On Solidarity (A Call to Action for White Liberals and Progressives)

DISCLAIMER:

Let me start of by saying, before I unintentionally offend my liberal white friends (again), that when I am referring to “whiteness,” I am referring to those that willingly and knowingly submit to what it means to embody a white identity in America, a nation founded on the expropriation of Black slaves to build this nation, a nation that had KKK supremacists and Jim Crow laws, a nation where black men with voting rights were seen as ⅗ of a person, a nation where it was illegal for a blacks and whites to get married, a nation were separate and equal meant truly just meant separate, a nation where a civil rights movement was needed in order to prove that black lives matter, a nation where when you say black lives matter, someone responds with all lives matter. With this being the attributes of our nation, I am coming to say that being pro-black does not equate to being anti-white.

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Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21st, 1905 – April 15th, 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. Apart from his renowned contribution to twentieth century French existentialist philosophy, Sartre is also known for his Marxist, anti-colonialist politics; such is evident in his Préface, “Orphée Noir,” to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948) 

He opens up “Orphée Noir,” by interrogating: “When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing you praises? Did you think when they raised themselves up again, you would find adoration in the eyes of the heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground?”

Image by Isis Davis Marks (Yale 2019)

Sartre’s “Orphée Noir,” was written upon Senghor’s request and seeks to speak in solidarity with the Black population in tandem with their experience in white social-settings. Through using European imaginaries and an understanding of colonialism, natives, slaves and immigrants, Sartre recounts the experiences of Francophone Blacks. Sartre details that Blacks are critical of Europeans namely because Europe is a memory that taunts them. Through his analysis of the black condition, Sartre illustrates Négritude in a similar light of Aimé Césaire; the Black man uses his oppression to reinvent the self. Through the epistemic violence of European logic and reason, the Black man is shaped by oppression and subjugation. For this reason Sartre suggests that the Black man's ultimate goal is to redefine himself and discover the beauty of Afro-Caribbean and African cultures. Through this process of rediscovery, the black man will be able to reverse the subjugating effects of the French language and utilizes the language as a positive force to bring about a negritudist cultural expression, primarily through poetry

Sartre’s analysis of race consciousness can be read in tandem with Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like (1972), in which Biko aims to elevate Black Consciousness in South Africa. For Biko, “the philosophy of Black Consciousness expresses group pride and the determination by the Blacks to rise and attain the envisaged self” (Biko, 68). In other words, Black Consciousness exists beyond a Black/white binary. One must awaken consciously so that the centuries of deliberate oppression can no longer subjugate the Black man. The grass-roots build-up of Black Consciousness will allow Blacks to assert themselves and stake their rightful claim. On the same vein, Sartre considers Négritude as a step in the progression of revolutionary consciousness that will allow the Black man to transcend, redirects the gaze to Europe, and become their essence. 

Biko makes strong remarks concerning complacent white liberals who are against the subjugation of Blacks, but make no efforts to use their privilege to change the conditions of Blacks in South Africa. Biko claims, 

They are quick to quote statistics on how big the defence budget is. They know exactly how effectively the police and the army can control protesting Black hordes---peaceful or otherwise. They know to what degree the Black world is infiltrated by the security police. Hence they are completely convinced of the impotence of the Black people. Why then do they persist in talking to the Blacks? Since they are aware that the problem in this country is white racism, why do they not address themselves to the white world? Why do they insist on talking to Blacks? (Biko, 65)

In other words, white liberals fail at solidarity because they fail to address the white world. The white liberal will agree with the Black man that they face copious hardships and impediments under the imposed imperial regime, but will not turn to the white man to call them out for their actions. The critique Biko directs to liberal white South Africans can be used to understand the anti-colonialist social and literary work of Sartre. 

Unlike the liberal South African, Sartre’s “Orphée Noir” is as an act of solidarity for the Black population. Sartre nuances the Black essence not for a Black audience, but for a European audience that has been marked by historical amnesia.

