By Jonathan Moore

“Is it possible to consider, let alone imagine, the agency of the performative when the black performative is inextricably linked with the specter of contented subjection, the tortuous display of the captive body, and the ravishing of the body that is the condition of the other’s pleasure?”

— Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection

“If lynching was a return to the slave block, a reinscribing of the black body as commodity, then lynching photographs functioned as the bill of sale and receipt of ownership.”

— Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle

 

I.

Saidiya Hartman writes of the constrained operability of the Black body to perform freedom that is shaped and sustained by anti-Black suffering.

“Beyond evidence… what does this exposure of the suffering body yield?”((Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, pg. 19.))

 

II.

Enter Gambino in the eternal warehouse of our dispossession, beautiful and quiet, his shirtless back turned to us, his skin a provocation, his hair the shape of restful sleep. He floats until the beat descends on his body and he transforms, a dam undone: gyrating and glistening in gold. He floats on a river, abs accordion. He smiles, bears teeth, twists his face and pulsates his body—our body. His chest protects the smallest of us.

He shoots a Black man execution style, head bagged in burlap. Or do we shoot him together? It all happens so fast… this sexy showcase of mutual disappearance. In case we did not know, he tells us: yes, this is America, and the joy of confirmation washes over me, the thrill of righteous bloodletting sinks its teeth.

What better way to know we are still alive than shoot ourselves and watch the blood pour out of another Black man’s skull?

We float on a river of blood to the children, some of whom have collected the gun and the body, and he is cooler now. More comfortable in our body. The uniformed youth, being unrelated and uninterested in the dead Black people, follow Gambino’s lead. He continues rapping and by now I know that this meal is gluten-free, this family recipe tried and true.

We dance into a sterile room populated by an all-Black choir belting out, as choirs do, the bridge. To where exactly I can’t be sure until his hands reach for the assault rifle and my hands sweat, heavy with our heavy, light with the light he cannot bear to fight for, and I now know where this ends. His chest is a steeple I am not safe inside of. The choir has exhausted its function and is ended unceremoniously, their bridge demolished and us on the other side of living.

In the left-hand corner of the riser, a tall Black man falls with his palms open, slightly cushioning his choreographed fall. A small refusal of all this clumsy wanting.

I pause the screen at the exact moment before he becomes the horizontal echo of someone’s son and though I cannot see his eyes from here, I want to believe they are wide with condemnation.

 

III.

A week after the music video for “This is America” premiered, Donald Glover admitted he has no interest in reading any of the countless pieces published in response. “I don’t wanna be in them—it’s too much for me. I’m really sensitive,” he told Jimmy Kimmel. It is not the brutal dramatization of a massacre in Denmark Vesey’s church that resulted in 9 dead, but instead the critique of his work that Glover cannot bear to witness.

 

IV.

Donald Glover and I open a hardcover Where’s Waldo? but instead of the red-and-white Brit, we are searching for Dylann Roof. We eye the flamboyant pages of our times, scanning for any sign of the orange-robed soldier. “Here!” I yelp, placing my finger on the inner crease of the book where he stands, smirking, the Burger King bag from his state-sponsored lunch still damp with oil. Glover turns the page, trapping my finger in the crease as he pays no mind, continuing to search for any sign of the man. I stare perplexed until he puts the book down and raises his right index finger to my temple, landing on the small block of bone between my eyebrows. “There,” he says. “I’ve found him.”

 

V.

Lynching is America’s most enduring spectator sport. As Leigh Raiford writes, mass mob lynchings were “about visibility, about spectacularizing white supremacy and the cohering of white subjectivity through and against “the spectacle of the dead black other.”((Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, pg. 39.)) Lynchings instilled fear in Black people as much, if not less so, than it produced ecstatic and unparalleled pleasure for white onlookers.

 

VI.

After tweeting that I learned nothing new or felt nothing good by watching “This is America,” a Black man emphatically responds, likening the dramatization of the Charleston massacre to Mamie Till-Mobley allowing Jet to publish photos of her son. As if she drowned him in the Tallahatchie herself, as if his bloated body were a bloody canvass predestined to make demons devout.

In a 1996 interview, Devery Anderson asked the late Till of her decision: “Were you thinking of the benefits to society, and what this would do for America?” She responded: “I didn’t even think of the benefits to society. The main thing I thought about was: ‘Let the world see what has happened, because there is no way I could describe this.’ And I needed somebody to help me tell what it was like.”

Uninterested in shaming or soliciting empathy from those who participated in the mundane and spectacular terrorizing of Black people, she refuses the logic of lynching. While she cannot revive her son (or prevent the murder of other Black people) by allowing his remains be displayed publicly, the wake((Christina Sharpe theorizes “the wake” as an invaluable analytic for thinking both the scripted and spontaneous persistence of Black and death in the afterlives of slavery. Sharpe figures “wake work” as caring for the Black dead and living– “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing” the afterlives of slavery “with our known lived and un/imaginable lives (“In the Wake: On Blackness and Being” pg. 18).”)) she calls Black people to perform at her side takes place under her vigilant and disbelieving eyes. She cares for her son in death.

