Still, nobody mean more: Engaging black feminist pedagogies on questions of the citizen and human in anti-Blackqueer times

ABSTRACT

Still, Nobody Mean More explores how Black youth constructed as queer subjects by state apparatuses and sociocultural institutions encounter, survive, and resist premature death. Engaging with women and queer of color theories this paper interrogates how the queerness of Blackness works to erase certain subjects from contemporary political campaigns eliding claims to the status option or protection of the citizen and/or human. Specifically, this paper, through the cases of recently slain Baltimoreans, Mya Hall, Korryn Gaines, and Freddie Gray, explores the question embedded in #BlackLivesMatter – do they, and which ones? Illustrating how discourses of difference structure and mediate value, this paper ultimately turns to Black queer feminist pedagogies to imagine otherwise.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Blackness
• black feminist theory
• black queer theory
• curriculum
• performance pedagogy

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the issue's editors for a timely special issue. This essay has been part of an ongoing conversation I have been having at the intersections of Blackness, queerness and violence. Additionally, special thanks to the reviewers, as well as Leila Angod, Tomás Boatwright, Dominique C. Hill, and Malathi Iyengar for their critical reading, invaluable comments and sustained conversations during the various iterations of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I first witnessed PorshaOlayiwola perform, “Rekia Boyd” during Black Girl Genius Week, a celebration of Black girlhood in all of its complexities put on by SOLHOT at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The poem can also be found at Button Poetry (2014).

2. Blackqueer for me signals an intentional language shift and is my attempt at seeking new ways into understanding what it means to be queered by the state or to have a queer relationship with that state. Following the logic of Somerville (2000), Cohen (1997, 2010), Spillers (1987), and Holland (2000), the intention of the term is to understand how processes of racialization in the USA have fomented Black subjectivity as unintelligible, aberrant, excessive, beyond acceptable heteronormative machinations of productivity, and utility – Blackqueer. Further my carving out new language joins shifts across Black queer studies and within popular culture to note the linkages of Blackness and queerness – quare (Johnson, 2005), black/queer/diasporas (Allen, 2012), BlaQueer (Wilson, 2016).

3. Indebted to a robust and rich field, the legacy of Black queer scholarship, and queer of color scholarship in education, the argument I am making specifically here with regards to my usage of queer marks a slightly different trajectory, locating queerness within and beyond same sex desires, identities, and practices. Where I find synergy with the work of scholars such as Brockenbrough (2015), Coloma (2013), Cruz (2013), McCready (2010, 2013), and as I have written elsewhere (Callier, 2016), is in the need for educational practices to be more intersectional in approaches to addressing the safety and survival of Black youth and youth of color broadly (see also Pritchard, 2013). This paper further explores that notion, attending to subjects at the periphery, whose queerness is mediated through state practices and discourses.

4. Precarity as Sanya (2017) discusses in States of Discretion, demonstrates the fragility of privilege for Black people. Specifically, Sanya (2017) reveals through the excavation of print and audiovisual media archives as well as court case documents “how cases of legal and extralegal violence against Black immigrants [are] in relationship to similar acts of violence perpetuated against Black citizens in recent history” (p. 43). My usage of precarity is informed by Sanya's study of highly educated, Black immigrant experiences and how “the law fails to protect those who have successfully received documentation” (p.43). Furthermore, as Sanya (2017) states, “Thus to understand Black citizenship and immigration as disconnected or dichotomous erases the precarious nature of any privilege ascribed to a Black person in the U.S.” (p. 143). Finally, noting the similarities and differences between Black citizens and Black immigrants, Sanya's usage of precarity is useful to underscore the nefarious nature of anti-Blackness and its rendered effects.

5. Márquez (2012) in exploring the deaths of Black and Latino youth in Chicago, describes the “bloody-noble/street-decent binary” which operates in regards to responses from the media, celebrities, politicians, and society writ-large with regards to viewing a valuing certain deaths. This binary as Márquez (2012) outlines, the types of “hypervisible or a cause célèbre” deaths or, the “invisible norm forgotten” (p. 635). These death rituals, or the inability to mourn particular types of deaths stands in sharp contrasts to the sociocultural significance of funerals within Black communities. Throughout this essay, I am invested in how the scene of the perpetual Black body in mourning (Rankine, 2015), has also been utilized as a seen political action vis-à-vis ritualized performances. However, in this moment of perpetual mourning, does the spectacularized and quotidian nature of Black death and the resultant funeral/wake/mourning (televised) belie or betray previous aims like that of Mamie Till, to move the country towards action and to see what she saw and what they did to her baby (Rankine, 2015)?

