Between books, events, and media, the last couple weeks has been an interesting vortex for me in terms of the American experience in regards to Black & White. In the basic speech class that I teach, the textbook urges that we be careful and specific in the way that we address and discuss individuals. At times this seems to indicate what some would write off as "politically correct address" or as some of my students have termed it "pacification, conflict avoidance, and bullshit". In my classes and in the afore-mentioned comment discussion I had about the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I tried to emphasize the effort that we need to make as Americans and human beings to interact with each other in an I-Thou interaction--as though meeting another Self instead of an Other. During impromptu speeches, one of my students received the topic "What is one thing that you would like to see in your lifetime?" and he chose to speak on a vocabulary shift from "African-American, Asian-American, White-American" to "American"... he's a rather powerful speaker already and I get echoes of MLK's "all of God's children". Another student responded to the question "what one person from history would you like to meet and why?" that he would like to meet Dr. King so that he could ask the civil rights leader if he felt that his death had been worth it. The student referenced Trayvon Martin and said repeatedly "because I don't think it was. I don't think it was."
Finally, I encountered this blog posting which discusses the recent popular series The Hunger Games and the just released movies. Specifically at issue here is the presence of black bodies in the film and a particular audience response of young people tweeting their disappointment and disgust at the casting of black actors for characters that they did not read as "black bodies". I choose that term, borrowing from Harvey Young, because the comments that this blog poster cites deliberately see and comment on the actors as "black bodies" instead of as individuals. The blogger and several comments argue (having read the books, I can attest) that these readers failed to read the specificity of the book in writing them as characters with "dark skin." But some of the readers did and substituted lighter readings of "dark"--not meaning lighter "black" but "not-black".
Having grown up and matriculated through very diverse schools, I identify with one young woman who commented on the above blog. While aware of racism, I am not frequently the target of it and I have not been physically witness to it's more blatantly ugly forms. My default is to perceive it as a thing for old curmudgeons or hicks--ignorant people, not people like me. However, what I have come to believe with increasing strength is that passive response, pretending it does not exist, or innocently ignoring allows it to continue.
The solution is actively acknowledging, countering, and working to reclaim the dialogue. By reclaim, I cite Harvey Young's definition of reclamation:
"Re-claiming does not require that we erase the past and script a new one. The prefix tells us this. To reclaim is to take something back. It is to possess something in the present while knowing that i has only recently been back in your possession. It is to remain aware of its previous "claims" even as you articulate your own. It is to know the past in the present as you work toward creating a future." (135)
In reclaiming, I included all of us who are defined by the gaze of another--whatever our skin tone, gender, clothing, sexuality, mannerisms, body shape and size, etc. I also include all of us who are innocently unaware or exhaustedly ignoring, or injured and buying-in to try and relieve the pain. It's difficult, I think, because the easy response is the angry one; the hard response is to deal with those who carelessly or maliciously utter/type the words. Opening eyes is a lot harder than closing them.
To add to the discussion about the black body onstage: Here is a link to a Riverside production (in the Inland Empire, my home town really, it's pretty big) that premiered this year called "Dreamscape". It centers on and reframes a shooting that happened 14 years ago in which a black teenage girl was shot 24 times by white police officers. The play takes place in the moment of the shooting, punctuated by each bullet that connects with the girl's body. The other character chronicles each hit, while the girl responds. This article and production were shared with my by a friend in response to my posting of the above link about the Hunger Games. She didn't know how particularly it would relate. Both Young and George-Graves write about plays and performances that use the stage to highlight the metonymization of the "black body" and reclaim the pieces as parts of whole individuals rather than "both an externally applied projection blanketed across black bodies and an internalization of the projected image by black folk" (Young 13). Young writes about Parks "Venus" and "In the Blood", McCauley's "Sally's Rape", and Orlandersmith's "Yellowman", while Georges-Graves writes about Urban Bush Women's productions like "Batty Moves", "Hair Stories", and "Hand Singing Song". In all cases, the tension between the conceptual black body and the individual body is present. Both authors discuss the productions, scripts, and performances work to re-individualize, re-contextualize, re-vitalize, and re-claim the body for whole individuals.
"Dreamscape"'s act of highlighting the violence done to individual body parts while allowing the actress to connect those parts back to her particular life is a powerful embodiment of precisely the reclamation that Young and Georges-Graves are describing. Young writes that his premise is "that a remarkable similarity, a repetition with a difference, exists among embodied black experiences" (5) That the projection of a conceptual "black body" results in individuals, who are distinct and different selves, experiencing similar treatment, responses, behavior.