 

VII.

Jesse Jackson wrote: “If the men who killed Emmett Till had known his body would free a people, they would have let him live.”((Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America))

This statement is grossly neglectful of the pleasure garnered from murdering Black people—a pleasure human beings partake in daily despite the (minute) possibility of facing punishment or retaliation—and a perverse figuration of a yet-realized world where Black people’s freedom is the yield of Emmett Till’s murder. We are “free” because Emmett is dead. More deviously, Jackson’s rhetorical flourish rests on the historically disproven notion that whites’ witnessing of Black death translates into caring for Black life.

 

VIII.

I am troubled by interpretations of careless recreations of anti-Black obliteration that figure these scenes as anything other than gross pleas for impossible empathy which Black people are structurally denied. As Hartman writes of abolitionist rhetoric that appealed to whites by encouraging them to imagine themselves as enslaved: “In making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration.”

Recreations of anti-Black violence in “This is America“ reek of an excessiveness intended not to care for Black people who live against the overwhelming force portrayed, but for those who have no vested interest in Black people surviving the destruction on display.

 

IX.

The title of this reflection speaks not only to whites’ terrible inventiveness in the pre-Jim Crow South, but to the enduring function of Black death in the 21st century. The current meaning of ingenuity (the quality of being clever, original, and inventive) arose by confusion of ingenious with ingenuous, meaning candid, or innocent. The slippage between the two marks the ease with which naivety is hailed as genius, simplicity extolled as intellect.

In an interview with The Independent, Childish Gambino’s creative director Ibra Ake said that “This is America” is the product of intense affective reduction. “We reduced it to a feeling ― a very black feeling, a very violent feeling, but also a very fun feeling,” he said. This style is clear throughout the video, whether manifested in Glover’s facial expressions, the prancing youth, the blood, the contagious choreography, the police cars etc.

The most interesting moment of the interview comes toward the end. “Our goal is to normalize [sp] blackness,” Ake says. “We’re trying to not have to explain ourselves to others and just exist, and not censor what our existence looks like as people.”

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of normalize is “to make conform to a norm or standard; to bring or restore to a normal condition.”

By normalizing “blackness,” does Gambino hope to portray Black life as conformed to the white standard of human and unrecognizable as Black (the brutality displayed might qualify this reasoning), or—equally troubling—is he interested in returning Black people on-screen to their “normal” condition of suffering?

If the on-screen slaughter of Black people is motivated by the (white supremacist) urge to liquidate grammars of difference used to illuminate how the experience of being human cannot be standardized, how do such representations come to be lauded as generative for Black imagining of other worlds? What distinguishes an effort to standardize or popularize complex representations of Black life from efforts to normalize anti-blackness by wantonly imaging anti-Black violence as avant-garde?

If the original condition of Black (not African) people in the modern world is one of domination and violation, chattel and chain gang, what do we make of art invested in relegating Black life to a past (and present) of permeative violence by giddily dramatizing scenes of subjection that Black people are well-acquainted with? How must we respond to this popular normalization of anti-blackness—the ultimate goal of lynching—in this dawning age of virality?

 

X.

Enter Gambino in the eternal warehouse of our dispossession, beautiful and quiet, his shirtless back turned to us, his skin a provocation, his hair the shape of restful sleep. He floats until the beat descends on his body and he transforms, a dam undone: gyrating and glistening in gold. He floats on a river, abs accordion. He smiles, bears teeth, twists his face and pulsates his body—our body. His chest protects the smallest of us. It all happens so fast, this sexy showcase, this indulgent disappearance. What better way to know we are still here than to move together?

We float on a river of someone else’s blood to our children and we are restless in our bodies. When his hands reach for the assault rifle, my hands sweat, heavy with his heavy, light with the light we have died for. His chest a steeple we are not safe inside of. We are not safe anywhere.

The choir sings. The killer arrives. In the left-hand corner of the riser, a tall Black man falls with his palms open, slightly cushioning his fall.

A small refusal. We watch and learn.

Suggested Reading:

“‘What Does It Mean to Be Black and Look at This?’ A Scholar Reflects on the Dana Schutz Controversy” — Christina Sharpe interviewed by Siddhartha Mitter, Hyperallergic (March 24, 2017)

“Black Care” — Calvin Warren, liquid blackness, volume three, issue six

“TURF FEINZ in “R.I.P 211” TURFING in Oakland | YAK FILMS” — TURF FEINZ, Youtube (Uploaded December 17, 2009)

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The essays, poetry and reviews of  Jonathan Jacob Moore, or Jon Jon, have  appeared in Drøme Magazine, The James Franco Review, The Poetry Project, Vinyl, and elsewhere. Jon Jon is Book Reviewer at the Shade Journal, Fellowship Director at Winter Tangerine, and a PhD student in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley.

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