6. The hypervisibility and invisibility of Blackness I am referring to harkens to both the saturation, virality, and overrepresentation of Black pain, suffering, and death circulated through media outlets as well as the same absence of Black joy, humanity, active presence, and representation (beyond tropes) within the same cultural spaces. It is the difference in which Alexander (1994) describes how the videotaped beating of Rodney King elicits a particular cultural history and memory for African-Americans. Further noting that this collective knowledge is antithetical to the ways Black bodies have been an “American national spectacle for centuries (p. 78).” At the center of Alexander's article is the idea that witnessing and watching Black pain garners different reactions and that these reactions are based upon one's subjectivity. Moreover, Alexander illustrates how this difference for African-American's in particular creates a collective cultural memory, which “would indelibly affect the very way that someone sees what is before them (p. 93).” The hyper/invisibility of Blackness, and the consumption, normalizing of (Black) death/trauma porn is also distinct from how other images are consumed and reproduced within US culture – e.g. the circulation and airing of 9/11 video footage (The Associated Press, 2006).

7. Darren Wilson the officer who non-discriminately shot and murdered unarmed teenager Michael Brown during his Grand Jury testimony, referred to Brown as an “it” a “demon” and read his behavior as aggressive and angry:

21 After seeing the blood on my hand, I 22 looked at him and he was, this is my car door, he 23 was here and he kind of stepped back and went like 24 this. 25 And then after he did that, he looked1 up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. I 2 The only way I can describe it, it looks like a 3 demon, that's how angry he looked. He comes back 4 towards me again with his hands up. 5 At that point I just went like this, 6 I tried to pull the trigger again, click, nothing 7 happened. (Grand Jury Testimony, pg. 224–225)

This type of language not only dehumanizes Brown, but narrates the altercation in a way which justifies Wilson's actions. Drawing on age old stereotypes of Black bodies as dangerous, violent, and less than human coupled with the presumed threat of large(r) Black male bodies Wilson effectively sets the stage for the inevitable justifiable death of Brown.

8. For the purposes of this essay, youth is defined within a Critical Youth Studies lens, loosely spanning 15 to 30 something year olds (Ibrahim & Steinberg, 2014). Thus, youth is not biologically determined, or constricted by age but rather refers to the relationship of a generation to social and cultural factors in distinct ways of preceding generations (e.g. usage, creation, and consumption of technology, popular culture, financial prospects, etc.). In this way, I am also taking up Brown (2009), in thinking about what it means to be marked by a “youthful” body.

9. The force was so violent; it was reported as needing to be akin to that of a car crash in order to do the damage to his spine, which resulted in leaving him in a coma.

10. Drawing attention to who is named or not named in death is not meant to create another list of value, but rather is used here to demonstrate the inconsistencies, contradictions, and missed opportunities in the virality and consumption of Black death often under the guise of racial justice. Furthermore, in highlighting here the distinctions of when, where, and to whom value is conferred as indicated through public discourse, local/national political actions, and quotidian practices, I wish to turn our attention to ways to attune ourselves to care (Sharpe, 2016). Specifically, in turning to care, how might we remember the dead, and how might we envision care in precarity, in anti-Blackness? Look like for and with those who endure anti-Blackness and queer antagonisms.

11. The knowledge produced from embracing the place no-citizen as Sharpe (2016) referencing Dionne Brand's interview with Maya Mavjee (2001) is about two choices one faces in knowing what it means to live Black life insisted in the interminable occurrence of Black death. Here, Sharpe drawing on Brand, sees the knowledge from this space as a lucky opportunity. Brand, “in her interview is quoted as saying, “In Map I talk about all these interpretations that you walk into unknowingly, almost from birth. If you ’re lucky you spend the rest of your life fighting them, if you're not, you spend your life unquestioningly absorbing” (as cited in Sharpe, 2016, p. 139).

12. Wake as Sharpe (2016) defines it consists of several definitions. Specifically, “Wakes are processes; through them we think about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which we enact grief and memory. Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside the body of the deceased from death to burial and the accompanying drinking, feasting, and other observances, a watching practiced as a religious observance. But wakes are also ‘the track left on the water's surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; in the line of sight of (an observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)’; finally, wake means being awake and, also, consciousness” (p. 21).

Additional information

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Durell M. Callier

Durell M. Callier is an assistant professor of critical youth studies and cultural studies of education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University. His current research documents, analyzes, and interrogates Black youth lived experiences as it intersects with constructions of race and queerness. In his research and creative projects, he employs feminist and queer methodologies to research how Black and queer communities broadly defined make use of art and narrative towards knowledge creation, staging critical resistance, and actualizing freedom.