“Why Did the White Woman Cross the Street?”: Cultural Countermeasures against Affective Forms of Racism

Abstract

This article outlines the distinct logics that govern embodied, affective forms of anti-Black racism in order to theorize cultural countermeasures that disrupt them. I argue that attempting to dismantle affective forms of racism by creating “positive” representations of Black people is an ineffective strategy in the long term. This approach tends to amplify investments in racial exceptionalism, fetishism, and restrictive conditions of acceptability, ultimately leaving Eurocentric epistemological and ontological frameworks intact. Instead, I consider cultural methodologies and epistemological frames that allow the complexities of Black ontology to thrive and proliferate. I examine Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly for the ways it uses Black epistemological frames and methods that hold the potential to diminish affective forms of racism.

Keywords:

• affective racism
• antiracist countermeasures
• black epistemologies
• embodied racism
• implicit racial bias
• improvisation
• positive stereotypes
• respectability politics

Notes

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); George Yancy, Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012); Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, and Laurie A. Rudman, “Social Justice in Our Minds, Homes, and Society: The Nature, Causes, and Consequences of Implicit Bias,” Social Justice Research 17, no. 2 (June 2004): 129–42.

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There are important reasons to consider preventative countermeasures to affective racism rather than focusing solely on correctives. Research has shown that, in automatic, affective, and implicit domains, formative associations are more difficult to undo than subsequent ones. As Aiden P. Gregg, Beate Seibt, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Patricia Devine argue, implicit preferences are “easier done than undone.” Aiden P. Gregg, Beate Seibt, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Easier Done than Undone: Asymmetry in the Malleability of Implicit Preferences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90, no. 1 (January 2006): 1–20. It therefore stands to reason that people whose affective and automatic associations are formatively shaped by complex cultural practices and representations of Black people rather than normative racist stereotypes would be less susceptible to deeply entrenched forms of embodied racism.

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Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 133; Paula Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness, Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Marshall Wise Alcorn, Resistance to Learning: Overcoming the Desire-Not-To-Know in Classroom Teaching (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Rudman, “Social Justice in Our Minds, Homes, and Society.”

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Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (May 16, 2011).

Rudman, “Social Justice in Our Minds, Homes, and Society,” 135–37.

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Dasgupta and Greenwald, On the Malleability of Automatic Attitudes.

Joy-Gaba and Nosek, “The Surprisingly Limited Malleability of Implicit Racial Evaluations.”

Ibid., 141.

The results were d = .17 and d = .14, respectively, compared to Dasgupta and Greenwald’s d = .82.

Calvin K. Lai, Maddalena Marini, Steven A. Lehr, Carlo Cerruti, Jiyun-Elizabeth L. Shin, Jennifer A. Joy-Gaba, Arnold K. Ho, Bethany A. Teachman, Sean P. Wojcik, Spassena P. Koleva, et al., “Reducing Implicit Racial Preferences: I. A Comparative Investigation of 17 Interventions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143, no. 4 (August 2014): 1771–75, doi:10.1037/a0036260.

Darnell M. Hunt, ed., “Black Content, White Control,” in Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1965), 85.

Hypothetically, if only white negative representations and positive Black representations were repeated and circulated over four hundred years, we would likely reduce implicit racial preferences for whites. But while this hypothetical proposition would theoretically reverse who is targeted by implicit bias, it would not necessarily change the epistemological frames that undergird racism.

Brittney Cooper, “Black America’s Bill Cosby Nightmare: Why It’s so Painful to Abandon the Lies That He Told,” Salon.com, July 9, 2015, https://www.salon.com/2015/07/09/black_americas_bill_cosby_nightmare_why_its_so_painful_to_abandon_the_lies_that_he_told/ (accessed October 15, 2017).

Ibid.

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005); Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, & Class, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1981).

Hunt, “Black Content, White Control,” 13; Riggs et al., Ethnic Notions; Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics.

Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, “White Responses: The Emergence of ‘Enlightened’ Racism,” in Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America, edited by Darnell M. Hunt (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), 74–88.

