Oluo was right.
In so far as Diallo’s adventurism left white dominance critically unchallenged, shifting the burden of hospitality and moral nobility to the victim, it was a denial of the power inequities that exist between white and black people. Black people—especially black women like Ijeoma Oluo (who, ironically, would have been labeled “white” or “oyinbo” back home in Nigeria, because of her fair skin and obvious “mulatto look”) do not have the liberty to cross lines or jump fences the way Diallo did. Black people cannot look away, or change their robes in telephone booths (I’m sorry if these references are lost on you, dear!). They are locked in. But power can: power can look away, can take your skin … where to turn would be the death of you, and where if you could exchange your skin for a loaf of bread, you might have done so a long time ago.
Oluo stopped short of calling white Spokane woman Rachel Dolezal–turned–Nkechi Diallo crazy. Like others, she chalked it up to the familiar fluctuations of white supremacy. Nothing strange was happening. Blackness was once again saved; its virginity restored. Oluo’s article was a furious antibody dispatched to eject the viral element from the bloodstream of blackness, an invasion that might very well have weakened the black cause for justice, for reconciliation, for equality, for reparations, for safer streets and friendlier cops, and for the same socioeconomic privileges of normalcy white people enjoy that black people need to be exceptional to attain. For the right to sit at the round table. For a piece of the Future promised everyone regardless of creed or color.
And yet, when the dust settled, I felt slightly unsettled. I found myself asking questions the Forbidden girl had taught me: is this all there is? Is there no more surprise? Isn’t there something yet unexpected in the experience of blackness—or is this it? This eternal dialectic with whiteness? This quest for equality? This closed settlement and barricaded steel walls of secure identity?
Growing up in Nigeria, I didn’t think of myself as black. Sure, I was darker than midnight and all my siblings were fairer than I; this was just a matter of genes and too much beans. In fact, I felt more white than black. White people were fascinating to me. I loved watching “movies”—which, for the sake of needless clarification, always meant movies made in Hollywood. Most of my friends (if not everyone I knew that was my generation) disparagingly called our own movies “films” or “homemade videos”—in our eyes a lesser category of quality, since our products didn’t have the magical special effects and awe-inspiring wizardry that attended Bruce Lee’s gravity-defying leaps, or Steven Seagal’s blustery martial tactics that allowed him to take out an entire mob of gangsters with his lanky limbs. Or Robocop.
You didn’t find white people walking down my street, as they might have done in Johannesburg or Pretoria in South Africa. The white people who came into my country were mostly expatriates, some of whom earned briefcases of dollars working with oil companies, banks, and global conglomerates. They lived on Victoria Island, in the poshest parts of Lagos. If a white person came to my area, everything would have stopped. Bus conductors would have danced merrily while hanging precariously on the sides of their danfo buses—pointing at “oyinbo pipu.” Women who made àkàrà and fried yams like my grandmother might have blushed if a white person came by to patronize them.
Everyone dreamed of “going abroad” someday—and those that got visas after prayerful fasting and spiritual vigils and then squeezed their way into airplanes flying to Europe or America often came back, a few weeks later, with the most disingenuous accents you’ve never heard. They would say “wanna” and “gonna” instead of “want to” and “going to,” deforming their faces and twisting their lips to approximate the elusive sound of a schwa, just to prove to everyone that they’d been there. Done that. We didn’t mind. We let them have their time. The comedic value of watching someone try to speak like an American or with the cockneyed abandon of a Londoner was always dampened by the soft internal reminder that we ourselves hadn’t been “there.” The Western world was a dream, a story everyone wanted to tell. And every story deserved embellishment.
We looked up to African Americans too. I certainly did. To us—to my friends who lapped up every fashion trend propagated by the hip-hop artists of the day—black Americans had it good. From Notorious B.I.G. to that Reid guy that played a professor on the TV show Snoops, African Americans were just as “other” to us as the white people that liked to jog down the streets in the rich residential areas, their pale pink and sweaty bodies brazenly exposed, to the mild irritation of our mothers. Somewhere at the back of our heads, in vague recollections of history lessons we hardly paid attention to, we knew black Americans were the children of old slaves—connected to us across watery miles of savagery and maltreatment—but, at least, they lived in a country with constant electricity. They had good schools, good transportation, and white people around them. We had none of that. We were late, living in a world that was never on time. We envied African Americans, and considered them “oyinbo” as well.
I remember my father used to amusedly say the f-word sometimes when he was younger. They were few and far between, and hardly ever in the context of abuse or heightened emotion. In fact, his usage lacked the caustic sting of his “black” sideburn-totting brothers in the diaspora. He mostly learned it from blaxploitation movies, for he too—like his own generation—thought of black Americans as an avant-garde culture.
So while there was “black,” we sometimes felt “black-black”: lower than our better brothers whose fathers couldn’t outrun the trade ships.
