Blackness: A Conversation

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MOHAMMED ELNAIEM AND CASES REBELLES

In this epistolary conversation, two complementary yet distinct perspectives on global blackness are articulated. While Mohammed Elnaiem verbalizes his discontent with the way a US-centric epistemology on blackness has led to “transhistorical generalizations” and the distancing from Third World socialism, Cases Rebelles prefer focusing on how the shared experiences of anti-blackness around the world can lead to powerful forms of solidarities, far from academic theories that only affect marginally political movements.

Dear Cases Rebelles,

Comrades, 

As I’m writing to you about “blackness,” I must share my concern on how it is being both perceived and defined in the Anglosphere these days. But before talking about “blacknesss,” I can perhaps start with its antonym: anti-blackness. Let me describe what it has meant to me at a more personal level. During my late teens, I lived in Malaysia. I had always inhabited a black body, but during those days in particular, I quite literally experienced routine terror because of that fact. In one instance, Malaysian gangsters on bikes (Mat Rempits) surrounded my friends and I, and cowardly spat on us while they drove away. On an otherwise unfussy night, one threatened to slit my throat as he waved his knife in front of my face—in that case, some Mat Rempits who thought of me as “one of the good ones” actually came to my rescue. They would commonly call us “Awang Hitam,” a seemingly benign word which was encoded with the common refrain that to be African is to be criminal. As far as both the petty thieves, and broader middle-class society were concerned, the terror was vigilantism. Those who engaged in it saw themselves not as mere petty criminals, but as an extralegal force keeping the primal predisposition to crime of Africans like myself checked and tamed while legal means of denying us our rights were being innovated on a daily basis. There was, in this sense, an unspoken alliance between the rempits and the police; when the police stopped us, it wasn’t because we committed a crime. They could invent the crime if need be. It was because, unlike the white tourist, we could be made to stop. At roadblocks, the common question was: “Do you want this the easy way or the hard way?” Nobody I know decided to engage in a one-person act of resistance and find out what the hard way was, but the easy way was a simple bribe. A bribe to pass and a bribe to exist.

I won’t mention too much the moral panics, the landlords that refused to rent out to us, or go into detail about the televised and humiliating drug searches that were designed to keep middle-class Malaysians (including the racialized and dark-skinned Tamils, who themselves knew the taste of our suffering) feeling safe. I only mention all of this to first signal that there is *something* which seems unique about racism directed towards a particular kind of blackness. There is an obvious kind of blackness, which is imputed onto a particular kind of African body, and one which raises moral panics from Tunis to Guangzhou. And there is also something quite absurd about this anti-blackness. While Trump was calling Covid the “China Virus,” in China, African residents were not only banned from going into some malls and eating establishments but many were evicted and thrown out of their own homes. It is quite hard to make sense of this: even where Covid likely took hold, Africans were forced to pay for it.

All sorts of alliances seem to be possible against that body which is racialized as black. I am, as you can probably imagine, moved quite personally trying to make sense of this. But it seems that many of our US friends who are offering answers to this question—or rather transhistorical generalizations to it—are intent on telling all black people to be suspicious (if not to see as the potential enemy) of all who are “non-black.” With this one statement, I fear the whole Third-World liberation project that our predecessors held onto is being dispensed of. There is not yet any consensus on how this discursive border-making process should be restricted. Just who counts as black and non-black anyways? It is not an easy question because one is never really black or white except relative to somebody else.

This proposition I recognize, many will interpret as blasphemy.

So let me clarify. Today, unlike the Sudanese or even Albanians, the British see it as a patriotic duty to treat Ukrainians seeking safety as white. This was not always so. I remember a time, not long ago, when to be Ukrainian, like to be Polish, meant that your whiteness was conditional and certainly not universally accepted. The leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage, once felt comfortable enough to say that it is understandable for an Englishman to be afraid of Romanians moving in next door. What allows for a Ukrainian to be white and an Albanian a threat to whiteness, seems arbitrary, connected among other things to geopolitical happenstance and the war on terror. Why, until today, the Sami people, despite their supposed blue eyes and blonde hair, have failed to pass into whiteness in Scandinavia, is rooted in absurdity. Racial classificatory systems escape generalization because they are always historically and geographically bound. It is also because they are not real, they are based on fiction. Nobody, it bears remembering, is black in any real sense of the word. They are racialized as black. The very idea of calling ourselves black is a political act.   

