Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific. Vince Schleitwiler
resounding a red ray
If the color line serves as a tool for mapping the geopolitics of race and projecting its destiny across centuries, it also marks the site where race is produced, where bodies are given coherence and torn asunder. This is not a line to be crossed in triumph; to be crossed by it is to feel the violence of imperial incorporation extending itself as justice. The anecdote that began this chapter invokes such a crossing in order to evade it, in what I propose below is an improvised theoretical gesture of a radical poetics, out of which unfolded that enormous history of action—aesthetic, intellectual, political—which travels under the name Du Bois. So let me return to April 1899, to the earnest young man making his way up Mitchell Street. Eight months away from the speech in D.C., he is on the other side of a vast divide: over ten days in May, his son, Burghardt, age two, will take ill and die, in a city where white doctors would not treat black patients, and black doctors were in short supply (Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois 227–28). For now, carrying his reasoned statement and his letter of introduction to the newspaper, he may still imagine that the violence he hopes to address reaches toward someone else.
This is a story about imperialism’s racial justice and its tokens. In it, the ambitious young scientist recognizes his own tokenization: all his hard-won achievements suddenly seem meaningless before the evidence of overwhelming violence. If he’s been endowed with the power to speak as a representative of his race, which he’d planned to use with the editor of the Constitution, it is because his achievements, his person, could be taken to justify a civilizing mission. He appears, in autobiographical caricature, as what would later be called a model minority.
This is racial incorporation in a mode of sponsored uplift, whereby the nation guides the education of its nonwhite wards in the ways of white civilization—a mode pioneered in the metropole before its extension to the Philippine colony. If this process engineers a kind of model nonwhite racial subject hybridized by internalizing white civilization, it also secures the nation’s claim to whiteness via the demonstration of a racial capacity for benevolent mastery. Further, the scientific efficiency by which the United States performs the civilizing mission proliferates racial distinctions within whiteness, engineering a modern, hybridized yet pure variety that could be heir and successor to European empires.
But I find another form of racial token here, manufactured by another mode of racial incarnation. I refer to the gruesome trophy said to be on display at the grocer’s, the dismembered knuckles of the lynched body of Sam Hose. I argue that lynching is one manifestation of a mode of imperial incorporation through overwhelming violence, and that the lynching form may be understood as a communal, narrative act of sexual violence—a sex act, whose performance establishes and secures whiteness, as well as blackness, as racial categories of violent mastery and conquest. A racialized, sexualized, invasive violence is projected, as threat, onto the body to be sacrificed, and then mastered through an overwhelming, preemptive violence.
The trophy is a token of this act, condensing its narrative into a magical object, whose display reenacts the ritual. The token on display serves as a warning to black people in its vicinity, to fix them in place in the local racial order—not to expel them, not to exterminate them, but to fix them, in intimate bondage, in relation to whites. It serves, too, as a celebration and a commemoration for local white audiences. But it also addresses other white audiences, who may or may not be present, who may provisionally hold a superior position in a social order, and thereby deign to condescend to the community of lynchers. It defiantly proclaims a racial difference within whiteness, between higher but decadent strains of whiteness whose capacity for rejuvenating violence has degraded, and a lower but more vigorous, youthful, potent, rising racial strain. At issue here is a perceived threat of overcivilization, giving rise to moral and sexual perversion, feminized men and masculinized women, and the inevitable decline of a great race in the cyclical rhythms of world-historical progress—that orientation to civilization I have been calling occidented.31
Lynching is commonly misunderstood as a strictly Southern phenomenon, exemplifying the conflict between a subordinated regional white community and a disapproving nation. I contend instead that lynching is just one of the manifestations of racial incorporation through sexualized violence crucial to the ways the United States, as a rising world power, claimed the imperial legitimacy of whiteness while asserting the exceptionality of its white racial character. Thus, one response to the spectacle of lynching, a condemnation from the perspective of some Northern or European elites, which would become dominant and shape subsequent histories of racism, takes it as evidence of the backwardness and debasement of white lynchers, of their savage or uncivilized ways—that the process, in effect, made them less than white, contaminated or blackened. Yet the danger of contamination is the necessary risk of a procedure to inoculate whiteness from overcivilized decline by infusing a sexualized, racialized savage essence, of the engineering of a hybrid modern whiteness that projects primal nature onto a nonwhite body in order to abstract and consume it in an act of sacrificial communion. As I argued in my reading of King Kong, this act makes white people more white, white men more manly and potent, white women more feminine and sexually desirable. Another analogy appears in the “Optic White” episode of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the secret ingredient of a superior white paint turns out to be ten drops of “dead black” liquid (163). In an influential analysis of this “remarkably astute parable of the production of whiteness” (74), Harryette Mullen reads it as an analogy, not to lynching, but to passing, taken as a model for fabricating “pure” whiteness from racial difference (72). If the social phenomenon of passing unveils the “formula” of whiteness’s manufacture—not as an exception to the general rule of white reproduction, but as the exemplary case revealing the underlying principle—then the lynching form is one of its instances.
It would be tempting to narrate Du Bois’s decision to turn back down Mitchell Street as a deferral or postponement, to say he reverses course because he has not yet prepared the theoretical formulation sufficient for the scene he is on the way to witnessing. For the color line, as he would shortly define it, is first and foremost the natal site of whiteness, even as Du Bois’s intervention seeks to overturn this priority to herald the emergence of modern nonwhite subjects. But the lynching form does not merely instantiate the color line—it seeks to collapse that line into a single, fixed point. Du Bois is justifiably less concerned, in this instance, with elaborating the multiple strains of whiteness lynching nourishes than with its propensity to reduce all varieties of nonwhiteness to the same fate. One might say that Du Bois hesitates before or evades the embodied experience of being crossed by the color line—except that, as I will argue, you may take his deferral or hesitation, the swerve or detour from the scene of lynching that necessarily returns him to it, as itself the crucial theoretical gesture of his narrative, improvised on the spot.
What happens in the encounter that Du Bois quite prudently avoids? Something of an analogue can be found in chapter 10 of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The unnamed protagonist, whose New England boyhood is closer to Du Bois’s biography than Johnson’s, has come to the South after a series of adventures across the United States and Europe, determined to become a great composer by transforming the raw materials of black popular culture into a refined, concert-hall music. Following classic European models of modernizing nationalism—to reconstitute the collective accomplishments of the peasantry first into folk culture and then into the product of individual genius—his ambitions are fully worthy of Du Bois’s vision of uplift. Arriving in the poor communities of the Black Belt, he begins “jotting down in my note-book themes and melodies, and trying to catch the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state” (Johnson, Writings 105), but he is compelled to abort his initial research when he finds himself observing a lynching bee.
Jacqueline Goldsby persuasively argues for a reading of the book as a novel of lynching rather than passing, shaped by Johnson’s own traumatic encounters with the violence. Indeed, it is the experience of lynching that transforms the protagonist into an ex-colored man. His representation of his decision appears disingenuous—“I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race,” he says, and merely “change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would” (115), though subsequent events reveal he must actively hide his past. He rationalizes the decision as an impossible attempt to distinguish