What is a ‘Black Life’?
Since its inception, the Black Lives Matter movement has stirred passions every possible way. Arguably one of its greatest achievements is an unprecedented level of global attention to the injustices faced by people identifying as black. At its height, the movement rode a wave that has still not reached the shore of its resolution.
It is a wave powered primarily by the lived realities of millions of black-identifying people in the United States and much of the Western world. Centuries of marginalisation, exclusion, abuse, and downright oppression, coupled with a sober — although also intoxicating — realisation that injustice continues impudently to this day, have contrived to produce an environment in which black people justly express that enough is enough. It was a movement spurred by the sheer ability of the human heart to grasp the truth of injustice and oppression, to be offended by it, and to rise up and say enough is enough.
In raising this question, my intention is not to criticise the movement per se. As many American civil rights leaders have already expressed, it would sit ill in one’s mouth to require of the oppressed a serene and ‘dignified’ response to oppression. In fact, that request is itself a component of the abuse. Yet, time and again, black people have been expected, asked, and compelled to be silent, turn the other cheek, or at best, resort to economic, legal, and political processes long rigged against their interests. The deeply structural nature of injustice is, of course, well documented and need not be recounted here.
What I want to do here is pose a question that I hope can lead to some helpful reflection at a time of relative quiet (regarding the BLM movement ant not injustice itself!). Nevertheless, it is a question that would have been far less appropriate to ask at the height of the BLM protests. There is a Ghanaian (Akan) proverb that says, “a leopard is chasing us, and you are asking me if it is male or female?” The niceties of rhetoric are not the most pressing concern of a people with knees upon their necks. But now, within this intermission of relative quiet, let me ask, “what is a black life?”
The Danger of another Single Story
To clarify, my question is not about the meaning of the term “black” or “black person” or “black people.” That is an important, complex question too, but a different one. I’m specifically concerned about the phrase “black lives.” Now, it is not as if there is confusion as to whose lives are said to matter. And it certainly is not a question about all lives mattering or anything of the sort. Rather, I am concerned about the possibility of unintentionally entrenching injustice through a well-meaning label. You see, a label tells a story, and an essentializing label tells a dangerous kind of story, a single story.
So what is a black life? Is it the life of a black person? Or is it a certain type of life that is lived by black people? Quite obviously, the former is the intended meaning of the phrase. So why not say “The Lives of Black People Matter?” or “Black People’s Lives Matter?”
Driven as it was by social reality of injustice, BLM was also a movement powered by the logic of social media and digital culture, and the cultural and political climate left in its wake especially in the United States. Within the logic of social media, Black Lives Matter is a better rallying call. It is short, crisp, and even catchy. As such, it is memorable and repeatable. These are key ingredients of virality for any social movement that seeks to gain traction in today’s media world. In that world, of course, repeatable means remixable, hashtagable, memeable. And that BLM is, as a rhetorical instrument.
But what is sacrificed in the process of gaining the algorithmic upper hand, I fear, may be rather too dear. The danger of essentialising blackness as a certain way of existing in the world is real. History teaches that this essentialisation is not likely to draw on the more glistening aspects of what it can be like to live as a black person, in the United States, here in the United Kingdom, or anywhere else with a prominent racial gaze. The immediate import of “a black life” resonates the so-called substance-attribute distinction in philosophy. Here, the substance is a life, and the attribute is presumably, a set of characteristics captured in blackness. What are those attributes, and who will do the selection? I am quite afraid of the answers suggested by history.
In the end, my fear is that BLM may be producing a species of what the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has famously denounced as the single story. “Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again,” she warns, “and that is what they become.”[1] From single stories of poverty, laziness, naiveté, unintelligence, brutishness, hunger, disease, corruption, to ones of lack of ambition and catastrophe, stereotypes have been perpetuated about black peoples everywhere for too long, whether by Lugard, Kipling, or more contemporary actors. Yet the inescapable reality of every such story is that even when it makes use of facts, it is ultimately a lie.
What I can say for sure is that even though I think I know what a black person is (within the confines of certain assumptions about race, of course), I have no notion of what a black life is. Even though I am a black person, I do not and have never considered myself to live a black life.
One might object that this is because I have never lived in the United States and cannot therefore relate with the struggles of black people there. Perhaps a black life is the name for the sphere of existence demarcated by the systemic racism and race-based injustice that finds expression in American legal, cultural, economic, political, and other spheres of life, and that are still supported by institutions of state, society, and commerce in virtually all domains of life.
On one hand, that is a fair objection, and the conclusion may be right. But to say so is to further underscore my point. It is to suggest that a black life is in part an American phenomenon. That Americanness is an attribute; what is the substance?
On the other hand, should we accept that sphere of existence, that set of structurally foisted outcomes as definitive? I do not believe anyone means to, not intentionally. It would be counterintuitive in the context of the serious and admirable effort underway to undermine that superstructure of injustice. To then turn around and self-identify using rhetoric that implicitly acknowledges the regime would be self-defeating. “Power,” Adichie says, “is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”[2] This is what I fear may be happening implicitly through the uncritical repetition of the concept of “black lives.” I fear it essentializes what it means to be black and makes it into an identifiable type of existence.
Another possible response is that a black life refers to a style of existence wholly authored by black people, in which they express and celebrate their own humanity, and culture. It is a reference not to disempowerment, but a celebration of the agency of black people to shape their own identities. It is true that black culture in its various forms has been a powerful force for good (not that it needs any justification), and it has deeply impacted American and global culture. But even if we manage to clearly define black culture, which is an ongoing task in scholarship, it is not obvious that every person who identifies as black identifies with black culture. There is such a diversity of ways of being, among black people and people in general, that even though black culture (also true of many cultures) is a space for positive agency and should be celebrated as such, I do not think it should be imposed as a defining attribute of persons on the basis of their racial identity. Culture is something people should identify with willingly and directly, not indirectly by virtue of their skin colour.
Further, to what extent can a non-black person participate in and even identify with black culture? Would such participation and identification be enough to say they are living “a black life?” These are only some of the issues that come up with ambiguous labels such as this one.
Conclusion
So maybe I have a point, you say. But when it’s all said and done (as if it ever is!), isn’t it just a label? Am I making the Mississippi out of a few drops of rain? Hopefully this is not a seriously raised objection. I am willing to believe, given the generally intelligent and sophisticated nature of the movement thus far, that there is no need to rehash the power of labels, names, to shape identities, both internal and imposed.
This is the reason I bring this up. There isn’t, and maybe there shouldn’t be anything like a black life or a white life. There really should be just life, I think, and a black person should be able to live it just as fully as anyone can. I could be wrong, but it is a conversation I think needs to be had. An important one.
Sources
[1] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TED Videos. 2019. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.
[2] Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story.”