 

In a word, I am talking now to white men, and I should like to explain to them what black men already know: why it is necessarily through a poetic experience that the black man, in his present condition, must first become conscious of himself; and, inversely, why black poetry in the French language is, in our time, the only great revolutionary poetry (Sartre, 16).

Despite Sartre’s essentialization of Black struggle, he actually makes the effort to directly address the white world (or white men as he says) and relay his Marxist, anti-colonial sentiments. In catering to European thought, Sartre’s preface is a powerful tool that not only allows the European to understand themselves and their complacent role in the subjugation of Blacks. Sartre’s support for the Négritude movement in “Orphée Noir” aligns him as a strong ally to the Black diaspora. Even so, he knows that his solidarity does not mean he can understand the Black experience through a first hand account (Sartre, 35). Rather, Sartre uses his voice to address the European for their colonial neurosis and their role in the subjugation of Blacks.

A CALL TO ACTION

Although this is highly representative of a male gaze and is contextualized within the anti-colonial period of the 20th century, my purpose in speaking on Sartre and Biko is to show that black oppression continues to be a global phenomenon. My request for all white liberals who wish to see the global liberation of black people, please use your voice to uplift our community. If you have financial freedom, please help the POC around you in need, especially grass roots efforts making substantial impacts on the ground. We are combatting centuries of epistemic, pedagogic, institutional, colonial and capitalist violence. I have included a list of Bail Funds you can donate to. And if you are protesting, please put yourself in between a black person and the police, THEY WILL NOT HURT YOU! And if they do it's the price of war.   

RESOURCES

- Donating to Protest Bail Funds

- Anti-Racism sources

- Black Consciousness Raising

- Mental Health Resources

Reflection 2: Why do I choose Paris?

 

Mas como não tive chance de ter estudado em colégio legal

Muitos me chamam pivete

Mas poucos me deram um apoio moral

Se eu pudesse eu não seria um problema social

-        “Problema Social” by Seu Jorge

 

The multiplicity of existence can only reveal itself when inhabiting different spaces, be it in the social fabric of the built environment, or the imaginaries of the mind. Such multiplicity became apparent to me in the streets of Paris, where I was rendered invisible to the average Parisian eye. Can I actually say I am invisible? I should instead state that I am accepted in their society for I am not often stared at and I am never questioned for being in the spaces I am in. I am frequently asked where I am from, or what brings me to Paris, but never have I been meant to feel as though I do not belong. This differs greatly to my contested experience in Madrid, where every wandering eye that pierced through windows and crowds questioned my existence, hoping to erase my brown existence from their society. In contrast, my experience in Paris can be compared to that of New York, I can exist as I wish and just fade into the crowds of people that are more concerned about themselves than they are concerned with questioning the other. 

 

    

 

 

I suppose you would question why I would want to live geographically distant from New York if in both cities I could exist as I wanted. The reason is the atmospheric sense of freedom that encaptures you as you walk through the paved streets of Paris. Freedom, I came to realize in Paris, is something that seems aloof and can only exist the mere imaginaries of the black and latino population in New York. Through reading the works of black expatriates in Paris such as Richard Wright, one would see that Paris is a black man’s North because one exists in freedom, a freedom that is obscure, yet more tangible than it could be in the United States, the “land of the free.” In I Chose Exile Richard Wright proclaims, “I love freedom, and I tell you frankly that there is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America […] I am not trying to persuade other Negroes to live abroad. My decision is predicated upon this simple fact: I need freedom” (Wright, 1). In other words, Wright felt the need to escape racial pressure of the United States. In France there is no gun violence, no racialized ghettoization, no lack of social welfare programs, no hyper police vigilance. Without knowing what I was going to encounter, I left Harlem, Dyckman and the Bronx (the neighborhoods that had shaped my upbringing) only to find the freedom I had not realized I was looking for.