But the antagonistic response to whiteness—we didn’t have. Only in small academic circles of those who read Walter Rodney, you know, the professor kinds whose wives would roll their eyes when they started to speak about the ways Europe underdeveloped Africa in the company of friends, and who never made enough money to cajole their spouses to allow them be their quirky selves, did such talk thrive. We didn’t have the immediacy of a ready villain, just the traces of their ghostly presence and a desire to piece the puzzles together so we could get to heaven one fine day. All our agony was reserved for “the government”—those buba-clad politicians that promised us we too could look like London if we elected them into office.
I didn’t know the pain of dispossession or dislocation. Not directly. I didn’t lose a language, since I was born into the one-tongue. I didn’t miss out on bonfire tales by moonlight, since the fires had already been snuffed out by tarred roads long before I was born. I was born in exile—after the dust had settled into a maze everyone was now told was our new reality. To one born in chains, confinement can look like a privilege denied others.
Eventually I became one of those “professor types,” reading Fanon, Baldwin, Achebe, and Soyinka. And yes, Walter Rodney too. It felt like an awakening. In the context of my critical surveys of the damage that had been done to our lands, to our psyches, and to our futures, I began to recognize my whiteness and the white halls of power I had been born in. The music stopped, and the world felt like the scratching sound the turntable makes when the needle has skated off the record: the music extinguished, my days were spent pondering the loss of my identity. Where was my original blackness that had been taken from me? And how was I to restore it? My questions took me to an angry pan-Africanism in search of innocent pasts and black essences, and then to a postmodern pacifism but no less agonistic reappraisal of identity and culture—both of which left me in some sort of stable and unproductive blackness … a fugue blackness that sort of hinted at the heritage I was supposed to have, the feelings I was supposed to feel, and the attitudes I was supposed to adopt to be properly “black,” without the satisfaction of the actual thing.
I want you to know, dear, that I hope the world you live “in” is a beautiful world, and that you never know the scowls and rudeness and exclusions I have known for being a certain color—not to mention the pain and suffering our mothers and fathers knew in order to find us a place to plant our feet. I do not know what such
a world might look like or what racial justice even means, but I hope to share some of the questions I have been asking as I bring together the pieces of the puzzle of home.
The issue of race is a vexing thing, escaping full articulation. In a time of tearful losses and oppression suffered because one is not the “right” color, much rides on the particular ways and particular thoughts we employ to think about blackness.
The painful memories and whip marks inflicted on black bodies, the intergenerational trauma of chattel slavery and lynched families hanging from trees, the dislocation and disenchantment from one’s own wisdoms, the effacement of the vexed past and the Euro-American appropriation of history, and the influential figure of civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. have inspired a generation to seek to preserve the black experience. The justice-seeking claims and hopes for equality rest heavily on the survival of blackness as a pure category to itself. This is probably why Dolezal was severely criticized by the black community—because her foray into blackness threatened the integrity of the identity and diluted its power to lay hold on the kind of restorative future black communities seek.
At the same time, fetishizing blackness is hardly productive in generating new ways to think about our changing contexts and the complex burdens a changing world places on our identities. Such a strategy invites the risk of subsequent exploitation, and locks blackness into adversarial coordinates.
Another view of race denies there’s even such a thing. There’s no such thing as a black race or a white race. Race is an illusion—or better yet a mirage of power. The closer you get to the shimmering surface, the faster the apparition disappears. Because race is viewed as genetic reductionism, this postmodern interpretation and its distrust of the metanarrative of blackness seeks to denaturalize race, and expose the interests and power dynamics that are stitched into biologically deterministic notions of race. The effect is a rejection of the body entirely and a dependence on what we know, or epistemology.
What this inquiry provides is powerful insights into the politico-economic negotiations and identity-shaping influences that teach us to identify as black, white, yellow, or brown. Yet, it maintains a hostility and fear of the body (and thus negates from the get-go any possible exploration of the agency of the material world in race and identity), and leaves its analysis within the orbit of humanism—centralizing human thoughts and discussions on the matter.
Whatever we posit as the “real story” of race behind the scenes, most of us seem to experience it in its manifoldness—as an economic sorter of persons, as a phenotypic distraction away from the waltz of power that is inscribed upon every frolicking molecule of space in the world. But trying to arrive at the “essence” of race is to obfuscate the intra-active effects that are at play in merely talking about it as an “it.” We are not allowed the luxury of speaking from nowhere—we can only settle with a partial view, one that inexorably excludes other complementary views.
There could therefore be no complete appraisal of white privilege or fully adequate synthesis of all insights about racial oppression into a single unified theory. Things—including concepts and bodies—are inexhaustible; they show up only partially. If you can see everything, then you’ve already missed a spot.
Thinking this way affords us an opportunity to ask the question: What are we missing, then? What are we occluding from the picture in our particular descriptions of blackness and white normativity? What new insights can be generated in particular modes of inquiry and action that could heal racial divides—and possibly conjure a world for your skin to breathe in?
If we must seek to understand racism, then we can turn it this way and that, entangling ourselves with its multidimensionality—however, not with any hope of arriving at the surest, most universal way of thinking about it. There isn’t one. By engaging “it” differently, however, new meanings and modes of action are made possible.