In Sudan, one can be Red, Brown, Green, Yellow, and the darkest—sometimes called “Abeed” (slaves)—Blue (often reserved for South Sudanese). These are all racial indices which make sense in Sudan, and thankfully seem stupid elsewhere. This may seem absurd, but it is not the craziest regime of racialization. In The Black Jacobins (1938), CLR James remarked that mostly out of fear, the planters in present-day Haiti:  

“divided the offspring of white and black and intermediate shades into 128 divisions. The true Mulatto was the child of the pure black and the pure white. The child of the white and the Mulatto woman was a quarteron with 96 parts white and 32 parts black. But the quarteron could be produced by the white and the marabou in the proportion of 88 to 40, or by the-white and the sacatra, in the proportion of 72 to 56 and so on all through the 128 varieties.”

Behind all of this absurdity, CLR James remarked, was the fear of a slave uprising. It seems that the purpose of anti-blackness is to entrench fragile foundations. I once heard a dark joke. A northern Sudanese in New York was pushed into a fit of fury and screamed to his Southern Sudanese interlocutor that he was a slave. The Southern Sudanese in hysterical laughter, responded “We’re all Ni**ers here.” The joke raises a broader question: how can there be an alleged coalition of solidarity between the non-black person of color and white supremacy, when there is no universal acceptance of who counts as black, even among those of us who are black? This “discovery” that has been made by a few African American academics rests on tenuous grounds, and it is certainly not persuasive enough of an answer for what certainly does seem to be a very real problem of global anti-blackness. But it is the political conclusion that worries me most. We are told that we have to stick it alone; that we must put “our” own interests before all else, even the dispossessed and colonized subjects of Israeli apartheid, the Afro-pessimist tells us, are our oppressors. This isn’t entirely foreign to the history of black politics, but it has historically always been associated with the most reactionary wing. 

Am I wrong to be worried that all of the wisdom of the black Radical Tradition is being disposed of today? Historically, asking our kin to identify as black meant asking people to abandon their other identities. In Africa, it has explicitly been a call to unify. Globally, and this is an inconvenient truth to some, it was an invitation that was extended to Aboriginal people in Australia and New Zealand, Indians in South Africa and Guyana, and Africans in the diaspora and the Continent. It was this form of blackness, which will likely not return to its old form, which wedded blackness to a politics of anti-imperialism.

Despite my experiences of anti-blackness, or perhaps because of them, I truly believe that the struggle of the 21st century is still the struggle against the global color line. It is certainly true that all sorts of ungodly alliances against blacks are taking place. But today in Britain where I live, it is not only the non-black people of color who are the new pundits of the far right. We have a brown Prime Minister, a brown Home Office Minister, and a black Foreign Minister, who have all promised to “stop the boats” and send refugees that look like them to Rwanda. No more than ever, it seems to me, we must not be parochial.

Best, 
Mohammed 

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Dear Mohammed,

We would like to thank you for sharing your experience of anti-blackness in different territories with us, and thank you very much for all your analyses.

The question of shared experience does indeed seem crucial to us. Sharing an identity assignment (i.e. blackness) is in no way tantamount to a shared experience. But if the underlying question is that of solidarity, the ability to join forces in order to fight back, let us be honest and admit that a shared experience doesn’t intrinsically lead to solidarity either. Therefore we believe blackness is not solely defined by shared suffering, socio-economic condition, class and race-based exploitation or otherwise. In our everyday lives, we can recognize these traces of blackness in each other, whether in close friends, comrades in struggle, potential allies or potential enemies. A blackness forged in all the imprecision and vagueness of race taxonomy. This phenotypic wager– as it has been projected and imprinted on a significant portion of the peoples of Africa and its diaspora, and which some attempted to make more scientific and homogeneous by means of racial geographies. Of “black Africa.” Subsaharian. Black here has nothing to do with a staid chromatic analysis. Black people may not have “black” skin and have all kinds of complexion: having a so-called light skin, whether one is mixed or not, does not mean you’re not black. Thinking otherwise, to us, feeds into the hazardous and phantasmatic logic of racial purity.

