What I find both fascinating and terrifying about contemporary culture is its use of intersectionality with regard to blackness. For clarity, I use the term “intersectionality” to represent the literal intersections such as ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation to which blackness is juxtaposed.
Intersectional agents function as what I will call the honorary oppressed or
those who assume less than a cisgender white male, but more than a member of the black collective. The honorary oppressed are far more acknowledged in the white media and have quickly become the necessary companion to black abjection. We’ve seen this with Recy Taylor who despite being a black woman savagely gang-raped by white men in the 1940s, posthumously became the face of a “woman’s” movement.
Similarly, a few years ago, amidst the tragic shooting at a gay night club, the media reported that the assailant “freed the blacks.” This seemingly innocuous detail highlights the deliberate steps taken to make black people appear a privileged minority compared to the honorary oppressed. The contemporary climate employs intersectionality in a sinister plot to deceive the world to believe that black injustice is a thing of the past. To the deceived eye, Empire star Jussie Smollet’s highly publicized brawl appears to actualize black terrorism. Smollet’s attack however, as portrayed by the media, illustrates modern mastery in the art of deception.
The deception of white hegemony employs intersectional agents to seemingly represent the under-represented. In reality, these agents represent the paradigm of white supremacy and nothing more. Thus, the issue with figures like Jussie Smollet is that they imply a linearity between antithetical modes of suffering. Smollet as intersectional agent makes it so that gay whites and non-black persons of color can attest to a shared struggle with the black collective. This struggle is thereby detached from historic examples like Jesse Washington and Claude Neale and contemporary examples like Trayvon Martin and even Chikesia Clemons, often simply referenced as the “black woman” involved in a struggle at the Waffle House. Washington, Neale, Martin, and Clemons illustrate those exteriorized by white supremacy because of their blackness, an incomparable experience reduced in alignment with intersectionality.
In reality, the media only appears to care about Jussie for two reasons. First, 
because he’s famous and secondly, and most importantly, Jussie is an intersectional agent. Smollet proclaimed his intersectionality by referring to himself as the “gay Tupac” at a performance following his attack. I assume this self-proclaimed status references Smollet’s merging of “activism” and celebrity status. However, this proclamation does more than depict Smollet as resuming Tupac’s legacy. With this proclamation, Smollet intersectionalizes Tupac. This intersectionalizing of an outspoken black male celebrity, also seen in the recent movie The Hate You Give (but that’s another post), proves that Tupac’s posthumous presence must be dismembered in order to prove worthy of contemporary consumption.
To be black is to be intersectional. Blackness literally lies at the interactions of races, life and death, human and animal, and man and woman. Whether gay, trans, female, disabled, or what have you, blackness remains central to global abjection. This statement is easily supported in a quick examination of each intersectional faction in acknowledgment of the attributes shared by those placed at the bottom of said faction. Black people of the LGBTQ community, Black women, physically black persons of color, and disabled blacks remain disenfranchised by their blackness. To partner with those who may share a fraction of your experience as a black person is to acquiesce to fractional justice. Yet, for an antiblack climate, the black struggle remains too boring, too limiting, to exposing for a world more interested and committed to performing and inciting change than actualizing an alternative to white hegemony.
Had Jussie never come out on the Ellen show (of all places), his fame would not be enough to garner him attention or empathy from the American public. Just a few years ago, amidst the early fame of Fox’s Empire, Smollet’s Empire costar Taraji P. Henson rescinded comments about her own son’s experience with racial injustice. It is likely Henson withdrew her commentary due to the pressure of maintaining an “American” enough presence to ensure that her sapphire-like status remains detached enough from consciousness to prove lucrative. Thus, had Smollet not come out as gay, pledging allegiance to Ellen and the LGBT platform, his experience of black male terrorism, like that of Taraji’s son, would be a non-topic in white media. As a non-intersectional black person Jussie’s actions would easily be attributed to “playing the race card.” His efforts would be seen as burdensome and belittled to the status of “complaint.”
Intersectionality, in addition to the increasing focus on persons of color, have 
functioned not to expose ignored oppression but to further deter from what needs to change in order to truly disrupt the racial paradigm. Whiteness easily interacts with intersectional attributes such as gender and sexuality. Additionally, whiteness intersects with non-black persons of color as they often function as white mimic man in the acquisition of education and other superficial attributes. Thus, to showcase/highlight the oppression faced by the non-black persons of color or intersectional agents is to centralize whiteness as the alterity faced by these groups. This, of course, does not trouble the system of white supremacy enough for change. Jussie, as an intersectional agent, can occupy victim status as his intersectionality and celebrity dismember his being to ensure that the aftermath of this exposure is as empty as the symbolism imbued.
So, while Jussie’s safety as a black man in America remains a concern, this concern reflects a larger concern about black people exposed to the violence of inclusionary abjection. Situations like the Jussie Smollet scenario delineate white supremacy as continuing on its quest for immortality. This quest remains enabled by ensuring the blood of its irreversible target remains spilled. We, the black collective are this unmoving target, seduced to stand still as the “honorary” oppressed fight for their chance to join those of the majority in black oppression.
Black Power ❤
The one drop rule is of western origin and functions to separate whites from those deemed “other.”
and inevitably puts those with darker skin at the bottom. So to adopt the one drop rule is to cosign the continued oppression of black people– to appropriate our experience and deem our own bodies not worthy to represent our own narratives.
I do want to say that my assertions do not speak to the Fredi Washingtons of the world who irrefutably adopt their blackness to detriment of assimilatory motives.
