PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2003) ISSN: 1094-2254 Abducting Black Bodies: The Little B’s of North America and the Caribbean

Aaron Kamugisha

Wright’s unrelenting bleak landscape was not merely that of the Deep South, or of Chicago, but that of the world, of the human heart.

-- James Baldwin on Richard Wright’s Black Boy ¹

Aha! said a cricket in the grass (ancient observer of distracted cross examiners);

Now you’ve seen it, now you don’t!

And the body

was stolen away.

-- Alice Walker, “The Abduction of Saints” ²

What would it mean to speak of the history of Blacks in the Americas as a determined struggle against a hegemonic process of abduction? What could it mean to speak of the “abduction systems” of Western civilization? In part, this is similar to a question posed by Saidiya Hartman, “how does one tell the story of an elusive emancipation and a travestied freedom?,” ³ but with certain crucial differences. This idea of abduction immediately raises the spectre of that forced movement of Africans across the Atlantic, abduction on the grandest scale in human history, to be sure. It also reminds us of Gregory Bateson’s definition of abduction systems as the “lateral extension of abstract components of description…Metaphor, dream, parable, allegory, the whole of art, the whole of science, the whole of religion, the whole of poetry, totemism … the organization of facts in comparative anatomy – all these are instances or aggregates of instances of abduction, within the human mental sphere.” ⁴ Conceptualising the experience of Blacks in the West as a struggle against abduction allows us to think of both the epistemic and physical violence done to Blacks in the Americas. It shows that what Hilary Beckles, in another context, has called the “two hundred years war against slavery in the Americas” is actually well over four hundred years in duration; and this war shows no sign of abating. ⁵ At stake is the very legitimacy of Black life, the right of Black bodies to exist.

Elaine Brown’s The Condemnation of Little B

The marvelous commitment shown by Elaine Brown in defending Black children in “America” from the latest species of lies that rain down upon them (caricatures of them as superpredators [36], unfit teenage mothers [100], mindless killers…) is the finest of its kind in print today. The phrase “extenuating circumstances” does not seem to be part of the vocabulary of the penal system today. Thus, fourteen-year old Anisha Walker can be convicted of murdering the man who subjected her to false imprisonment, physical abuse, and rape (35). As Brown notes in a very compelling argument about new laws which allow prosecutors to try young teenagers as adults, “Children thirteen and fourteen years old have almost no relationship under the law equal to adults, except, now, to be tried in criminal courts as adults” (191, original emphasis). New ruses of the state demand that children be adults for its own convenience, surely one of the most dangerous recasting of the rights of children in generations.

There is no need for us to waste much time in surveying Brown’s magnificent denunciation of the white supremacist framework that continues to destroy Black lives in “America,” or her denunciation of its spokespersons from Lincoln’s commitment to “Union” over “Abolition” to Clinton who, no more than a “racist charlatan” for Brown (175), was responsible for more damage to the Black community than Bush or Reagan (183). U.S. state power’s utter unconcern for Black life has been re-stated many times. In Brown’s tracing of “reverse white flight,” which results in Black communities’ again being manipulated and treated as expendable, it becomes obvious that residents of the inner city have no “right” to adequate living conditions, schooling, housing, jobs or even life itself. If in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott case it could be declared that Blacks had no rights a white man was bound to respect, and Daniel Moynihan in the 1960’s could state that Blacks have noculture to protect, we can see at the turn of this century that inner city Blacks have neither rights nor culture that “American” society has to respect, protect or even acknowledge.

However, it is Brown’s indictment of “New Age House Negroes” (212), citing William Julius Wilson, Henry Louis Gates, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the National Bar Association and the Congressional Black Caucus specifically as figures who have abandoned the Black community, which makes The Condemnation of Little B one of the greatest polemics against the Black bourgeoisie in African-American letters. It forces us to realize that the abandonment and condemnation of Little B is a result of the cooptation of the Black middle classes of “America” by governing elites. As Brown puts it:

It was this New Age Racist-era abandonment of principle, this shrugging of shoulders and turning of backs by blacks and former friends, that had set the stage for the unchallenged prosecution of a thirteen-year-old black boy. Newly elected Atlanta prosecutor Paul Howard knew that there would be no liberal protest, no black protest. Nobody – nobody that mattered – was concerned about a Little B anymore. Everybody – everybody that mattered – wanted him to go away, forever. Little B was at once a problem and a solution, expendable and expedient. (259).

