Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific. Vince Schleitwiler
on the senses that conditions perception. Students of black literature and culture will be familiar with its paradox of invisibility and hypervisibility, and scholars of race will recall the duplicitous language of color-blindness, two examples of a larger dynamic not reducible to the visual or to any single sense. Angela Davis captures it succinctly in asking why older forms of racism are called “overt,” as if racism is somehow “hidden” in the post–civil rights era (“Civil Rights”). Similarly, Patricia Williams describes the successful police defense in the Rodney King case as less a rationalization than a painstaking lesson in an “aesthetics of rationality” (54). An elaborate system of looking, charged with fear and desire, which intuitively apprehends a prone black body as a threat demanding overwhelming preemptive force; or again, the socialized habits of perception that instruct you to perceive mass incarceration as a natural function of government, and that evoke the specter of the prisoner to teach you to see yourself as free—such are the broader set of phenomena I conceptualize as an aesthetics of racial terror, a training of attention that allows its subjects to distinguish between forms of freedom and unfreedom, between differently racialized and gendered bodies, and between the gospel of imperialism’s racial justice and its expression as overwhelming violence.
The violence’s tendency toward repetition and excess points to its intrinsic inability to fully and finally achieve its ends, revealing an anxiety over the limits of domination and the nonidentity of coercion and consent. By the same token, its corresponding tendency toward spectacle and ritualization suggests how that anxiety demands a periodic renewal of its lessons. These must be compulsively reenacted in an increasingly formalized manner, whose slightly disjunctive relation to any given situation both extends their temporal reach and invites their eventual collapse. Because the violent operation of imperialism’s racial justice is unable to fix its terms, they are shown to be historically contingent. What passes for racial justice under imperialism in one period—expulsion, wholesale slaughter, engineered extinction, religious conversion, cultural erasure—might provide the very definition of racial injustice in another, even as the extent to which imperialism dominates the terms of what can be imagined as racial justice in the present is difficult to properly perceive.
This is why I do not turn to the past to recover an exemplary politics. Such an impulse rests on unacknowledged presumptions regarding history as progressive enlightenment, upholding images of freedom’s betrayal in an unfree past to train its optics to mistake the privileging of hindsight for freedom of judgment in the present. By contrast, this book seeks to dwell within the strangeness of the past as a means of defamiliarizing the present, casting its lot within the predicaments of the past in order to read a shared condition of unfreedom in the desire to become estranged to it. This task of reading, or learning how to read, draws on the aesthetic resources of black radical traditions that improvise a countertraining of perception, whose appearance may be anticipated within the ritual sites of training in the aesthetics of racial terror—in its very forms, practices, and protocols. It pursues the chance that what imperial inclusion in the violence of its embrace must exclude bears the clues to what yet eludes it.
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The predominant form of imperialism’s racial justice discussed in this book, recent enough to seem at once familiar and foreign, is racial uplift. At the twentieth century’s dawn, uplift encompassed both the range of projects to improve the social conditions of African Americans and the guiding rationale for U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Looking back through a perspective shaped by post–World War II conjunctions of formal racial equality and formal national independence, on one hand, and Third Worldist antiracism and anti-imperialism, on the other, these two senses appear incommensurable. Examples of Negro uplift, as collective protest or moralizing conservativism, are regularly represented as antecedents of various contemporary strains of African American politics. By contrast, the attitudes and expressions of Anglo-Saxon uplift, when not ignored or discarded, are recognized as outmoded or racist. Whether the racial politics of U.S. colonialism are seen as aberrations or vestiges in an essentially benevolent tradition, or as alibis or paternalistic delusions exposing the immorality of power, their discontinuity from traditions of racial justice is taken for granted. Yet at the time, black intellectuals regularly presumed the coherence and continuity of an overarching category of uplift, upholding it most strongly when they subjected its Anglo-Saxon variant to criticism. On what terms can this continuity be understood?
In his influential work on uplift, Kevin Gaines argues that an older sense of the term rooted in “antislavery folk religion” (Uplifting the Race, 1) largely gave way, after Reconstruction, to an ideology stressing “self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth.” While “espousing a vision of racial solidarity uniting black elites with the masses,” Gaines argues, uplift ideology functioned to establish a fragile class division within the race. In the teeth of racism, “many black elites sought status, moral authority, and recognition of their humanity by distinguishing themselves, as bourgeois agents of civilization, from the presumably undeveloped black majority; hence the phrase, so purposeful and earnest, yet so often of ambiguous significance, ‘uplifting the race’ ” (2). Tenuous and aspirational, this social distinction intensified the values and practices of service and duty to the race, inscribing it even as they worked to overcome it.
Anglo-Saxon uplift was similarly concerned as much with its privileged subject as with its benighted objects. While the stated aim of conquest was to better a native deemed unfit for self-government, its underlying objective was to establish a white American racialized capacity for imperial rule, as illustrated by Rudyard Kipling’s famously bitter counsel to his Anglo-Saxon brethren to “take up the White Man’s burden” in the Philippines. Though ingratitude, sabotage, and failure may be the results of the colonizer’s efforts, the poem suggests, he must be satisfied by the “judgment of [his] peers,” veterans of other civilizing missions, upon his “manhood.” Counterposing this racialized fraternity to the sour travesty of “silent sullen peoples” impassively “weigh[ing] your Gods and you,” the poem illustrates how imperialism constitutes white manhood as a transimperial community of judgment, even as judgment is thereby made available to appropriation by the colonized (291).
This understanding of U.S. conquest as a trial of white manhood, a liberating burden, was not merely an invention of the poet. Cast in decidedly sunnier terms, uplift was President William McKinley’s own reported justification for the war. In a notorious 1899 interview, first published by James Rusling in 1903, McKinley insists he had no initial interest in colonization. After nights of soul searching, however, he finds no alternative: returning the islands to Spain “would be cowardly and dishonorable,” handing them to another European power “would be bad business and discreditable,” and recognizing their independence would be disastrous, as “they were unfit for self-government.” “There was nothing left for us to do,” he concludes, “but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died” (22–23). However authentic the anecdote, it accurately illustrates the official rationales for war, recast as a moral challenge—encountered first before a transimperial community of whiteness, as a test of manhood (the gendered capacity for valor, honor, and credit), and second, in the face of a racialized population, recognized only as the object of responsibility. Uplift, in other words, is a moral duty, in the form of conquest.
Broadly speaking, what’s historically particular to uplift as a form of racial justice is its imagination of a benevolent relationship between subjects positioned differently in a hierarchy of civilization. As it worked to establish, certify, and justify inequality, its internal logic cast this relationship as a form of tutelary love. McKinley’s official policy of “benevolent assimilation,” as Vicente Rafael glosses it, is “a moral imperative” devoted to a “civilizing love and the love of civilization” (21), manifested primarily in education—the governing trope and signature policy concern of Anglo-Saxon uplift in the Philippines, as well as a primary field of debate for competing visions of Negro uplift.
The problem of tutelage holds an inherent paradox, what you might call uplift’s miraculous core: it aims to produce a free, self-determining subject through an imposed, coercive process disallowing that subject’s capacity