|
Books by and about Steve Biko
I
Write What I Like: Selected Writings (2002) /
The Testimony of Steve Biko (1984)
Biko
(1991) /
Black Consciousness in South Africa (1979) /
Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve
Biko
*
* * * *
Books by Louis R. Gordon
Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism
(1995) /
Her Majesty's Other Children (1997)
/
Exisentia
Africana (2000)
Disciplinary Decadence
(2006) /
A Companion to
African-American Studies /
Fanon: A Critical Reader
*
* * * *
New Introduction to
Steve Biko's
I Write What I Like
By Lewis Gordon
Steve Bantu Biko
was a courageous man. This is not to say that he was
callously neglectful of the value of life, including his
own, but rather he was a man for whom life was so
valuable that the fear of death could be transcended.
The consequence was that he found a way for word and
deed to meet and thus to achieve the urgently political
and the genuinely liberating. Brutalized to death in the
flesh, he left his words to unfold through three decades
in a continued challenge to every human being to carry
on the fight for our humanity. Dust though his body has
become, his ideas live on.
You hold in your
hand, dear reader, a classic work in black political
thought and the liberation struggle for all humankind. I
mention both to emphasize the paradox offered by
blackness as the limit—as the periphery or the margin
-in the modern, racist world where whiles are treated as
the carriers of universal humanity, although the world
of color often admits the genuinely universal and often
hidden aspects of the modern world: its dirty laundry
or, in the formulation of the Latin American philosopher
Enrique Dussel, its "underside."
An imbalance of
power and perspective is the consequence of white
privilege, and it has led to what I call a theodicy of
the West.
Theodicy is the effort to account for the
compatibility of evil or injustice with the existence
of an omnipotent, omniscient, and good God. If God is
all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, why doesn't God
do something about injustice in the world? White
supremacists rationalize modern racism as a consequence
of God's favor of white people. Biko challenges such
views of God in "Black Souls in White Skins?" in which
he writes that the revolt of black youth is the most
reasonable response: "The anachronism of a well-meaning
God who allows people to suffer continually under an
obviously immoral system is not lost to young blacks who
continue to drop out of Church by the hundreds." He
calls for a liberating message: ''[The Bible] must
rather preach that it is a sin to allow oneself to be
oppressed."
God has been
replaced in the modern world by an order or system that
is to be maintained at all cost. In theological
language, such rationalization of modern racism is a
form of idolatry because it treats the system as God,
although Biko does not put it this way. Racism can be
described as a form of idolatry in that it holds one
class of people above others as intrinsically superior.
This means that it creates a double standard for human
membership. On the one hand, if those who are "below"
consider themselves human, then those who are "above"
are suprahuman or demigods. And if those who are "above"
consider themselves human, then those who are "below"
are subhuman and closer to animals.
This is the
relational theory of racism. It enables us to see the
problem of normativity that emerges in what
Frantz Fanon
and subsequently
David Theo Goldberg call "racist
culture." Those who place all others beneath themselves
create a situation in which the assertion of their
humanity and their superiority becomes superfluous. They
literally are the standpoint of nil reality. This means,
then, that racism is fundamentally asymmetrical, and it
is this pervasive asymmetry that marks many of the
contradictions in efforts from within the racist system
to liberate blacks. Biko's trenchant criticisms of
unequal power relations bring this argument to the fore.
Much of Biko's
energy is devoted to criticizing the liberal in both the
condescending white and the idiotic black forms. The
black liberal is idiotic because black people lack power
in a white-controlled system. The white liberal, on the
other hand, operates from the vantage point of having
something—perhaps a great deal—to lose in the event of
progressive social change. The white liberal's offer to
help has an air of condescension because it masks a
profound existential investment in the continuation of
the racist system. Thus, the white liberal always
insists on offering the theoretical or interpretive
strategies against antiblack racism, but such strategies
often act to preserve the need for white liberals as the
most cherished members and overseers of values in their
society.
In Biko's words:
|
I am against the
superior-inferior white-black stratification
that makes the white a perpetual teacher and
the black a perpetual pupil [and a poor one
at that]. |
Biko refuses to be
told what to think and what to write. "I write what I
like," he declares under the clever pseudonym Frank
Talk. The clarity of Frank Talk is a demand for truth.
He reveals here the unique, doubled relationship blacks
have with European civilizations: blacks face a world of
lies in which they are forced to pretend as true that
which is false and pretend as false that which is true.
This is the insight behind what is perhaps the most
powerful trope of black theoretical reflection,
introduced by W. E. B. Du Bois more than a century
ago—double consciousness.
Double
consciousness is knowing the particularity of the white
world in the face of its enforced claim to universality.
