Remember Black Dismemberment

Dismemberment is basically the stripping of membership. Simple enough, right? It represents a deconstruction which disfigures the identity of the object destroyed, such as to make its identity indeterminable.

African people were cut off from their tribes. Stripped of their names, languages and religions. Lands were cut away from tribes. And tribes that once kept their distance were now forced to live “as one” in “new lands” constructed according to the imagination of whiteness.

At one time we only counted for 3/5ths a human, dismembered from full humanity. Strange fruit swung from poplar trees. Dismembered. Fingers missing. Phalluses missing. Black body parts were sent across the country by the US Postal Service.

Forced sterilization policies dismembered Black women. Departments of Family and Child Services dismember Black families.

The racial disparity in statistics across the spectrum of social life bear witness to the reality that Black people have been dismembered from the “We The People” enshrined in the Constitution. Whether or not the Nation publicly holds to it’s 3/5ths designation for the mattering of Black life, the reality is this: Black people have been dismembered from the “people” as determined by America.

And that was the most important deliverable of white supremacy: the complete and utter dismemberment of Black people. For white supremacist society, Black people serve as the example of what happens to a people when white power determines to destroy it: that people is effectively and efficiently destroyed. Obliterated. Dismembered.

And having dismembered the African, whiteness gave birth to the Nigger. Not just the word “nigger,” but an actual being – an inferior being, called the “Nigger.” Like Dr. Frankenstein, White people went into the laboratory of the Slave Plantation and set about to construct the Nigger.

Willie Lynch supposedly preached in Virginia on how to convert the African who still desired freedom into a perpetual slave. It’s said he was the “best slave breaker” in the British World, helping British plantation owners secure their human chattel given the abolition of the Slave Trade. He supposedly knew how to create an environment for enslaved folk that would put Black subjugation on auto-pilot. Knowing the looming end of slavery, his techniques were in demand as investors wanted to know how to maintain control over a valuable commodity that was about to be outlawed.

Some will dispute whether Willie Lynch is a real person. Yet, it doesn’t matter if “The Making of a Slave” and Willie Lynch are real. You can see the evidence of the methodology playing out in the present. We are, indeed, a perpetual underclass…dismembered from – cut off from – the full expression of our humanity.

And we know that the Nigger has been created. Rather than undoing that Nigger’s creation we reject the idea that that Nigger has been created. And so that Nigger remains, unseen in the shadows of our individual and collective psyche.

We try to deny that Nigger’s existence. We pretend as if that Nigger isn’t present…isn’t real…isn’t efficacious. And so we effectively bury that Nigger alive, then wonder why we feel like we can’t breathe.

We spend our lives trying to keep that Nigger docile. And that Nigger spends his life trying to stay alive. And that “inner Nigger” is a fighter. That Nigger has spent more than 400 years learning how to stay alive in the face of white efforts to kill him. And just because the white man has employed your Black self to bury him, doesn’t mean that Nigger will give up and die. That Nigger has come this far by faith and can’t turn around now…

And so that Nigger stays around. That Nigger’s determination to survive taught him that the key to life was to make himself useful to white service. That Nigger came to understand that if he stayed in useful service to whiteness, he could survive. So that Nigger learned to be docile and submissive. He learned to be malleable to white molding, so that he could be shaped in the image of whiteness and fit into the box designed for that Nigger by the white imagination dictated.

Shucking and jiving became the means for surviving…

Because of that Nigger, we do everything within our power in order to appease whiteness. We do all we can in order to make ourselves useful to whiteness. If we have intellect, we get a good education. If we don’t have intellect, we entertain them. If we can’t entertain them, we learn to smile and be nice so we can serve them in the front of the house. If we cannot be rendered useful to whiteness, we will find ourselves in the back of the house and in the fields of unemployment, underemployment and the forced employment of the prison industrial complex.

That Nigger made you do it…That Nigger made you appease whiteness as if your life depended upon it. And because you are busy trying to bury that Nigger alive and pretend he ain’t real, that Nigger keeps you under control and in bondage.

We have been told to put on the cloak of whiteousness. Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois and those of that lineage – on down to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and those host of those engaged in the “civil rights movement” told us that if we wrap ourselves in the politics of respectability, according to the standards of whiteness, we would secure our freedom. They tell us that if we put our pain on display for white society to see, they will feel sorry for us and be moved to compassion over the hell they perpetuate and allow to be perpetuated.

But the politics of respectability really should be called the politics of acceptability. For, respectability politics is merely reshaping our identity in order to be acceptable to white society. Respectability politics means agreeing to assert our humanity and dignity in ways that white society will respect. Foundational, respectability politics requires us to embrace Black identity in the image of whiteness.

This is where dismemberment really comes into focus. For it becomes clear what happens to a dismembered people. And yes…a dismembered people is a broken people. And yes…a dismembered people cannot find their way until they are remembered.

But there’s a reason why those realities of dismemberment are true. And that reason is most important, for it dives right to the core of what white supremacy has done to humanity.