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The notion that Black people are human beings is a relatively new discovery in the modern west. —West, 1982 To the real question, how does it feel to be a problem? I seldom answer a word. —DuBois, 1903 DuBois asks, “How does it feel to be a problem?” The question I will ask and answer in this chapter is, “How did Black bodies become a problem in the first place?” The social assignment of Black bodies to an underclass is a historical conundrum that has multiple origins, two of which are the institutions of slavery and the mass media. This chapter will explain how a set of racial projections became concretized in the American landscape via the development of meanings that were eventually fortified in many aspects of American life. In other words, Black bodies were inscribed with a set of meanings, which helped to perpetuate the scripter’s racial ideology. Through these scripts, race gradually became its own corporeal politics. Essentially, this book is an un-muting of DuBois’s reply to the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” Also, it inevitably offers a discussion of West’s assertion that Black people’s humanity is a fairly new discovery. Although it is clear, as Foucault (1972) announces, “that everything is never said,” it is important to engage the historicity of the concept of Black body politics and the scripting of the Black body1 for what they reveal about embedded racially xenophobic tendencies that are redistributed and recycled in mass-mediated cultural practices. The selected vehicle for doing so is criticalhistorical analysis, which recounts the genesis of a phenomenon while mapping contemporary parallels and grappling with age-old problems revisited. This 9 ONE Origins of Black Body Politics mode of inquiry has become valuable and transitive for its ability to support social reformulations and reconstructions of knowledge in addition to the sociopolitical machinery that functions to perpetuate historically concomitant ideologies. Critical-historical analysis is necessarily an emancipatory act of reasoning through historical problems while elevating an analysis that calls for an end to a kind of domination characteristic as evidenced in the Manichean dialectic of psyche (mind) and colonialism (coercive control). This social and philosophical dualism, as implied by the word “Manichean,” suggests an inescapable commitment to power relations. My lifelong concern for the liberation of Black bodies, and therefore Black people, is conspicuous and unapologetic . Black bodies are not discussed here as a way to objectify, reconfigure, or disfigure Blacks and Black lives. Instead, the aim is to theorize how race is currently enacted at the moment of the gaze, and how this spectatorial surveillance complicates social relations because of how it is historically and inextricably situated and lodged in the US collective consciousness and the American ethos via popular media. The gaze, as Wiegman (1995) describes it, is a specular event, a tool for examining sites of obsessive desire that admit the visibility of difference, but remain troubled by it. The gaze can certainly be impartial or nonobligatory, but within the interplay of race relations, corporeal zones such as that of skin color and hair texture automatically evoke feelings, thoughts, perhaps anxieties , if they are already resident or dormant. The gaze suggests that there must be the presence of an Other. The Other can be a self-reflection, or it can be an unfamiliar or distanced Other. Either way, the Other functions to affirm the Self within this I–Other dialectical arrangement (Hitchcock, 1993). The Self is more than the “I” since the Self involves self-consciousness, selfesteem , and a personhood influenced by society and culture (Grosz, 1994; Hall, 1997). Anticolonialist Frantz Fanon (1967) was clear about this when he wrote, “To speak is to exist absolutely for the Other” (p. 17). Writerscholar Ralph Ellison (1952) also lucidly addressed this matter when he asserted, “I am an invisible man . . . I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (p. 3). It has become ordinary to talk about the I-versus-Other dialectic, but it is also possible to be Self and Other, though Homi Bhabha (1986) rearticulates this equation as follows: “[it is] not Self and Other, but the Otherness of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity” (p. xv). That is, the sickly nature of hegemonic inscriptions may influence an individual to begin to view the self as a stranger, as an obscure Otherized corporeal object, rather than as a familiar subject. So then, it is both the Other...

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