Reading about Susanne Wenger, the white woman who had come to Nigeria with her linguist husband in 1950, proved not only to be a counter-story to the Nkechi-Dolezal-Oluo account, but a soft expedition into the first stirrings of a different way to imagine racial relations and responsivity to white normativity. Susanne Wenger not only became “black” in the eyes of the community that adopted her but eventually learned the customs and language of the people of Osogbo so well that she became a priestess—accepted by no less than Yoruba deities and their priests as a sacred intermediary and interlocutor for Orisha worship. She renounced Christianity, divorced her husband, adopted black-black children, rejected formal education as a form of colonization, and was believed to have saved the traditional beliefs in Osogbo from extinction with her work to preserve the forest. Better known by her adopted name, Adunni Olorisa, Wenger died in 2009, in the home she loved and with the people who called her their own. It is said that the day she died a midday rain began and ended abruptly, and then she died—surrounded by her fifteen adopted children, some of whom were revered chiefs in Osogbo, Osun State.
Revisiting Wenger’s story recently, I started to wonder about Dolezal’s (or Diallo’s) claims to be transracial and the intense animus this generated in black communities in the West, contrasting this with Wenger’s relatively celebratory reception and welcome into a Yoruba community in Nigeria. Both incidences are incommensurable in many ways: Diallo is perceived as disingenuous and deceptive in her adoption of an identity that served her particular career and professional choices. Her critics insist she could walk out anytime from her blackness—simply uncoil her hair into its “original” blond look, and no one would bat an eyelid. Wenger, on the other hand, was an Austrian artist who arrived in pre-independence Nigeria with her husband during a time when being white in Nigeria afforded you the highest privileges ordinary citizens didn’t enjoy. Instead, she forsook that identity, and decided to live with a people, eventually learning their language and culture, and becoming a strong advocate for the preservation of those traditions. She didn’t take the identity of blackness; it was offered to her, in a sense.
Many in my time might detect a hint of white saviorism in Wenger’s story and scoff at the familiar story of redemption from abroad—but if one is to be cynical and dismissive, then one must also simultaneously diminish the capacity of the indigenous Yoruba people and rubbish their traditions and rituals for adjudging authenticity.
But there is more to be learned—something that troubles popular accounts of blackness and resituates (not displaces) analytics of racism, white privilege, or antiblackness. Something that rekindles my hope for a racially sensuous world.
Responding to a French documentary maker in 2005, who was inquiring into her remarkable journey and her eventual acceptance by the Osogbo people, Wenger said of her sacred mentor: “He took me by the hand and led me into the spirit world,” adding that “I did not speak Yoruba, and he did not speak English, our only intercourse was the language of the trees.”
The language of trees.
There have been many insightful analyses of blackness and whiteness (such as Oluo’s), many descriptions of microaggressions in racial relations, and many inquiries conducted into the real and horrific injustices that white supremacy occasions. And yet racism persists. As Jerry Rosiek notes:
The persistence of institutionalized racism despite the sheer scope of the suffering it causes, its resilience in the face of multigenerational organized resistance, the way it adapts to and subverts every political and intellectual intervention, suggests that we are dealing with more than a mere conceptual mistake. It suggests that empirical research on the phenomenon of racism, white supremacy, whiteness, anti-Blackness—whatever our theoretical suppositions lead us to call it—will ask more of scholars than adopting alternative epistemologies and practices of description.13
What more is demanded of us?
Perhaps we find in this “language of the trees” the interesting proposal that the racializing agent is not singularly human or just a social construction but a flow of ma
terial-semiotic practices that engulfs/shapes/constitutes humans together with trees, stones, stories, concepts, and the world. Perhaps the world around us, the environment, pulses with the question of race. What happens if we reconsider blackness, the strictures of identity, and white privilege within a world that is porous, constantly unmaking and remaking boundaries? What if the lenses with which blackness is seen—in agonistic tension with whiteness—are just as much a product of white colonial ways of knowing—an epistemology that does not take into consideration the racializing effects of the material world and thus situates the source of racism in the human? What if racial identity is not a property of persons, but a flow of becomings—of post-human becomings—that challenges our claims to ownership? What if we all are a becoming-each-other? And that even in the sham of pretend-blackness or pretend-whiteness lies the shamanic gestures of an art that speaks an unsuspected truth? A possibility that we are transracial as a matter of fact?
Speaking at a town hall event in Sonoma County in California, after being invited to share some of my understandings about racial justice, I began the meeting by inviting the audience to envision a world where racial justice had finally “happened.”14 What would that look like? The responses traced the contours of a familiar social justice imaginary: no one gets left behind; a cop sharing a thumbs up with a black driver; no one has to live in fear; equal rights. I might have said the same things, including reparations; designing policies to help at-risk people of color, especially black men who have a higher probability of being incarcerated than white men; and seeking the forgiveness of those who were decimated, chained, and eventually cordoned off in reservations in order for nation-states to rise.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 21
