Empty Hands, Borrowed Visage

What is appropriation to the dispossessed?

Time and time again I see my U.S. sibs become tangled in the quagmire of appropriation. Not often as participants, but instead as tired defenders of Black cultural sanctity who cannot name the discomfort that's associated with modern day blackface. 

This isn't a text to debate the minutiae of what non-Blacks believe is and is not Black cultural appropriation. Instead this text's purpose is to uncover an aspect of white supremacy where it lies unnoticed and venomous like a snake. 

Let me ask you, reader, what is cultural sharing between Black people and others? Sharing implies consent, intention, and reciprocity. You'll be hard pressed to find any one of those factors in the historical relationship between Black people and just about anyone else. In Jared Sexton's deconstruction of interracial relations in Amalgamation Schemes Sexton gives words to ethos of slavery as an underlying disjointedness that continues to fester within Blackness. Sexton proposes that Black people, "live in a permanent state of theft", and that Blackness itself is plagued by, "a perpetual and involuntary openess". When the box braid conversation rolls around for the umpteenth time for Black people's concerns to be brushed off, when Black people castigate minstrels who co-opt Black aesthetics and we're relegated to 'haters' of those non-Black folks, when Black people try to define our spiritualism as a closed practice and that is denied forthright we see the seams of this ontological disjointedness.  Black people are trying to carve out a cultural, racial, and ontological niche made by Black hands. This new identity, unfit for a Slave, is our effort to confront a world where we are supposedly 'free'. This freedom; one ill defined by even the letter of the law, is clearly not a freedom from racial regimes and white supremacy. Black people are free people but not free enough to have ownership of our own cultural identities. We are free people but not human enough to be spared of having our lives and bodies dissected and re-sold in the most lurid, commodifying, and exploitative ways. 

Neobilbeal capitalism, powered by centuries of racialized thinking has displayed more than ever that the Black, as in Blackness and Black people, has never escaped being the fulcrum of humanity. Blackness is the mat on which others wipe their feet, leaving behind only dirt and muck while making off with clean shoes. 

What cultural exchange can Black people have when we don't have possession of our identities in the first place? I propose that there cannot be one, not with so much unacknowledged dispossession, both past and present. This is not to deny the agency of Black people, but exclaiming your position can only go so far when every social apparatus refuses you time and time again.  

Why are Black people uniquely denied this cultural sanctity? The answer is of course, White supremacy, the many headed hydra that it is. 

While other ethnic groups suffer appropriation in forms like offensive costuming there's an implicit acknowledgement that there is less or no authenticity and that the outsider does not occupy legitimacy. Meanwhile, people who drape themselves in abstractions of Blackness attain the same cultural significance. In fact, some see non-Black's pilfering of Blackness as an elevation of Niggardly status. The flipping of Blackness from the maligned to the hyper visible is not a transition from imprisonment to freedom, but an exchange of one form of bondage for another. The commodification of the Black is another form of exploitation. It is the pimping of Black drama, trauma, aesthetic and affect to line the pockets of outsiders while simultaneously denying that there was a distinct Black culture to be stolen from in the first place. 

My Black cultural experience is one that is infringed upon by ideas that Blackness can be bought and sold with surgeries and falsified accents and fetishism of Black flesh. This is a conception that can only be birthed when the Black is equal to the commodity, it's visage able to be embodied as easily as you'd slip on a smock. 

This tug-of-war between the Black and Non-Black is the tension I feel when speaking about appropriation. It's an argument between two parties with completely antithetical logics. The only ethos of Black life that includes Black autonomy and sanctity is a radical life for the sole fault of refusing to be a Slave. This was the life that the ancestors who petitioned the U.S. government for autonomous land faced, this is the life the Maroons faced, this was the life faced by elders of the Black Liberation Army and this is the life I commit myself too.