Black excellence, the politics of being
It can be the urbane Thabo Mbeki calmly stating the obvious that “I am an African” or a Usain Bolt spearing the air with his hand and pointed finger after a good run; Serena Williams can punch the air with her fist, and Muhammed Ali declares that “I am th
IN the present world, black excellence is an object denied. If it is not denied and criminalised, it is opportunistically appropriated by its fearers and haters, and used as their own invention. It can be the urbane Thabo Mbeki calmly stating the obvious that “I am an African” or a Usain Bolt spearing the air with his hand and pointed finger after a good run; Serena Williams can punch the air with her fist, and Muhammed Ali declares that “I am the greatest!” Kanye West puts it as it is, “that’s what it is, black excellence, baby.”
Even at its obvious, there is something about black excellence that is criminal, forbidden and taboo in the present world. Black success in anything must be an imitation of the real thing, the original, white excellence.
Lewis R. Gordon and his fellow travellers in the Caribbean Philosophical Association have come up with an entire philosophy, Africana Existentia Philosophy, to reflect on the condition of being black in an antiblack world. By the Africana as a people, Lewis R. Gordon and his community of philosophers mean Africans in the mainland of Africa and the descendants of the former slaves and African migrants in the diaspora.
The fear and criminalisation of black excellence, that is if it is not appropriated in the USA, is such that all black legends and icons are handled in such a way that they all die disappointed or disgraced.
The American dream just does not seem to permit a black legend or icon to leave the world with their dignity and humanity intact. When Michael Jackson the “king of pop” left the world trying to engineer a return to fame, he left with a dark cloud over his head as a low life child molester and a pervert.
The biggest manufacturer and distributor of laughter in the world, Bill Cosby, now has a chapter in his book of life as a sex pest. Marcus Gurvey, the return to Africa philosopher and black liberation thinker, in the book, died not as a philosopher but a low life fraudster.
The American dream, the white dream, will always find mud with which to besmirch any form of black excellence or success. Closer to home, the narrative of the life of Nelson Mandela, not in so many words, is not that of a brave liberator but a hot headed native who white people jailed for 27 years, after the good school of prison, he became a statesman.
Simply, it takes a good 27 years to turn a raw native into a leader. To qualify to receive a Nobel Prize alongside a white man, Mandela needed close to thirty years of disciplining and preparation. An impression has been built, whether he is a native in Africa or a Negro in the United States of America, the black person is unfinished business that still needs white homework to polish and finish as a human being. Looking at how white mediocrity and black mediocrity are differently dealt with in the world can help illuminate this point, especially in the area of criminality. White and Black Mediocrities On 24 March 2015, a co-pilot of a jet belonging to Germanwings, Andreas Lubitz, who was 27 years old at the time, locked the other pilot out of the cockpit and flew the plane onto a mountain, killing everyone on board. There was agony and perplexity in understanding and describing the motives and actions of the young white lad from Germany.
He could not be described as a mass murderer or a terrorist even as evidence was abounding that he intentionally flew the plane against a mountain. The conclusion was that he was depressed, very sick and haunted by suicidal tendencies. There was even pathos in the media reports that intended to invite sympathy to Andreas.
The cause of the death of 150 people was attributed to an act of suicide by a sick pilot. In a way, the sick fellow sickly intended to take his own life, but sadly, some 149 people also died with him. In the media and scholarly literature the low and even criminal activities of white people are presented in the discourse of individualism.
The white low life is an individual whose actions are not a representation of his community; he has been set apart by an illness or another disturbance. Dylann Storm Roof, the church shooter, a 17-year-old white American man who gunned down nine AfricanAmerican worshippers in Charleston was described as a deluded
individual who should have been identified for help; society had been negligent in not realising that he needed help.
Uma Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, a 23-year-old black Nigerian man who tried to blow up a jet full of more than 200 people with explosives that were tailored to his underwear, was quickly called by the name fitting the crime, terrorist. He was sentenced to four life times in prison plus 50 years. A quick survey of newspaper reports in Europe, America and even South Africa shows that, whenever black criminals are sentenced, the usually heavy sentence is handed down to set an example to all black people out there. White law reason imagines black people as a mob that is out there waiting to commit crimes, and therefore it is important to punish one of them in such a way as to scare the whole of their society. In the present world, a black person offends not as one individual but as a representative of a criminal community. Failure, mediocrity and offence among blacks are a black thing, in the imagination of white sensibility. The Celebration of Black excellence If not remembered as a hard hitting boxer, or slippery fighter with fancy footwork, Mohammed Ali is remembered as a boastful and even racist winner. Very little attention has been paid to the depth of his thought, and even poetry and phi losophy as a black icon . Boxers, especially black ones are supposed to be all muscle and not mind, but Ali defied that categorisation. In one celebration of victory he said: “I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale, I handcuffed lightning and thrown thunder in jail” not only that but Ali had “only last week murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick” and was “so mean to make medicine sick.”
Ali was a black champion who knew it and said it. Black victory, black success in a white and anti-black world is miraculous and poetic. Claudia Rankine observes how white America expects Serena Williams to embrace her victory with more humility and politeness, not to shake and gyrate too much. She should do like the white brothers and sisters, receive success with modesty.
Usain Bolt is supposed to cool down a little and not get frenzied by a win. But, black success and excellence in the present world is an impossible explosion, a miracle that 2pac Shakur, another poet called the “rose that grew on a concrete floor.”
Throughout the centuries, social and scientific racism has invented many cultural and sociological technologies, from table manners, dress code to etiquette as ways of disciplining and containing the black body, its looks and its movements in the world.
In South African universities presently, the rules and regulations against sexual harassment are such that one has to literally ask for permission to greet a lady colleague or a lady student.
Observers believe it is a cultural technology to protect white women from the black male gaze as black academics increase in the academy.
Even black laughter, humour and mythmaking are feared to be loaded with violent sex intentions that must be guarded with clinical rules and regulations. In failure and in success, blackness in the present world must be invisible.
All sorts of commandments, religious and moral are formed and circulated to protect the world from blackness and its harmfulness.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa. decoloniality2016@gmail.com.