ADA, or the African displaced in America as inherently “mixed,” or “colored.” While this certainly is true for many ADA’s, the one drop rule is not reciprocal. One drop of white blood does not make you white, and to deem what happened centuries prior without consent relevant in defining blackness, is to place an underserving emphasis on whiteness
I often revisit the mis-teachings of my so-called professor and access his behavior as mimicking that of a global colonizer. His words imposed the idea that being of African descent, not one’s allegiance to black culture, or what one has done for black people, constitutes blackness. Basically, that one is black because they aren’t white. This ideology is a simple solution for a problem festered over centuries into a complexity beyond words.
forget the back door that blacks previously had to enter to attend awards like these–if we were to attend at all. Subsequently, any applause, tears, or feelings of pride that arise within the black collective in response to this empty symbolism, grants entry to a subjugated assimilation via back door.
masses applaud in a colonized daze.
As long as we remain consumers of white propaganda and wait for the revolution to be televised by our oppressors, symbolism will continue to thwart progress. Symbolism reflects a fixation on the external that compromises the internal state of the oppressed.
several times. Though he performatively acknowledges his blackness, it is clear that Harris seeks to occupy an American space. He acknowledges a childhood inundated with white spaces where he came into his identity
personhood with the gaze of a southern slavemaster and not the very descendant of this slavemaster as sharing the gaze of his forefather. This depiction is problematic because racism made it impossible for any black person to consent to relations with a white person during physical slavery. Arguably, contemporary manifestations reflect a similar duress. However, Harris represents said duress as consent. This portrayal assigns accountability to black agency an accountability that Harris does not extend to his white characters. This portrayal affords comfort to his white audience.
Harris’s play functions in a new wave of art by black people that appears to confront issues it distastefully circumvents. These projects, which terrorize the black narrative with distorted truths, hold hands with one another in their commitment to caricaturing the black narrative for white entertainment. Our experience is not entertainment, yet as long as our skin folk continues to act like Jeremy O. Harris, our bodies will continue to be for sale.
to seek black productions for and by us. Most importantly, I encourage those of the black collective to write and produce the next pages of our narrative.
the second leg of their On The Run Tour. The evening proved a battle with traffic and the weather, namely a two hour stand off where
tour that Bobby and Whitney should have had over two decades ago. Whitney and Bobby of course were not out of this world in the way that Jay and Bey are—it was just Whitney who catapulted to the lonely place at the bottom of a white supremacist mountaintop—a mountaintop that is nothing more than a veiled cliff. Bobby and Whitney illustrated the imbalance white supremacy puts on black love—that the black woman is purposely allowed to walk in doors for the sheer purpose of those same doors slamming in the face of the black men that follow.
storm they created. Contrarily, for Jay and Bey, the profit for the 10+ years of their relationship is togetherness—their unity is good for their brand in the same way that
assessing the tour’s title. A black man and woman as “on the run” is literally a personification of what it means to be black anywhere on the globe. As beings of black form, we remain on the run from various manifestations of white supremacy. In considering Beyoncé and Jay-Z respectively, the black body remains on the run from a media who thrives in our subjugation and separation of self.
The general labeling of the black body as linguistically inferior is an anticipated complaint of our oppressors. The consequences are variant, as even the black body has internalized this poisonous perspective of their collective and upon occupying positions of pseudo authority, perform the policing that hindered their youthful dreams of writing.
abide by the very grammar and mechanical rules that has articulated my collective inferiority for centuries. My writing is to demonstrate mastery of the very technicalities that legalized the niggerization of my people.
dialect, pidgin. His essay articulates a non-negotiable espousal to pidgin, as pidgin represents everything the academy wants to pull out of him. Most resonantly, is perhaps his proclamation of writing letters of recommendations in this language. Now Tonouchi is not a black man, and his arguments are hardly unique. Plenty of black men and women have also refused to code-switch, but have not been granted the prestige and agility Tonouchi, as a non-black person of color, receives by default. As a non-black person of color, the choice to speak in a language other than English is in fact a privilege. The decision to speak in this language is seen as a choice, not an ability to acquire or perfect the language. Ethnic whites and non-black persons of color are never as ridiculed or undermined for their use of English language as black people. In America, no black person’s use of the English language is ever enough. Even those demonstrating an unprecedented mastery of a coerced language with a severed tongue, are demeaned and treated as language degenerates.
physically visits a foremother and witnesses firsthand the blood spilled during the horrors of physical bondage. Her time travel places her in the years preceding the union that would eventually engender her existence. Her great grandmother Alice is owned by Rufus’ family. Rufus will eventually father Alice’s two children. Though
shucking and jiving for those who drink black blood like smoothies. I am constantly frozen in the conscious stupor of wanting to use my positionality to educate, but also realizing what I say and suggest can and will be used against my collective.
Instead I will sit in a ring of fire. I’ll sit perched with pursed lips amidst flames cast by what the world calls black girl rage. They’ll forget that I’m there but whisper later about my indignant “attitude.” Though few will have the nerve to say it, I’ll be regarded as a bitch, everyone overlooking the vast ways in which every institution on the globe treats black bodies like bitches, like female dogs tied to a post and forcibly penetrated to ensure she literally the bears the burden of bondange. The insincere queries that are sure to follow will wonder what’s “wrong” with me, refusing to even consider that there was something wrong with the environment as a whole. None of the other darkies complained, so let’s cast this one overboard before she convinces the others that this is a slave ship and not a cruise, that this is a plank not a position.
