On Black Optimism and Other Forms of Magic
Friday, I hopped on the express train from my job in the city. After a long day of living in that all too familiar state of being “one of few,” I packed my shit up at 4:00 PM to skip happily out the door. Somewhere around Bowling Green, the train began to slow to an unusual creep and eventually stopped somewhere far away from any kind of wireless signal. We continued this stop-and-go until Nevins where the conductor announced that the train was no longer in service. A quick check of MTA’s Twitter account revealed a “police investigation” as the cause of the delay. I rolled my eyes and waited for the next train to pull into the station, feeling that flare of rage and indignation.
Sleepily, on Sunday morning, I scrolled through Twitter, which is still somehow stuck in the past. As I refresh my timeline, I find a video frame showing Black faces peering through the foggy windows of an MTA subway car at a hoard of blue-uniformed bodies. Reluctantly I click. I hear voices that are oddly familiar. Shakily, the camera person captures the chaos inside the car as people attempt to escape a threat. With the doors still unopened, the movement in the car suddenly becomes more frantic, as people push into the periphery. The car divides biblically, leaving one man sitting at the center of the car, the obvious target of the ever-growing police mob. The camera person shifts as men and women on the train exclaim. My heart drops, my finger poised to pause before what I know will likely happen actually does; the voices of more frightened passengers can be heard from the camera person’s vantage point. The view then begins to toggle between the man and the doors, still unopened, still unarmed. The moment before they burst, the breath of the car is whisked away. The silence is flooded with 2, then 6, then 10 blue bodies. In a single frame, the Black man, his arms raised, his head hung in resignation, is buried under a blue mob. Violently they retain him. He quickly disappears in their frenzy. In the next second, the blue gaze turns to the passengers still huddled at the edges of the frame. They are herded out onto the platform, the fate of the Black man still unknown under the pile-on. The camera person’s view shifts, now outside the train. I try to count the number of fingers I see resting on guns.
“All I can do is expose the sickness.” - Nina Simone (Source).
Last week, in the wake, we tried to articulate what it means to live under the conditions of social death. My mind sticks to Burkina’s comment towards the end of class, of never really being able to come up for air because of the weight of the gratuitous violence that keeps us fighting, every day. I’m thankful, that that violence has yet to broach my everyday lived experience, but the realities of this violence never stop haunting me. Over the past several weeks, I’ve found myself choking on the ideological and emotional weight of the work of Sharpe, Wilderson, Sexton, Hartman, Spillers, and Wynters. Each week, I’ve felt the fog clearing a bit more. With wake work finding a comfortable place in the front of my mind. That even though the terror and violence, Black life persists.
This week, though back to a bit of academic jargon, Fred Moten puts forth the idea of Black Optimism that offers an even brighter stain of hope on this grueling exploration of Black/Human. Particularly in Black Op, Moten does well to illustrate the tension in which Blackness exists. Though focusing mostly on a definition of Black studies, Moten simultaneously captures what it means to be Black. Blackness is “walking in another world while passing through this one” (Moten, 1743). It is a state of disorientation, of being and unbeing at once. He goes on, “no government can take responsibility for [Blackness], however much it emerges in and out of government conditions; at the same time, it remains unresponsive to the governance that it calls and the governments that it rouses” (1745). I wonder what all this means to the Black man being tackled on the train. A small voice inside me attempts to search for a reason that this force would be required for such a takedown, then (Black) reality snaps in. For one, unarmed, resigned Black man, the weight of 10 and the performative support of over a dozen more officers would be required for the inability to invest $2.75.
I leave with an understanding of Black studies (and Blackness) as “a genuine, fundamental, fantastic, radical collective rethinking” of the world and our place in it. If we are at once here and in another world, how can we begin to reconfigure the building blocks of the anti-Black system to our immediate benefit? How can our conversations in class, and elsewhere, help to save or at least encourage the Black man on the train at Franklin Avenue, or any other Black body that faces a violent monster. Someone in class said a while ago that we can’t rely on white sympathy, or even our aural expression if it doesn’t cause the earth beneath us to shake.