In France, it has been extremely rare for us to meet any other individual or group referring to themselves as black outside of people sharing this black-African ancestry, except for some Melanasian or Indo-Caribbean people. Yet, when trying to define black and blackness, and thus mark out a racial assignment, one cannot escape grappling with the illusion that broadening blackness brings about an extension of solidarities. Believing that is the most banal and fruitless form of universalist thinking. This injunction to neutralize identities in large ensembles is extremely common in France: it lies at the heart of the French republican ideology. As if solidarities could only exist in some sort of identitarian fusion. Besides, wouldn’t it be lending blackness a great deal of political power to think that it would necessarily be desirable to apply it to others? And doesn’t it take a part in reinforcing a black / white binary vision of race?

To try and define blackness, in our time and in English, is to project oneself into a theoretical field where US-centered black thought has produced an enormous number of generalizing, totalizing and pithy statements. In the French-speaking world, there is not even a consensus on the French word for blackness. Négritude? Noirceur? Noirité? Noireté? However, it shows that blackness has de facto existed and survived without the help of a black intelligentsia. It has survived in its superficiality and its political power.

Does our conversation have to respond to the most amplified voices? The idea that in the world of blackness, there are one or two current conversations, one of whose centers is the US, is, it seems to us, extremely detrimental to the emergence of new concepts. Of course, we are sorry to see sweeping statements being made from black scholars and activists about other oppressed groups’s anti-blackness. But we do have to point out we didn’t become aware of the anti-blackness of our non-white comrades through the words of North American academics and thinkers. We grew up with this harsh reality. We didn’t need North American academics and thinkers either to get tired of the systematic use of pro-Palestinian solidarity as the sole yardstick of political radicalism.

Our understanding of blackness comes from our childhood, school, the street, family. A world with little English language permeated, no “black Radical tradition,” no modern “one-drop rule,” but a world where we had little difficulty recognizing each other as black. We’re not a political collective through the magic of blackness; it’s the political investment of blackness in revolutionary struggle and social progress that makes up the basis of a collective action in which blackness is only one thing we have in common: it’s a necessary basis, but not a sufficient one.

How powerful is this blackness? The criminal acts currently being committed against black people in Tunisia touch us deeply. We are affected by their scale and brutality, but also by their systemic and repetitive nature. We are really affected but what we can do from here is particularly limited: we are not on the ground, and we have no economic or political power that would cross borders. Our common blackness (in the most superficial sense) doesn’t prevent us from being first and foremost powerless spectators.

If these people hadn’t been black and another dynamic had been at play, we’d be experiencing the same kind of feeling, minus the universality of rejection and violence against black people. Where it affects us more personally is that although we’ve grown up and built ourselves politically with people from North Africa, we’ve always experienced a very strong anti-blackness on the part of some non-black people among them.

Is this anti-blackness an alignment with white supremacy? We don’t know, and does it really matter? In our bodies, these experiences of anti-blackness hit the same as white anti-blackness even if we know this doesn’t make their practitioners white. Meanwhile, whether we recognize common ground with black people in the U.S., Europe, Africa, or the Caribbean doesn’t change the fact that, at some point, in order to work politically in our geographical reality, we have to create alliances with other non-white people here. And therefore with human groups where anti-blackness is persistent. And in the same way, we’ve worked to consider the anti-blackness of poor whites and that of the rich differently, while fighting both. Why? Because we know that, at some point, we have to be able to create class solidarities to fight the systems that oppress us on the territory that we share. Coming together in a black collective gives us the strength and capacity to join with others temporarily, in order to build politically.

