at the hands of a Peoria-area serial killer between 2003 and 2004. I end here because the relay between violence and value that structures that discussion is the off-ramp to a whole range of further discussions yet to be completed about black feminist practice, black social life, and what it means to be with and for black people.