Double consciousness is knowing that much of the history
offered up to black people—its many interpretations and
echoes of while superiority and black inferiority, of
white heroism and black cowardice, and even the temporal
and geographical location of history's beginning as a
step off of the African continent—is a falsehood that
blacks are forced to treat as truth in so many countless
ways. Double consciousness, in other words, is knowing a
lie while living its contradiction.
Double
consciousness signals the most famous, and in some
circles infamous, concept in Biko's thought: Black
Consciousness. The roots of Black Consciousness go back
almost two centuries to the thought of
Martin Delaney. A
proud, African-born black man living in the United
States in the nineteenth century, Delaney advanced the
view that black people's appreciation of blackness was a
key dimension of their eventual liberation. His argument
addresses the force of the signs and symbols through
which people are seen and understood in their society.
Seeking value in blackness was a message that influenced
generations of black intellectuals in the nineteenth
century straight through to
Du Bois and his nationalist
rival Marcus Garvey.
The importance of
this move, which we may call symbolic resistance,
continued through reflections by the philosopher and
critic Alain Locke during the Harlem renaissance and
into the salon of the Nardal sisters in Paris from which
the Negritude movement emerged in
Aime Cesaire's coinage
and
Leopold Senghor's existential ruminations. Writing
on Cesaire's return to Martinique in 1939, Fanon
described, in his "West Indians and Africans," included
in his collection of essays
Toward the African
Revolution, the shock, the disrupting force, of
seeking the good and beautiful in things black: "for the
first time a lycee teacher—a man, therefore, who was
apparently worthy of respect, was seen to announce quite
simply to West Indian society “that it is fine and good
to be a Negro.” To be sure, this created a scandal. It
was said at the time that he was a little mad and his
colleagues went out of their way to give details as to
his supposed ailment.
In the 1960s, New
World blacks such as Malcolm X,
Charles Hamilton, and
Stokley Carmichael
(Kwame Ture) took another turn in
reconstructing everyone's altitude toward things black
through the conjunction of "black" with "power" to allay
the costs of associating blackness with impotence. The
resulting Black Power movement was a point at which
white liberals began their flight from black liberation
struggles, a departure which revealed much about the
racism that simmered beneath their allegiance: the price
of their coalition was continued black impotence and
dependence.
Biko's Black
Consciousness (in which the term "black" includes all
people of color) stands on the shoulders of this
history. It is grounded in recognition of the high costs
of truth. Biko wants the people, all people, to see what
was going on in South Africa and all over the world. He
wants us to see the connections between South African
black townships, the black ghettoes in England, the
United States, and
Brazil, and the many similar
communities in
South Asia and the
Middle East. Many of
us share his insight today when we seek those whom we
call "the blacks'" of their society, even if they may
not be people of African descent.
Why does Biko focus
his criticisms on liberals? He does so because liberals
pose as allies of blacks for the sake of securing a
liberal future. But is a liberal future best for blacks?
Although a "right-wing" future is patently anti-Black
one has to offer black people more options from
liberalism than simply its being better than the
right-wing position. Yet liberalism offers a
double-edged sword. On the one hand, there is
"conservative" liberalism, where the goal is to be
colorblind. The problem with this kind of liberalism is
that it changes no structures.
Thus, this
liberalism expects us to be colorblind in a world of
white normativity, a world where whites hold most of the
key cards in the deck. Another kind of liberalism
focuses on bringing blacks "up" to whites. The problem
with this strategy is that it makes whites the standard.
Blacks would thus fail here on two counts. First, they
would fail simply by not being white. Second, why must
it be the case that what whites have achieved constitute
the highest standards that humanity can achieve? One
luxury of modern racism is that it has enabled many
white people to compete only with each other while
either eliminating competition from other groups or
placing unfair burdens on them. Could many whiles
survive the many obstacles faced by blacks on a daily
basis? Could, with the absence of those tests, they be
assured that they are the "better" at what they do than
their black competitors?
White supremacy has
afforded many whites the luxury of mediocrity—as many
blacks discover when they trespass on white, privileged
places. Equality with such whites would be a very low
human standard indeed. Related to this branch of
liberalism is the very popular economic "class"
argument, which evades responsibility for antiblack
racism by focusing energy on poor whiles who also need
to be brought "up" to the standard of the white liberal.
Here we see the
presumption of the while liberal as a middle- or
upper-class individual, which entails the rejection of
whiteness as an economic commodity. The problem is that
the white liberal ultimately doesn't care about the
white poor because of the contradiction of wanting to
maintain a system that will have poor people and also
wanting those who are not poor as their cohorts. In
effect, the poor could never be their consorts. Even
more, the black poor, if able to escape their poverty,
still stand in a white world as a liability.
Biko appeals to
Black Consciousness as a way of going beyond all this.