Neo-Liberal Globalisation: The New Lebensraum

In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery, pure and simple.

-- Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 ⁶

To be effective, systems of power must be discursively legitimated.

-- Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception” ⁷

The theft of Little B by the state arises out of a set of new conjunctures, though with clear resonances in the old, in the global political economy, and within its richest and most powerful nation, the “United States of America.” Many commentators have noted neo-liberal globalisation’s intensified ability to continue capitalism’s long process of freeing itself from dependency on labour through technology. In the United States, the increased flight of industrial jobs to Mexico (as facilitated by NAFTA) and the “third world” has led to an increasingly two-tiered service economy – one can either sell burgers at McDonald’s or bonds on Wall Street. The expanding prison population, the result of a complicated series of factors well documented by Angela Davis and Ruth Gilmore, has resulted in a new post-Cold War state of affairs, wherein “economic mobilization to defeat communism has turned into economic mobilization to defeat crime.” ⁸ The “criminal” can be the new category of the human which signifies lack of reason, in the same way that this space was previously occupied by the communist, and is now being filled by the “terrorist.”⁹ Cheap service labour can be exploited in the United States as a result of the prison-industrial complex, labour that in some ways is even more attractive than “third-world” labour, as it cannot be unionized and no benefits need be paid; in fact, there are very little rights here at all.

Neo-liberal globalization is the lebensraum of our age. The original lebensraum as formulated by Adolf Hitler said that the German nation needed more “living space.” This was sedulously used to justify the territorial expansion of Germany into Austria, Czechoslovakia and later the whole of Europe. Hitler intended to create a slave race of the Slavic people of Eastern Europe to serve Aryan masters. Under neo-liberal globalization, the cry is that “American” and European transnational corporations need space – of an especially economic kind – to further accumulate profits. Reducing the majority of the world’s population to a servile class, along with racialised “minorities” within the heart of empire itself, is the goal of this project. This need for “economic space” is also linked to the desire for the “physical space” of the original lebensraum, and thus inner city residents can be herded out of the city in order to make ‘room’ for “reverse white flight.” Large numbers of these minoritized groups can be imprisoned and stripped of all rights of citizenship in the interests of racial capital. It should come as no surprise that the state responsible for Little B’s condemnation, Georgia, is, according to Brown, “one of only three states in America that do not pay inmates at all for their labor” (348). This is, as Marx might put it, “slavery, pure and simple.”

The need to legitimate the theft of Black bodies by the state in the Caribbean and North America has been made possible by the narrow terms under which citizenship is “granted” to poor and working class Blacks in both locations. The idea of full citizenship rights for Blacks in “America” (a four hundred-year dream that shows no sign of realization) has been abducted by one invented “state of emergency” after another: slavery, Jim Crow/segregation and now a resurgent right-wing fundamentalism. ¹⁰ The legal “citizenship” so grudgingly given to African-Americans in the 1960’s, and so severely attenuated and narrowly circumscribed due to the continued articulation of white supremacy (its twin systems of institutional racism and capitalist oppression), is being actively, deliberately reneged upon. Now, one can be considered a citizen in Black only if one totally prostrates oneself before the dictates of U.S. imperialism: the finest examples of the comprador citizen are of course, Condoleezza Rice, singled out by Brown for her “unprecedented servility to racists” (221), and Colin Powell.

These problems are not limited to the United States. The Jamaican state, to cite an arguably atypical Caribbean example, remains wedded to the anti-Black understandings of creole nationalism. C.L.R. James, in his great 1962 essay “The West Indian Middle Classes,” comments in closing that “the ordinary people of the West Indies…do not want to substitute new masters for old. They want no masters at all…History will take its course, only too often a bloody one.” This reality is well seen in contemporary Jamaican life. ¹¹ The reasons for spiraling crime rates and feelings of hopelessness among this population are overdetermined, but Brian Meeks’s recent analysis of the contemporary moment in Jamaica as one of “hegemonic dissolution” seems spot on. ¹² Meeks’s position is that with structural adjustment, the Jamaican state’s ability to provide social services for the majority of its population has been considerably destroyed. When this is allied to the fact that the middle classes (and, by extension, middle class values) are no longer embraced by the masses – since the middle class is seen as irredeemably corrupt and elitist – new forms of legitimation are articulated from popular music to the illegal trafficking of narcotics. This all becomes a critical part of a complicated social environment in which violent crime is on the rise, and protests turn quickly into “riots.” While this situation is quite specifically Jamaican, with the rest of the Caribbean escaping this potential “postcolonial future” ¹³ so far, it still points to the grim relationship between re-colonisation (via IMF and World Bank programmes) and middle-class hegemony under the guise of creole nationalism.