Bill Yousman, “Blackophilia and Blackophobia: White Youth, the Consumption of Rap Music, and White Supremacy,” Communication Theory 13, no. 4 (November 1, 2003): 366–91.

Cedric J Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), xiii.

Rudman, “Social Justice in Our Minds, Homes, and Society,” 137.

Darnell Hunt, Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15.

Hunt, “Black Content, White Control”; Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop—and Why It Matters (New York: BasicCivitas, 2008); Gray, Cultural Moves.

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 116; Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism.

Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, xi–xii.

Ibid., xii.

Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 32.

Clyde Adrian Woods, “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon, and the Return to the Source,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 427–53; Clyde Adrian Woods, “Les Misérables of New Orleans: Trap Economics and the Asset Stripping Blues, Part 1,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 769–96; Clyde Adrian Woods, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?: Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues,” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2005): 1005–18; Clyde Adrian Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (London; New York: Verso, 1998).

Woods, “Katrina’s World,” 429–30.

Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music (Middletown, VT: Wesleyan, 2011), 195–96, http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docDetail.action?docID=10468459 (accessed June 1, 2016).

Qtd. in Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 33.

Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 34.

Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, New ed. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003), 182.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe; New York; Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013), 51.

Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 33.

Patricia Devine et al., “Long-Term Reduction in Implicit Race Bias: A Prejudice Habit-Breaking Intervention,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, no. 6 (November 2012): 1267–78.

Kai Sassenberg and Gordon B Moskowitz, “Don’t Stereotype, Think Different! Overcoming Automatic Stereotype Activation by Mindset Priming,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 41, no. 5 (2005): 507.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Laurie A. Rudman, Richard D. Ashmore, and Melvin L. Gary, “‘Unlearning’ Automatic Biases: The Malleability of Implicit Prejudice and Stereotypes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 5 (2001): 860; Laurie A. Rudman et al., “Measuring the Automatic Components of Prejudice: Flexibility and Generality of the Implicit Association Test,” Social Cognition 17, no. 4 (December 1999): 437–65.

See, for example: Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark; Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads; Small, Music Culture; Robin Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Reprint ed. (New York, NY: Free Press, 2010); Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey, eds., Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose, First ed. (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1992); Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); John F Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997); bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: The New Press, 1995); Perry, Prophets of the Hood.

MTV, Kendrick Lamar Breaks Down Tracks From “To Pimp A Butterfly” (Pt. 1) | MTV News, interview by Rob Markman, March 31, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUEI_ep9iDs (accessed August 12, 2016).

Ibid.

MTV, Kendrick Lamar Breaks Down “Mortal Man” & His Connection to 2Pac (Pt. 4) | MTV News, interview by Rob Markman, April 1, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUEI_ep9iDs (accessed August 12, 2016).

Greg Tate, “Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly,” Rolling Stone, March 19, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/kendrick-lamar-to-pimp-a-butterfly-20150319 (accessed May 18, 2016).

Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 51.

Haltiwanger, “How Kendrick Lamar Is Proof Hip-Hop Can Influence Society In Big Ways”; jdmellin, Anti Donald Trump Protest Rally March at Trump Tower, Chicago—Kendrick Lamar, We Gon’ Be Alright; Jamilah King, “The Improbable Story of How Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Alright’ Became a Protest Anthem,” Mic, February 11, 2016, https://mic.com/articles/134764/the-improbable-story-of-how-kendrick-lamar-s-alright-became-a-protest-anthem (accessed November 5, 2017); Wochit News, Activists Chant Kendrick Lamar’s Alright.

Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 195–248.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paula Ioanide

Paula Ioanide is a mother, prison abolition organizer, writer, and Associate Professor of comparative race and ethnicity studies at the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity, Ithaca College. Her research examines the role of emotion in contemporary instances of racist violence as well as the dignity, integrity, and ethical witnessing fostered by racial and feminist justice movements. Ioanide is the author of The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness (Stanford University Press, 2015) and co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Antiracism Inc.: Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters (Punctum Books, 2018). She has also published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, A Journal of Haitian Studies, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, and The New York Times.