Happy Black History Month!
This year, the celebration of our cultural, educational, and scientific contributions to the United States is uniquely bittersweet. In the same month, the Trump administration has both recognized Black History Month, and yet banned the federal government and schools from supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion measures. This includes identity-based groups like Black Student Unions, which were created explicitly to advocate for Black students in hostile, predominately white institutions (PWIs).
And so, the overarching theme of this month has been resistance. Not only resisting Trump’s explicit efforts to undermine progress, but also its chilling effects on public culture. Now more than ever, we have to lean on the queer and paradoxical nature of Blackness.
Blackness as Queerness
Now, what do I mean by that? Queer – though now reclaimed by parts of the LGBTQ+ community – was used pejoratively to refer to those whose gender identity or sexual orientation existed outside the traditional norms of society (Brontsema, 2004; Rand, 2014; Coles, 2016). Before then, queer was another way of denoting something as strange or odd. Indeed, we have plenty of instrumental Black queer figures – Marsha P. Johnson, James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Nikki Giovanni – but I don’t mean ‘queer’ in that sense.
In gender and sexuality studies, ‘queer’ can also be used to refer to transgressive relationships broadly, without referring to gender or sexuality. In this way, ‘queer’ is an adjective that describes resistance behaviors to a certain societal practice. Blackness and queerness have therefore always been connected.
Across the Black communities of the ‘New’ world, various words exist to describe special, non-biological bonds among people of the same sex, such as the Brazilian “malungo,” the Trinidadian “malongue,” the Surinamese “mati” and Haitian “batiment.” These words are believed to originate from those who survived the transatlantic slave trade together (Wekker, 1994). Some “mati” relationships were probably sexual, but even if they weren’t they were always queer. These relationships were forms of resistance to the systemic dehumanization and oppression that was racialized chattel slavery (Tinsley, 2008). Audre Lorde herself used such a term in the title of her 1982 biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of my Name, with ‘zami’ being a Carriacou (Grenadan) term for women who work together as both friends and lovers.
Blackness as Paradox
The English “paradox” is derived from the Greek adjective paradoxos, which means “contrary to expectation.” The Greek word itself is a combination of the prefix para- (beyond or outside of) and the verb dokein (to think). According to Merriam-Webster, paradox indicates a statement or idea outside of common sense or knowledge, and yet may hold truth, validity, or otherwise worthy of consideration.
Racism and white supremacy stereotype Black people as lazy, (sexually) immoral, ignorant, sub-human, animalistic, and criminal (Lemons, 1977; Chiricos & Eschholz, 2002; Welch, 2007). And yet, they needed our bodies to build their countries. Our cells – HeLa cells – became the bedrock of medical science. The same system that subjugated us routinely appropriates our culture as its own. We are both a proof of concept and scathing indictment of American hegemony.
Blackness is beautifully paradoxical, fluid and encompassing in its forms. We’re not going anywhere, because we’ve always been here. No government, company, or social media trend can take that away from us.
Works Cited
Brontsema, R. (2004). A queer revolution: Reconceptualizing the debate over linguistic reclamation. Colorado Research in Linguistics.
Chiricos, T., Welch, K., & Gertz, M. (2004). Racial typification of crime and support for punitive measures. Criminology, 42(2), 358-390.
Coles, G. (2016). The exorcism of language: Reclaimed derogatory terms and their limits. College English, 78(5), 424-446.
Lemons, J. S. (1977). Black stereotypes as reflected in popular culture, 1880-1920. American Quarterly, 29(1), 102-116.
Rand, E. J. (2014). Reclaiming queer: Activist and academic rhetorics of resistance. University of Alabama Press.
Tinsley, O. E. N. (2008). Black Atlantic, queer Atlantic: Queer imaginings of the middle passage. GLQ: A journal of lesbian and gay studies, 14(2-3), 191-215.
Welch, K. (2007). Black criminal stereotypes and racial profiling. Journal of contemporary criminal justice, 23(3), 276-288.
Wekker, G. D. (1994). Ik ben een gouden munt, ik ga door vele handen, maar verlies mijn waarde niet: subjectiviteit en seksualiteit van Creoolse volksklasse vrouwen in Paramaribo. VITA.