I don't deserve to be free. I don't deserve to be recognised. I don't deserve to be represented. There has been the invisible-isa
I don’t deserve to be free.
I don’t deserve to be recognised.
I don’t deserve to be represented.
There has been the invisible-isation of the black person. To clarify, there is a visibility allowed, in part. Different parts in different situations, depending on what’s required. In this past week alone, and I’m not sure what it is about me that attracts this, I have been pulled into 2 conversations, where people have told me their thoughts on initiatives targeted towards addressing inequity – that if they were Black, that they would be offended; What, in their opinion should be done, and that Black people, when speaking passionately and vociferously about how they are being failed, are not really helping the situation.
The invisibile-isation, and erasure, is Eurocentric. I don’t know if it’s exclusively so, but I do realise it does a destructive disservice to marginalised people, because even if white people individually struggle with this, they live in a world that celebrates, endorses, and elevates their collective identity and experience to such a level that the very idea of personhood, conceptually and representationally, is white normative.
The levels, methodologies, and insidiousness of our erasure is such that even thinking on this is staggering in scope and depth.
We are underrepresented in our language. We borrow the language passively, and search for the best words and phrases to help us say what we mean. Language should be a tool for us to speak to who we are, and if it doesn’t, we should bend it to do so. We have done this to some degree, out of preservation. In our struggle to find a place, and create community, in our societies, we brought our unique cultural references and practices into our every day expression. It helped us survive, and along the way, led and shaped art and culture. I’m proposing that we need to think about not just reacting to our circumstance, but examine where language, culture, and identity intersect.
Yet, as we journey toward higher levels of acceptability and curated structural proximity, in our efforts to feel safety, and, in wanting to be seen as ‘proper’, in wanting to indicate that we belong, and can express ourselves in the ‘right way’, we followed the dictates of the tool that serves the system that structurally underserves us, without question, rather than becoming that tools master…
So even the language by which we present ourselves, and, by extension, represent ourselves, is tailored in favor of an intellectual and linguistic space that isn’t for us. It just accommodates us, and even then, only sometimes, because the default idea of personhood when we speak about people, when we speak about the general public, is normalized whiteness.
When we speak of our needs, when we speak of our personhood, we speak as the other. And in order to speak about us, people like us, in wider conversations, we other ourselves, to avoid an assumption that we are speaking of whiteness. That otherness lands us in alcoves, in these silos, in these trenches where we’re fighting for recognition, for dignity, for freedom of expression in a space that tells us that we require permission, we require to be deserved, and are required to deserve. For those of us who are cultural producers, thinkers, writers, academics, archivists, it is difficult in the extreme to produce work from a space that requires levels of legitimacy, or recognition, or validation.
The other part of that conversation is, who are these requirements for, and then to go further, what is it about those people, institutions, systems… that have such an authority, and what endows them with that authority, to give you that recognition? If we’re speaking about the space and place of cultural expression, many of us work hard to cultivate it, so that we may speak predominantly to us and where we come from. How can someone outside of that be able to validate that?
The framing dictates the image. In expressing our work, we centre our output, our sense of authority, or the vector that we need to travel along, in order to speak, with legitimacy, of the work that we do. If that centralized expression is framed by someone else, then whatever we present, whatever we put up, our output is always going to be within the confines of that, within the parameters of that frame, and by extension, within the parameters of the vision that someone outside of us has set for us.
So how can we then, in terms of creating film, in terms of creating content, in terms of creating art, in terms of our thinking, truly start talking about how to represent, if the direction and modus for validity, for legitimacy, for recognition, comes from outside of ourselves. We have institutions that ostensibly were built to contain us, and study us, and extract from us, and yet these are the spaces from which we take legitimacy.
Conventional wisdom prompts us to ask questions. The parameters of those questions are set to dictate the answers. But if we’re going to come together, in spaces like this, and look for answers to these challenges, then maybe we shouldn’t be seeking what questions to ask. We should be interrogating the parameters, and premises ,in which we frame those questions in the first place. Or else, what we have is not artistic and cultural freedom. What we have is a confined space within which we have restricted movement, and yet are expected to be happy to be able to move.
We talk about the lens we show ourselves through… WE have to be able to own the frame… or create it.
And this highlights the problem of black excellence, because black excellence is the thing that is held up to show how great we can be as individuals within this same confined space, the fallacy of it is that… A) the exclusivity of that example of excellence doesn’t allow for everyone, and B), the forces, people, institutions that create and maintain that confined space, use that iconography to tell us how great things are for us, to inform us of our condition relative to this, and gesture what we should aim for.
We live our condition. We need to stop having our condition defined for us through the parameters, views, expert opinions of people who either actively endorse or tacitly support, even with their silence, our confinement.
I could go into the destructive, and Orwellian mendacity of the Culture Wars, but I’ll leave that for another time..
Academia is supposed to be the place that allows people, who may not have the automatic resources to be able to step beyond what has been prescribed for them, the tools to be able to realise their potential, and make the world a better place. Yet academia is this ivory tower, that uses linguistic and intellectual tools, to be an exclusionary zone. It therefore doesn’t become the armorer of the people, but rather extracts those people, and perpetuates its separateness from the masses. Academia should be the place where we can find everything that we need to make a better world, and in some cases, it does, but it does so primarily for those who have power. Then those who have power, who have maintained that power, who have guarded that power, who create and perpetuate systems that keep the gradations of our communities and societies in place, are then the ones entrusted with the knowledge that would set us free.
That’s crazy!
The archiving of our culture is one of the most sacred undertakings we can commit to. To take the expression of a generation, to store, preserve, and re-present it, calls for a deep respect of both the work of the artist, and the people it represents. For the marginalised, this solemn duty takes on another layer, and a challenge. The archiving of such work must, at inception, and in a sustainable way, be structured to disable all framings that: A), limit and inhibit that works’ journey into the future as eventually no longer marginalisable, but central, as all art should be, to the exploration of humanity, and B), rebel against Academia in its cataloguing and categorisation of our culture, until that process is no longer renders those works orbital, or peripheral, to whiteness, but speaks to a level of specificity, that at it’s core, is universal.
This is no less that what the art deserves… and yet it doesn’t. The problem with ‘deserving’, is that it presents as if depending on worth, but the truth is, it is bestowed, via proof. I ‘deserve’ that accolade, look at my record… I ‘deserve’ to be in this space, see..? This is what I’ve done… I’deserve’ to be treated fairly, I’m just as important as the next person…
I’ll say it again… we function in a space that tells us that we require to be deserved, and are required to deserve.
As long as we still believe that we deserve, we acquiesce our right to claim ownership of our space, our validity, our legitimacy, and allow our needs to be behoven to someone else’s consent.
I don’t deserve freedom – It is mine to exercise.
I don’t deserve recognition – Better recognize me.
I don’t deserve representation – My very existence represents every aspect of humanity… with a Black cherry on top.
The fact that some refuse to see, exalt, and acknowledge, the full representation of who I am, and would seek to confine and define me, in order to make it more palatable for them, takes away from my humanity, and if my humanity has to come at the cost of being piecemeal, at the price of being ‘deserved’… the humanity that’s in question isn’t mine…
I challenge everyone, myself included to..
- Redefine the parameters and questions that guide the discussion on representation and freedom of expression.
- Explore ways to create new frameworks and spaces that are not confined by the existing power structures.
- Challenge the institutions and narratives that define the terms of legitimacy and validation for marginalized communities.
- And… Advocate for academia to become a true “armorer of the people” rather than an ivory tower that perpetuates exclusion.
Corrd
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