Black Power: A History of Black Commodification and Future of Potential Subversion
this was a difficult birth
1. HUNGRY EYES
For however much the relationship between white supremacy and Black subjugation has changed through the bitter cold of the past centuries, here and now in year 2012, the wind which carries the song of change still remains perpetually stagnate. As our bodies enter through the front of the theater, as our bodies sit in the front of the bus, as strange fruit no longer swings from the trees, those bodies still remain at the exterior of society: mindless, sensuous flesh bearing fruits which do not swing, they falls rotten next to the stump—dead on arrival, too many of us never grow into future.
Our enslavement moves forward, we draw our eyes close and turn away; perhaps after almost four centuries we are just too damn tired right now. Tired of being stepped past, spat on, shot at; tired of blackness and its baggage. Blackness, by the way, is a series of identifying sociocultural traditions, characteristics, stereotypes historically attributed to people of African descent by European traders, slave owners, and later American settlers of the same regard. Blackness has always been purposed in the ever hungry mouth of the widening capitalist economy as a commodity—defined by Marx as “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort of another.” (26) Because we see so much of the horror of past, we have for a long time left our eyes shut to the horror of the present.
I argue that somewhere down the line, like when The Civil and Voters Rights Acts passed, Blackness didn’t become liberated, didn’t become welcomed, and it didn’t become desirable: Blackness didn’t stop being Black; meaning Blackness didn’t stop being used as a commodity, a “nigger-thing.” (Judy) Legal integration was a paltry shuffling into a familiar social positioning—a bait and switch which left us with even less than we had: Blackness abandoned itself in the fervor for riches and fell into the evil clutches of the global techno-capitalist economy. So let me, from here, attempt to explain, to you, how enslavement is what it has been for Black people, how it continues to be, but also how it can be the tool which may undo slavery and part open our future like the biblical sea our ancestors drew strength from, for “ the value of the nigger is not in the physical body itself, but in the energy, the potential force, that the body contains. That force is there in the nigger body, standing-in-reserve, as it were, for its owner to consume as he/she likes. That force is the thing the planter owns. It is the property of the planter that is the nigger. The nigger is that thing.” (Judy 223) Forget Noah’s Ark, I think we’re old enough and I think we’ve rested enough to open our eyes, to become the masters of our own potential, and to build our own ship; and sail.
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