For us, it’s a constant gymnastics to work on political solidarity as black people, bearing in mind that we don’t share a common definition of blackness, that we don’t share the same political interests and the same analyses. If we take the example of our regular work with Sudanese activists here in Nantes, we are forced to note that we have often failed to rally pan-African individuals or groups from former French or Belgian colonies to the mobilizations in which we participated (apart from us). Is it because of divergent colonial histories? A lack of interest? On the other hand, the Sudanese activists we work with know that we are a black collective and the fact we identify them as black people was the initial impetus for working together.

Does that mean they identify with this assignment and our definition of “black?” No. That they identify us all as black? Probably not. When they do live streams during rallies they insist on the fact that they are backed by “French” people, not black people from France, which is quite ironic given our rejection of this denomination. Especially since, from an administrative point of view, we’re not all French. But what matters the most is our ability to take action with these Sudanese activists, regardless of what we project onto each other. By working to constantly expand our historical, political, and cultural knowledge of what we choose to identify as black worlds, we broaden our capacity to understand the complexities of self-identification, while still being able to create solidarities when material conditions allow.

While we’ve all been unquestionably racialized as black and always have embraced this identity, most of the members of our collective carry in their bodies the more or less visible histories and signs of other human groups. This means that we are all descended from African peoples racialized as black, and we have chosen to make this the pillar and pivot of our anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist aspirations for the political work we try to provide in the spaces our bodies traverse, inhabit, and occupy.

In France, Afropessimist ideas or the black Radical Tradition, have little hold outside extremely restricted intellectual circles, and therefore absolutely no influence whatsoever on how people mobilize or don’t mobilize, show solidarity or don’t show solidarity. The struggles that have historically brought together the most black people are the struggles of undocumented people, mobilized around issues of documentation, housing, and wage exploitation. In our recent history, the Gilets Noirs are surely the ones who have most explicitly associated the reality of these types of exploitation with blackness, whereas previously it wasn’t necessarily formulated in the group’s names. Does this make it easier to fight? We don’t know, but adding “black” probably doesn’t have any magical effect. Does it prevent other types of solidarity? We don’t think so. Yet, it attests to the obvious, a common and inextricably blurred blackness associated with a common social status turned towards the struggle for social progress and confronting the multiple proponents of white supremacy. And this makes it possible to take to the streets, to make demands, to set up blockades and so on, with less fear of being faced with manifestations of anti-blackness by a comrade in struggle.

In our view, the positive political use of blackness is to make it the basis of a radical assignment to internationalism, to transnational understanding and thus to the destruction of the nation-state ideology from an anti-capitalist vantage point. As we said before, a pillar and a pivot. The globalization of anti-blackness does not make all black people the most oppressed people in the world. Oppression and domination are complex dynamics, highly localized in time and space. But black people fleeing authoritarian regimes led by black autocrats backed by non-black imperialists are doomed to land in countries where variations of anti-blackness acts will be inflicted on them.

How, as a black collective, can we take action in the spaces we inhabit is the only question that matters to us.

Best,
Cases Rebelles

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Dear Cases Rebelles, 

I apologize for the delay, I had to re-read these excellent maxims multiple times to formulate an adequate response.

You are correct. No black person I know has discovered the reality of anti-blackness by reading an academic tract. In my experience only some white people are surprised to know that they don’t hold a monopoly over anti-blackness upon us. But if we are to pay attention to these tracts, it is not because we are interested in debating the content of what these academics write. Rather, we want to diagnose the crisis of blackness today. In the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon ended his love-hate criticism of the broader Négritude movement by coming to conclude that if blackness is to have any relevance as a point of departure for politics, it is only if it will do something, anything for “the lives of the eight-year old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.” If it does not pivot from perspectives of exploitation with an aim to resolve crises of production and reproduction, then black politics, like all politics, risks defaulting to a kind of nationalism that takes up militant garb only to hide the desires of the black bourgeoisie. As materialists we know that black thought often hides the fear and anxieties of the petit-bourgeoisie, even an aspiring black middle Class.