Black Consciousness calls for black realization of the
humanity of black folk. It is a transcendence of racial
self-hatred. It is also the realization that freedom is
a standard much higher than equality, although equality
is more just than inequality. He is in concert with
William R. Jones, the famed black liberationist and
author of
Is God a White Racist?, who argued in
his retirement speech that the rightful aim of black
liberation is, simply put, "freedom, freedom, freedom."
Black liberation,
the project that emerges as a consequence of Black
Consciousness, calls for changing both the material
conditions of poverty and the concepts by which such
poverty is structured. Four decades ago, Frantz Fanon
made the same point thus: liberation requires setting
afoot a new humanity, which amounts to saying it
requires, literally, changing the world.
A quarter of a
century has passed since Biko's murder in
Port
Elizabeth, South Africa. What has since transpired is a
series of events that bring to the fore his words of
admonition. Many white liberals in the United States
have moved to the right and many white progressives have
since become neo-liberal or neo-conservative when it
comes to black emancipation projects.
In South Africa,
there has been much progress since the days when Biko's
prescient and provocative reflections first emerged.
Yes, there have been elections, and yes, there is a new
constitution for the Republic of South Africa, a
constitution with language that is the envy of nearly
every progressive community throughout the globe. But it
is also true that the route of a liberal solution has
been taken, and with it a rejection of the Bikoian
thesis—with roots that go all the way back to
Toussaint L'Ouverture in Haiti and
Frederick Douglass in the
United States that freedom is something that can only be
taken, not given. With this liberalism came the
Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), where many South
African citizens were encouraged to relate their
victimization and others were encouraged to confess,
without fear of reprisals from the new state, their
roles in the atrocities that occurred during formal
apartheid South Africa. Needless to say, most of the
people who spoke out were of color (black, colored, or
Asian).
Remarkably
Christian though this may have been in its obvious theme
of confession and forgiveness as conditions of
redemption, one sees the devastating spiritual impact of
the TRC proceedings all over South Africa. One sees it
in the streets, in the parks, in the stores, in the
schools, in the offices. One sees it particularly in
whites. There are many moral rationalizations that can
be made of those proceedings, but in the end, the lived
reality is painful and bitter. They reveal how
desperately South Africa wanted to prevent white flight;
they reveal that the global market is heavily racially
inflected; lurking beneath the undercurrents of
transition in South Africa is the fear that the economy
is the baby that could be lost with the white bath
water.
Whites thus walk
the streets of South Africa as a precious commodity.
There are, of course, whites who do not want this to be
the case, and there are those who prefer it this way. In
either case, whites protect the nation from
international abandonment, for precedence shows that
whereas a black nation is often simply abandoned by the
North American and European powers, a white one—even one
that was their former enemy as in The case of
Russia—will be given many economic and political
safeguards. This reality has a devastating impact on the
consciousness of black South Africans. How can the
conclusion that black South Africans are expendable be
avoided?
Black South
Africans have been, as South African philosopher Mabogo
P. More has argued, humiliated by the TRC. The rancor of
that humiliation permeates the air. Yes, some truth made
its way to the public spaces. But public spaces cannot
become genuine political spaces without a meeting of
human beings on both human and humane terms. Denigration
and expendability are poor grounds on which to build a
polity and a praxis of freedom.
Like many
generations before us, we now face the question of where
to go from here. What is our generation's mission? In
the United States and South Africa, and all across the
globe, the people have been promised much—short of
freedom. The world has changed much since the fall of
the Soviet Union and the collapse of many Third World
governments after periods of decolonization. New
conflicts have emerged in which communities are
paradoxically more alienated from each other as they are
compelled to live closer together. By way of
technological development and restructuring of economies
worldwide, our planet has become a very small place with
a lot of very angry people. It is in times like these
that we need to engage our past sages.
I am sure that if he were alive
today, Steve Bantu Biko would be disappointed but not
deterred. Deep down, every liberationist is an optimist.
We should learn from the struggles of this young man of
a few decades past. Read his thoughts and participate in
their continued cry to the present and the future as
they call for a consciousness committed to truth in the
continued struggle for freedom, freedom, freedom
*
* * * *
 |
Lewis
Ricardo Gordon (born 1962) is an American
philosopher who works in the areas of
Africana philosophy, philosophy of human and
life sciences,
phenomenology, philosophy of existence, social
and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories
of race and racism, philosophies of liberation,
aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy
of religion. He has written particularly extensively
on race and racism, postcolonial phenomenology,
Africana and
black existentialism, and on the works and
thought of
W. E. B. Du Bois and
Frantz Fanon. . . . Professor Gordon is the
author of several influential and award-winning
books, such as
Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism
(1995),
Her Majesty's Other Children (1997),
which won the Gustavus Myer Award for Outstanding
Work on Human Rights in North America,
Exisentia
Africana (2000),
Disciplinary Decadence
(2006), and his co-edited
A Companion to
African-American Studies, was chosen as the
NetLibrary eBook of the Month for February 2007.—Wikipedia |
* * * * *
|
Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism
By Lewis R.