My first trip to Paris I felt as though my blackness was actually desired in the society. This was evident in the street style that paid homage to that of all corners of New York, Harlem, the Bronx or SoHo. The French youth embodied the street swagger of those across the Atlantic, but they were of course still very much French. Appreciation for black culture was also apparent in the music. Jazz was brought to the French by the black American troops that fought along the French during the world war that reshaped and renegotiated global cultures and international relations. Today jazz is just as part of French culture as anything considerably deemed French (read: baguettes, museums, the right to protest, and free education and health care). Jazz is played in cafes or the Franprix supermarket just as American hip-hop, rap and trap are played in all the clubs mean to attract a young and engaging crowd. The appreciation for blackness in France manifests itself in plusier forms and its been revealed to me as if through a slow unrolling of a script, meant to be filtered in increments so that the existence of blackness can be properly
digested and understood.

         My lived experience in Paris has however left me in polarizing odds concerning my incessant need to be an activist under an all black agenda. Let’s consider France’s politics of assimilation. Anyone can be French as long as they adhere to the French values of secularism, liberty, equality and brotherhood (liberté égalité et fraternité). Diverse friend groups dominate cafes, malls, parks, clubs, and the strips along La Seine river. Interracial couples are in large quantities, and it is not questioned the ways in which it would be in the States. How can I fight for the inclusion of black people in Paris, if they seem to be just as integral to the social fabric as Hugo, Roseau, de Beauvoir and Sartre? When the existence of black people is not contested, how then can I import my radical notions of racial politics to France?

When in Paris, I often wonder if I should have studied something more practical like civic engineering, physics, or chemistry, all of which I have the foundation for but never perused. But how could I pursue these subjects when I felt a driving force to nourish my mind with a global understanding of the many ways in which colonial legacies have written out the histories of their subjects and expected them to be submissive, subservient second-class citizens (if they had citizen status at all).

As part of the transcultural-dialogue that occurs when one is part of the diaspora, I wake up every morning affirmed by my blackness. My academic works have been purposed to uncover the nuances of black identity and shed awareness of the socio-political dynamics that continue to oppress blacks and Latinos in the United States. The forms of marginalization and oppression are written in the veins of the leaves of the sycamore trees of the south, written in the history textbooks of public schools that seldom represent the narratives of non-whites, written in the statistics of who populates the prison system and who populates a college classroom. These are some of the tangible proofs that have motivated me to continue to learn about the black diaspora and to use my passion for writing for a purpose, black liberation. However, chaque fois that I am Paris, I ask myself, why work so hard to deteriorate my weary soul that is seldom listened to, when in Paris I can just reinvent myself and appeal to those negrophiliacs? My efforts to enlighten even my own people began to feel futile, unwarranted, I began to feel like a rebel without a cause, a rebel without a platform, a rebel with no audience.

As I sat down to write this, the Brazilian artist Seu Jorge sings “Se eu pudesse eu não seria um problema social,” (If I could, then it would not be a social problem). And so I thought to myself the most obvious, I would not need to come to Paris if I could just exist unencumbered by my social class or my perceived racial background (as the one drop rule has determined me to be black before I could even understand what being treated as other meant).

In France my liberty to navigate as a person before my race allows me to have the peace of mind necessary to engage in theory and devote time to analyze my lived experiences with care and integrity. Might I be able to experience this level of freedom because my skin color is more palatable to the French? I am drawn to this question because of France’s obsession not only with black American culture, but with seemingly mixed race/ lighter skin people. I am drawn to this question because of my racial background, which has always been an internal struggle. I cannot think about my skin color without thinking about the one drop rule, I cannot think about the one drop rule without thinking about my interacial parents, and I cannot think about them without thinking about the colonial history of the Dominican Republic. I cannot think about the colonial history of the Dominican Republic without acknowledging France as having been one of the leading colonial powers. Why then would former subjects of the French colonial regime express different sentiments to the global north metropole than a black-identifying American?

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

“France Degage!”

Translation: “France, get out!”

Dakar, Senegal

  June, 2018