And in these days of precariousness and austerity, we see a generalized anxiety, among most middle classes, which in its most genocidal form transmutes into a vicious anti-migrant sentiment that allows among Europeans of many races for the Mediterranean to turn into a graveyard for black and brown corpses. This anxiety is a familiar one—the fear that they will take what we are entitled to—especially when those entitlements themselves, from grants, to public health and education, are shrinking. It is a generalized anxiety afflicting especially those who have amassed stature but on tenuous grounds; it arises out of a perception of scarcity, a perception which instigates a carnal predisposition to be competitive against the They who are under-deserving. Here blackness, black Africa, Subsaharan features are a visual map of difference: they haunt, and they remind so many that capital can make anybody superfluous. Those of us who are racialized as black are put into a particular category of “They”: we carry disease, Ebola, we are, as the Israeli far-right call the Sudanese, even a “cancer.” And some of the former Theys are indeed also now happy to kick away the ladder and deflate the dinghy. In the United States, one mutation of this generalized fear is the idea that the Caribbean or African immigrant takes what rightfully belongs to African Americans (the main idea of the ADOS movement in the United States). Here the Caribbean origins of Kwame Ture, Claudia Jones, and Malcolm X are erased and replaced with a story of an African American project of integration that is being exploited by black immigrants. African Americans are told by this movement that only by limiting African and Caribbean immigration can they win civil rights and reparations. Can we not imagine, that in an academic environment that is becoming more casualized, and more precarious, that other mutations may also arise: misdirected frustration with the “non-black person of color” in the age of austerity perhaps?

There are also two points of departure that I fear readers may miss from this powerful reflection, but which I believe are central to reconstituting black politics for the 21^st century: first, material realities conditions politics, and, second, the fact that black politics is in need of reconstitution and must combat what you call nation-state thinking.

The tradition of revolutionary nation-state thinking is one we must be proud of, but its time has eclipsed. Remarking on the anti-capitalist nature of an anti-colonial culture which he helped build, CLR James remarked that “under the colonial system you could always point to them and say they are responsible.” But when the African inherited the state, “what about this capitalist system? Well he does something which is very strange. He paints it up as much as he can in red and calls it African Socialism.” This was not an act of robbery by the African elite. Indeed, the idea at the time was that just as the carving up of Africa by the white world had created a common condition that could be transformed into a pan-African identity, so too did the promise of industry (centralization and socialization of capital) make socialism a possibility. The fusion of Africanism and socialism was to take place through and by the state, manned by a nationalist middle class, who would use their technocratic know-how to bypass the antagonisms between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and usher in socialism.

But where does this project stand today? It has faced an abysmal defeat. African peasants have been driven out of the countryside and into cities, only to find no industry and no space. The middle classes have moved into the service industry, and only a select-few get the chance to be both poor and employed. Across the black world, from Haiti to Tanzania, one is lucky to find work in a call center or as a motorcycle driver for Uber. The promise of a job has died, and with it, African identity and the promise of African socialism. Instead of a pan-African identity, we live with identities of atomized states, who have all written out the history of pan-African socialism from their nationalist narratives. Instead of industry, millions have been left landless, at the whims of militias, gangs, or the slumlords of the informal settlement. Those who led us to liberation in Angola now live lives of conspicuous consumption, stuff their wealth in tax havens, while the majority live in poverty. Is it wrong for Africans today to dream of leaving Africa, not out of disloyalty, but purely out of self-preservation? In either case, the question today, even more than exploitation is abjection. The only thing worse, Denning wrote, than being exploited under capitalism is not being exploited under capitalism.

Herein then we find the undocumented African, the refugee—the paradigmatic subject for pan-Africanists—as both an indictment of the old, and the revolutionary subject of the new. I am speaking here of the former domestic worker who is shot dead in the desert which separates Saudi Arabia from Yemen; the Kenyan maid who is recorded on video as she dangles from the balcony of a middle class family in Kuwait, the former slum-dweller who is enslaved by a militia in Libya, the child who is allowed to drown by Greek coastguards in the Mediterranean. All of them are a reminder that the projects of our foremothers and fathers have failed. I don’t claim to have the answer to this problem, and I am no anarchist. But to my mind, all answers that have arisen from nation-state thinking have proved themselves to be inadequate to the task. It is for this reason that the Gilets Noirs movement is far more significant than it seems.

