In the blog of 19th December 2016, I stated that I would start a series of blogs in the first week of January 2017 on Black men and Ethnic Minority men of colour. Today is the first instalment.
Trying to describe a Black man as if he was one of a ‘type’, a collection of artefacts-descriptions made up by other human beings, allegedly outlining ways of behaving, thinking, presenting himself, how he dresses, how he speaks, how he looks, is a recipe for distortion. Of far greater enlightenment is what does the viewer see and the influences that shaped that perception.
The history of Black people irrespective of geographical location, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, North America, Europe, Australia, The United States of America, the United Kingdom, to name a few, is littered with accounts of such ‘types’; viewer’s perceptions, mainly White colonialists, of Black people.
Such descriptions were not benign, they were purposive, having an intended impact calculated to contain, diminish, subdue, heighten the viewer’s estimation of themselves at the expense of the Black person (s) being described. Having consigned the Black person being viewed to an inferior status as a result of reputed characteristics, such as lower intellectual capacity, inability to control ourselves without external force and supervision by people like the viewer, promiscuity-sexual and criminal, the ground is set to enact unconditional control of the perceived threat by any means considered necessary.
A cursory reading of the literature on slavery of Black people over hundreds of years graphically illustrates how perceptions of Black people underpinned and was used as justification for, brutality, stripping away of cultures, histories, religions, ways of life, languages, pillaging of land and natural resources, enslavement and death. The process continues in 2017.
In describing a Black man therefore, I am wary, awkward, hesitant, out of my depth as I carefully unwrap the layers of perceptions, some of which I grew up with and have to understand their influence on me, and at the same time, try not to create another ‘type’ which I may have unintentionally formed. I also need to accept that the layers I am unravelling around the image of the Black man are part of my history as a Black man, they influenced my forebears and myself and are an integral part of my identity. It is one thing to acknowledge what may have played a part in making you the person you are now. It is entirely a different matter to allow your emerging self to be the victim of the perceptions of others today and act accordingly.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) a wonderful Black writer, raconteur, role model for Black men and human rights activist, outlines in an interview some three years before he died, how he went about discovering who he was and the process of untangling himself from the web of other people’s perceptions which were designed to destroy his creativity and indeed his life itself. Although growing up in the United States of America, he felt as a young adult he could not survive there as a Black man because of the singular pressures imposed on Black people by the racism prevalent there. ‘Looking for a place to live. Looking for a job: You begin to doubt your judgement, you begin to doubt everything. You become imprecise. And that’s when you’re beginning to go under. You’ve been beaten, and it’s been deliberate. The whole society has decided to make you nothing. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.’
James Baldwin decided to go to Paris and live and it is there that his success as a writer began. Part of that success revolved around him finding new ways of seeing and understanding. ‘I had to go through a time of isolation in order to come to terms with who and what I was, as distinguished from all the things I’d been told I was. Right around 1950, I remember feeling that I’d come through something, shed a dying skin and was naked again. I wasn’t, perhaps, but I certainly felt more at ease with myself. And then I was able to write.’
It is this process of shedding dying skin, moving away from being cardboard cut-out figures, that I will comment further on in next week’s blog.
Source
The Paris Review, Issue 91, Spring, 1984.
James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction, No 78 Interview by Jordan Elgrably