What I find ultimately hopeful about Young's writings, the above play, and the discourse that my postings have generated is the knowledge that "We are never entirely trapped by our habitus" (which Young defines as "the generative principle of regulated improvisation . . . [or] social expectations . . . incorporated into the individual" and the expectations that the individual projects back at society and individuals" 20). But the questions and the issues brought up are complex and unsettling, requiring continued dialogue.
George-Graves, Nadine. Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working it Out. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. Print.
Young, Harvey. Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Print.
Finally, I encountered this blog posting which discusses the recent popular series The Hunger Games and the just released movies. Specifically at issue here is the presence of black bodies in the film and a particular audience response of young people tweeting their disappointment and disgust at the casting of black actors for characters that they did not read as "black bodies". I choose that term, borrowing from Harvey Young, because the comments that this blog poster cites deliberately see and comment on the actors as "black bodies" instead of as individuals. The blogger and several comments argue (having read the books, I can attest) that these readers failed to read the specificity of the book in writing them as characters with "dark skin." But some of the readers did and substituted lighter readings of "dark"--not meaning lighter "black" but "not-black".
Having grown up and matriculated through very diverse schools, I identify with one young woman who commented on the above blog. While aware of racism, I am not frequently the target of it and I have not been physically witness to it's more blatantly ugly forms. My default is to perceive it as a thing for old curmudgeons or hicks--ignorant people, not people like me. However, what I have come to believe with increasing strength is that passive response, pretending it does not exist, or innocently ignoring allows it to continue.
The solution is actively acknowledging, countering, and working to reclaim the dialogue. By reclaim, I cite Harvey Young's definition of reclamation:
"Re-claiming does not require that we erase the past and script a new one. The prefix tells us this. To reclaim is to take something back. It is to possess something in the present while knowing that i has only recently been back in your possession. It is to remain aware of its previous "claims" even as you articulate your own. It is to know the past in the present as you work toward creating a future." (135)
In reclaiming, I included all of us who are defined by the gaze of another--whatever our skin tone, gender, clothing, sexuality, mannerisms, body shape and size, etc. I also include all of us who are innocently unaware or exhaustedly ignoring, or injured and buying-in to try and relieve the pain. It's difficult, I think, because the easy response is the angry one; the hard response is to deal with those who carelessly or maliciously utter/type the words. Opening eyes is a lot harder than closing them.
To add to the discussion about the black body onstage: Here is a link to a Riverside production (in the Inland Empire, my home town really, it's pretty big) that premiered this year called "Dreamscape". It centers on and reframes a shooting that happened 14 years ago in which a black teenage girl was shot 24 times by white police officers. The play takes place in the moment of the shooting, punctuated by each bullet that connects with the girl's body. The other character chronicles each hit, while the girl responds. This article and production were shared with my by a friend in response to my posting of the above link about the Hunger Games. She didn't know how particularly it would relate. Both Young and George-Graves write about plays and performances that use the stage to highlight the metonymization of the "black body" and reclaim the pieces as parts of whole individuals rather than "both an externally applied projection blanketed across black bodies and an internalization of the projected image by black folk" (Young 13). Young writes about Parks "Venus" and "In the Blood", McCauley's "Sally's Rape", and Orlandersmith's "Yellowman", while Georges-Graves writes about Urban Bush Women's productions like "Batty Moves", "Hair Stories", and "Hand Singing Song". In all cases, the tension between the conceptual black body and the individual body is present. Both authors discuss the productions, scripts, and performances work to re-individualize, re-contextualize, re-vitalize, and re-claim the body for whole individuals.
"Dreamscape"'s act of highlighting the violence done to individual body parts while allowing the actress to connect those parts back to her particular life is a powerful embodiment of precisely the reclamation that Young and Georges-Graves are describing. Young writes that his premise is "that a remarkable similarity, a repetition with a difference, exists among embodied black experiences" (5) That the projection of a conceptual "black body" results in individuals, who are distinct and different selves, experiencing similar treatment, responses, behavior.
What I find ultimately hopeful about Young's writings, the above play, and the discourse that my postings have generated is the knowledge that "We are never entirely trapped by our habitus" (which Young defines as "the generative principle of regulated improvisation . . . [or] social expectations . . . incorporated into the individual" and the expectations that the individual projects back at society and individuals" 20). But the questions and the issues brought up are complex and unsettling, requiring continued dialogue.
George-Graves, Nadine. Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working it Out. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. Print.
Young, Harvey. Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Print.
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