And yet they did, and in the belly of the beast. This where one should be to pivot oneself and be both Afrorevolutionary and relevant. And you are right where you need to be.

With love & admiration, 
Mohammed Elnaiem

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Dear Mohammed,

Though the expression “in the belly of the beast” has never ceased to make sense, it is more than ever relevant given the present race to fascization in Europe. Amidst police killings, constant war against black exiles, daily systemic anti-blackness, a rampant and terrifying islamophobia, the French government keeps on criminalizing undocumented people, organizations, activists and so many others. They have even made “non-mixité” (all black or non-white organized political gatherings), the very basis of our existence as a collective, punishable by law. A lot of black or other non-white collectives seem to be on borrowed time, exposed to the next political showdown and wave of dissolution. There is kind of a gap between intellectual debates and the current political climate of constant repression which always leads us to the same questions: where in the world could we live in some semblance of peace? Without being exhausted? And, of course, how do we keep on fighting? What weapons do we use?

In her 1989 book Le défi culturel guadeloupéen: devenir ce que nous sommes (The Guadeloupean Cultural Challenge: Becoming Who We Are) socio-linguist, researcher and pioneer of popular education in Guadeloupe, Dany Bebel-Gisler asks the following :

“You might well believe that nothing is set in stone, but how do we get by and break from what hinders the people in its entirety, especially intellectuals, the leaders of political movements, unions, parties? How to break away from the „missionary“ attitude towards the „masses“ which first leads to refusing to be taught by them and secondly, to unconsciously use the same elitist language of colonial power?”

Her reflection is about the liberation of Guadeloupe but it also resonates with our conversation.

Some people build entire careers off their black bodies, their corporeality by selling their ability to explain blackness. Here, we’re not only referring to people who are easily identifiable as native informants. We’re talking about people who combine a so-called “black excellence” with radical ideas and resolve this conundrum in an equation of which they are the solution, in which their ego, their intellect, their bank account, their personal success is the solution. As Joy James said in In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love (2022), “Integration and assimilation as alternatives to radical resistance. Back to the integration matrix.”

We’d like to think that blackness is a radical indictment of any forms of imperialism and capitalism. But we must acknowledge that “black” and “blackness” are disproportionately synonymous with entertainment, sports through the display of black bodies, commodification, fetishization, and spectacularization. A black class with blurred contours—whose action ranges from reformist to reactionary—keeps on equating black liberation with respectability, positions in the academy, economic power, and visibility. The poison of representation. Kwamé Touré stated the obvious a long time ago: “black visibility is not black power.” This is all the more true here, where the crimes of colonization, present and past, even the most undeniable, are constantly concealed beneath coarse layers of spectacular blackness. Where the French president welcomes voguing at l’Elysée Palace, meets with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, takes selfies with young shirtless Caribbean black men, crowns Josephine Baker as a national hero while pushing racist and imperialist policies of rare violence and denying any form of justice to the victims.

More than a political struggle issue, finding black unity today is a question of collective survival. We really wish to keep on trying thinking, acting revolutionary wherever our collective will be. PanAfroRevolutionary even, since it is the term we coined to express our will to fight against all forms of oppression from a black-centered perspective.

Echoing one of the issues you raised, we wonder if there was ever a time when blackness was not in crisis… How could it not be since it was first and foremost an identity forced upon us, an endogenous concept, born out of imperialism and slavery. Given the chaotic nature of this identity we yet chose to embrace, shouldn’t we talk of blacknesses rather than blackness?

Whatever might be in store for us, we need to keep having these transnational black conversations as much as possible. It gives us a much-needed strength and food for thought. Which we sorely need.

Sending you love and strength,
Cases Rebelles

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