The response from the Jamaican elites hence takes on the same aura of the U.S. security state: rights must be abridged; extra-legal murder can be sanctioned. Hence, as Tony Bogues notes in Jamaica, “between 1996 and 2000, civilians killed fifty-six police officers, and over seven hundred civilians were killed by the police.” ¹⁴ Renato Adams, the controversial head of the Crime Management Unit of the Jamaican Constabulary Force, when questioned about his tactics of policing that have led to several charges of murder, responded by repeatedly calling his methods “the final solution” to the crime problem. He was apparently unconcerned with the historical resonances of that term. ¹⁵ It is worth noting that in March 2001, seven young men (most of them teenagers) were shot by an Adams unit in one ‘incident’ in Braeton, St. Catherine’s. These killings have been condemned by the Jamaican Bar Association as “involving the possibility of ‘cold-blooded murder.’” ¹⁶ The larger logic is easily apparent – the young “sufferers” of the Jamaican ghetto or the U.S. inner city can be legitimately expropriated of their lives. The rage against the Little B’s of this world, from Richard Wright’s Black Boy to the Braeton 7 and Little B himself seems to be, as Elaine Brown notes so well, because they presume they have the right to exist (9). To recall Alice Walker’s poem, “The Abduction of Saints,” with the whole history of Blacks in the Americas in mind, the cricket cries for us: now you see it (“citizenship”), now you don’t – and again our bodies are stolen away...

Despite the anomie of many within and outside the academy, great thoughts and mobilizations are still possible. It is still possible, to use Greg Thomas’s phrase, to “struggle for Black life itself.” ¹⁷ Or, as Wynter would put it:

The starving “fellah,” (or the jobless inner city N.H.I., the global new poor, or les damnés) Fanon pointed out, does not have to inquire into the truth. They are the truth. It is we who institute this “truth.” We must now undo their narratively condemned status. ¹⁸

References

Baldwin, James. In Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Signet Books, 1951).

Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature (New York: Dutton, 1979).

Beckles, Hilary. “The 200 Years War: Slave Resistance in the British West Indies, An Overview of the Historiography,” Jamaican Historical Review 13 (1982): 1-10.

Bogues, Anthony. “Politics, Nation and Postcolony: Caribbean Inflections,” Small Axe 11 (March 2002).

Davis, Angela Y. “Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment Industry.” In Wahneema Lubiano (ed.), The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).

Edwards, Nadi. “States of Emergency: Reggae Representations of the Jamaican Nation State,” Social and Economic Studies 47, 1 (March 1998).

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Globalization and U.S. Prison Growth: from Military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism,” Race & Class 40, 2/3 (1998).

Gordon, Avery F. “Globalism and the Prison Industrial Complex: An Interview with Angela Davis,” Race & Class 40, 2/3 (1998).

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Headley, Bernard. “Man on a Mission: Deconstructing Jamaica’s Controversial Crime Management Head,” Social and Economic Studies 51, 1 (2002).

James, C.L.R. “The West Indian Middle Classes.” In Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee (eds), I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), Reprinted from Party Politics in the West Indies by C.L.R. James, 1962.

Meeks, Brian. Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000).

---------. Radical Caribbean: From Black Power to Abu Bakr (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1993).

Scott, David. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Thomas, Greg. “Sex/Sexuality & Sylvia Wynter’s Beyond: ANTI-Colonial Ideas in “Black Radical Tradition,” Journal of West Indian Literature 10, 1&2 (November 2001): 92-118.

Walker, Alice. “The Abduction of Saints,” in Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete (London & New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991).

Wynter, Sylvia “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis.” In Paget Henry & Paul Buhle (eds.), C.L.R. James’s Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).

---------. “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Voices of the African Diaspora 8, 2 (Fall 1992).

© 2003 Africa Resource Center, Inc.