Unconventional Notes

Ungendering The Black Captive

Artwork by black painter and sculptor, John Woodrow Wilson. I took this picture while I was browsing his exhibit section (Witnessing Humanity) at the metropolitan museum in New York.

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Authors note: I titled this essay “unconventional notes” because it strays from formal sentence structures, embraces abstract thinking, and indulges in the messiness that is theoretical jargon. I wrote this while thinking about Black/African American subcultures like FBA and ADOS (and certain factions within the Soulaan milieu) who may acknowledge their historical origins as enslaved Africans but are, from what I’ve observed, more concerned with spewing xenophobic rhetoric, dismissing pan-African politics, and aligning themselves with American exceptionalism, neoliberalism, and the white capitalist power structure. When it comes to how I personally choose to identify, as a person who’s family mainly comes from Florida, I’d say that I align more with the revolutionary New Afrikan perspective, especially since I’ve always despised the US, American patriotism, and its ridiculous iconography, but I digress. For more information about New Afrikan nationhood and the complications of the black American identity, one of the comrades just wrote a brilliant article and I’ll link it here (The problem with the black American identity). This piece is not meant to reprimand or chastise anyone in particular, but rather express my true and honest thoughts on what I believe lies at the center of these cultural identities.

Abstract

If genetic studies and scientific evidence shows that the average African American has around 0.8 % to 1.2% Native American ancestry, and that about 5% of us only have around 2% of indigenous DNA at all, why were so many African Americans told the generational lie that they “had some Indian blood in them”? Could it be, that the “pretendian” identity only gained traction in the black community because we were historically indoctrinated to hate everything about ourselves, thus making us imitate and gravitate towards things that we were not? a stateless people who were socialized in an anti-black world to despise and detest everything they were; from the color of their skin and the texture of their hair, to the features of their bodies and the voices that sprung from their mouths. Or is there something more that we must reckon with? And to be clear, I’m not saying that afro-indigenous people don’t exist because they very much do.

This essay isn’t directed at the familial dynamic between one black parent and one native parent procreating and then “boom” a biracial baby is born, nor am I discussing the nuances around blood quantum or sovereign tribal enrollment. What I’m specifically talking about is those of us who grew up being told this false tale about how our great grandmother, who may have been of a lighter complexion and just so happen to have a picture somewhere with two pig-tail braids, was somehow a Cherokee princess from a southern reservation. Perhaps by the end of you reading these “unconventional notes”, you will have more of an understanding on why this illogical claim that we are the aboriginal peoples of turtle island, that we were Algonquian or Iroquoian and not of African descent, that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was a conspiracy theory and not a real historical event, is a nonsensical fiction—one that has more to do with the unhealed wounds of slavery than anything else.

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Pseudo-negroes and the Poetics of Ungendering

The pseudo-negro in general, is a vast concept rooted in anti-intellectualism, cognitive dissonance, religious dogma, and social propaganda, that embodies various archetypes ranging across different genres and genders of the black experience. For example, it’s much deeper than your homie on the block who’s always yapping about how he, she, or they believe in aliens, mermaids, bigfoot, lizard people, a flat earth, and other silly mythical conspiracy theories that aren’t based in reality. For me, it’s more indicative of biblically misinformed groups like the Hebrew Israelites that walk around dressed up like purple and gold power-rangers, claiming to be the “Real Jews” and believing that they’re connected to a subregion all the way in the Middle East.

Similarly, it’s like those deeply confused Hoteps who arrive at the falsehood that we were Egyptians from the northeast corner of Africa, or the black pretendians (Wabos) who are essentially non-indigenous people of west African origins that deny their bloodline, steal indigeneity, and argue that they were here prior to 1492. Even more so, if we are to take a look at the more extreme exemplifications, the pseudo-negro could also be those patriarchal cult leaders like the now convicted Eligio Bishop and Dwight York. Domestic abusers who thrived off mental manipulation and weaponized a deceitful form of religiosity and “pro-blackness” to hide their depravity and wicked ways—not only to garner power and popularity within the black community, but to coerce women, groom children, and sexually exploit them under the guise of spiritual divination.

If we are to take seriously the delusional thinking of the fraudulent pretendian, we can actually see that their fabricated identity (that they’ve wrongfully confiscated and culturally appropriated) is something more than just a mockery of one’s ethnicity, internalized anti-blackness, and the erasure of the indigenous peoples. Put differently and more concisely, what the pretendian, the hotep, the hebrew israelite, the FBA, the Soulaani, the ADOS, and yes, even us revolutionary New Afrikans all have in common (as Black/African Americans) due to the horrific histories of chattel slavery and persecutions on the plantation, is that our desire for a distinctive cultural identity stems largely from our ancestors having been stripped of their very own lineage, land, language, and life ways.

Precisely, what lies at the heart of this controversial discourse is an uncomfortable truth, one that has resulted in the longstanding psychological terror, misguided self-hatred, and the ungendering that we still see today. One that understands that if whiteness represents the infinite possibilities of humanity and is positioned as the pinnacle of modern civil society, then the ungendering of blackness is the epitome of the exact opposite, which is to say, the apotheosis of abjection and the symbolization of social death (what the afropessimists call natal alienation, general dishonor, and gratuitous violence).

In a section of professor Hortense Spiller’s indispensable text Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, she connotes a type of violence that is made possible by the transporting or more accurately, trafficking of black captives through the middle passage across the Atlantic Ocean: “Under these conditions, one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into “account” as quantities.” In various ways, Spillers is explaining the dehumanizing process of ungendering. Ungendering as in reducing African persons to that of mere implements for usage and exploitation. Ungendering as in no longer man, woman, or child, but rather black sentient flesh, fungible objects, sexual instruments, and laboring tools—mutable beings that can be made to fit the ontological plasticized mold of whatever twisted fantasies or contradictory categories the captor desires (those categorical terms being what professor Zakkiyah Iman Jackson would refer to as “the human, animal, machine, and object all at once.”). Ungendering which is not to be confused with gender non-conforming like in a gender fluidity or “queer non-binary” way (albeit not explicitly disentangled from it either) but instead, specific to African peoples who lost all that they were on slave voyages. Ungendering as in the enslaved losing their bodily autonomy, tribal sense of self, narrative belonging, and kinship relations. A intergenerational brutality that continues to impact the marked lives of their descendants and the global black population by extension.

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After Thoughts and Affirmations

No matter what anyone says, thinks, or does, I will never be ashamed of what my ancestors had to go through. To disavow my genealogy, disregard my complex historicity, and deny my africanness, would be a disgraceful betrayal to those who made it possible for me to exist in this lifetime. The blameworthiness we so often burden ourselves with as Black/African Americans, for what happened to our ancestors 400 years ago, is not ours to carry and it’s not a fault of our own making. That shame belongs to the Portuguese that pioneered the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the white American settlers of the so-called new world that perfected that anti-black colonial project, and the other genocidal western imperialists that financed and continued that catastrophe during and after the scramble for Africa.

I am a descendant of chattel slaves and captured subjects; a people who were forcibly taken from their places of residence never to return home to their families or countryside again. A people who endured the darkness of dungeons, manufactured scarcity, and sexual introspections at the auction markets before being sold to the highest bidders. A people who were stacked up against each other in the belly of the ship and made to undergo the most inhumane predicaments of all time. A people who fought regardless and survived by any means necessary despite them being outnumbered and dropped off in a predominantly white civilization. A people sentenced to toil, submit, and die as the permanent racial underclass in a foreign society that was once flourishing with the beating hearts of unmassacred natives.

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