Gordon
Lewis Gordon
presents the first detailed existential
phenomenological investigation of anti-black racism
as a form of Sartrean bad faith. Bad faith, the
attitude in which human beings attempt to evade
freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant
possibility of human existence. Anti-black racism,
the attitude and practice that involve the
construction of black people as fundamentally
inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to
evade the responsibilities of a human and humane
world. Gordon argues that the concept of bad faith
militates against any human science that is built
upon a theory of human nature and as such offers an
analysis of anti-black racism that stands as a
challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it
means to be human. |
 |
* * * * *
* * * * *
|
Existentia Africana
Understanding Africana Existential Thought
By Lewis
Ricardo Gordon
The
intellectual history of the last quarter of this
century has been marked by the growing influence of
Africana thought—an area of philosophy that focuses
on issues raised by the struggle over ideas in
African cultures and their hybrid forms in Europe,
the Americas, and the Caribbean.
Existentia Africana is an engaging and
highly readable introduction to the field of
Africana philosophy and will help to define this
rapidly growing field. Lewis R. Gordon clearly
explains Africana existential thought to a general
audience, covering a wide range of both classic and
contemporary thinkers—from Douglass and Du Bois to
Fanon. |
 |
* * * *
*
Afro- Pessimism By
Frank B. Wilderson, III
“Afro-Pessimists are framed as such . . . because they theorize
an antagonism, rather than a conflict—i.e., they perform a kind
of ‘work of understanding’ rather than that of liberation,
refusing to posit seemingly untenable solutions to the problems
they raise.”
“[The Afro-Pessimists
argue] that violence toward the black person happens
gratuitously, hence without former transgression, and the even
if the means of repression change (plantation was replaced by
prison, etc.), that doesn’t change the structure of the
repression itself. Finally (and this is important in terms of
the self-definition of the white person), a lot of repression
happens on the level of representation, which then infiltrates
the unconscious of both the black and the white person . . .
Since these structures are ontological, they cannot be resolved
(there is no way of changing this unless the world as we know it
comes an end. . . .); this is why the [Afro-Pessimist
relational-schema] would be seen as the only true antagonism
(while other repressive relations like class and gender would
take place on the level of conflict—they can be resolved, hence
they are not ontological).”
“[The Afro-Pessimists] work
toward delineating a relation rather than focus on a cultural
object.”
“Something that all the
Afro-Pessimists seem to agree upon regarding social death are
notions of kinship (or lack there of), the absence of time and
space to describe blackness. . . . There is no grammar of
suffering to describe their loss because the loss cannot be
named.”
“[The Afro-Pessimists]
theorize the workings of civil society as contiguous with
slavery, and discuss the following as bearing witness to this
contiguity: the inability of the slave (or the
being-for-the-captor) to translate space into place and time
into event; the fact that the slave remains subject to
gratuitous violence (rather than violence contingent on
transgression); the natal alienation and social death of the
slave.”
“[T]he Afro-Pessimists all
seek to . . . stage a metacritique of the current discourse
identified as “critical theory” by excavating an antagonism that
exceeds it; to recognize this antagonism forces a mode of death
that expels subjecthood and forces objecthood [upon Blacks].”
“For Fanon, the solution to
the black presence in the white world is not to retrieve and
celebrate our African heritage, as was one of the goals of the
Negritude project. For Fanon, a revolution that would destroy
civil society, as we know it would be a more adequate response.
I think the Afro-Pessimist such as Hartman, Spillers, and
Marriott would argue there is no place for the black, only
prosthetics, techniques which give the illusion of a
relationality in the world.”
Like the work of
Jared Sexton,
Saidiya Hartman,
David Marriott,
Hortense Spillers,
Frantz Fanon,
Lewis Gordon,
Joy James, and others, Wilderson’s poetry, creative prose,
scholarly work, and film production are predicated on the notion
that slavery did not end in 1865; the United States simply made
adjustments to the force of Black resistance without diminishing
the centrality of Black captivity to the stability and coherence
of civil society.—Incognegro
* * * * *
The Life and Death of Steve Biko (1977) /
The Life and Death of Steve Biko (1977) Part 2
Why
Steve Biko Wouldn't Vote
*
* * * *
Privatizing Education: The Neoliberal Project
Black Education and Afro-Pessimism /
The Collapse of Urban Public
Schooling / The Myth of Charter
Schools
Hunger for a Black President /
Introduction I Write What I Like Biko
Biosketch Biko
Speaks on Africans / The Fact
of Blackness (1952) Black World and
Fanon
* *
* * *
posted 15 December 2010
|
