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xii Preface themselves to themselves, and to justify their acts of colonization, ordered the world with themselves as its leaders and as the epitome of humankind. In their schema there were losers. Africans and their descendants ranked at the bottom of nearly every list. Ideas of race serving as explanations for cultural and phenotypic differences associated with biology, climate, and moral history were woven into elaborate systems of privilege perpetuated across great expanses of space and time. Schools, businesses, government policies, work, residential arrangements, rules restricting interaction, and other institutions performed this work. Accompanying those institutions were theories, books, jokes, songs, cartoons, and so on. In Fanon’s words: “The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative of the European ’s feeling of superiority. Let us have the courage to say it outright: It is the racist who creates his inferior” (1967:93, original italics). But this is only a part of the story. Remember, I said that we humans are creators of categories, relationships, makers of causes and identities. We are capable of artful subversion. So, if you continually tell me that I am an animal, unintelligent, childlike, dangerous, without culture and history, perhaps I may believe you. Perhaps I will imbibe your identity and cultural imaginaries and situate myself within a Eurocentric framework , even though I know, at least to some extent, that I am not European , that I am not White. Here is where subversion becomes relevant. You can tell me that Blackness is indicative of inferiority and fallen status, but I am also able to reply, “No. It is venerable and majestic; it is only because of Whiteness that we Blacks have to make the argument . Just as you exalted yourself in your story, I can do the same, using cultural resources that make my case—maybe even taking a page from your book by declaring that God looks like me and us.” Subversion, as it relates to the identity work of producing and maintaining affirmative conceptions of Blackness, entails turning things on their head. This, the Rastafari have done. Aimé Césaire points us to some of the elementary exercises that involved racial subversion: “We adopted the word nègre (dare we translate it as ‘nigger’?), as a term of defiance. It was a defiant name. To some extent it was a reaction of enraged youth. Since there was shame about the word nègre, we chose the word nègre” (2000:89, original italics). Subversion, of the kind practiced by the Rastafari, has a pragmatic, deliberate aspect because it requires that its practitioners attain a certain awareness, an awareness that one can only learn. As Césaire suggests: Preface xiii If someone asks what my conception of Negritude is, I answer above all that it is a concrete rather than an abstract coming to consciousness. What I have been telling you about—the atmosphere in which we lived, an atmosphere of assimilation in which Negro people were ashamed of themselves—has great importance. We lived in an atmosphere of rejection , and we developed an inferiority complex. I have always thought that the black man was searching for his identity. And it seemed to me that if what we want is to establish this identity, then we must have a concrete consciousness of what we are . . . of the first fact of our lives: that we are black; that we were black and have a history, a history that Negroes were not, as you put it, born yesterday, because there have been beautiful and important black civilizations. At the time we began to write, people could write a history of world civilization without devoting a single chapter to Africa, as if Africa had made no contributions to the world. Therefore we affirmed that we were Negroes and that we were proud of it. (2000:91–92) Fanon recounts a personal experience of a racialized encounter in which a young White girl exclaimed in fright at the sight of him, “the Negro.” This event indicated to Fanon his power as a Black man to repulse , instill fear, and arouse rejection, all powers that he never desired but which were bestowed upon him by virtue of living in and circulating through societies in which race was salient. His recognition of his Blackness and its imposition upon him was a part of his reorientation and resocialization into a consciousness that dispenses positive salience to Black history and culture, a consciousness that asks to uncover explicit connections to...

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