9/23 Post #4
As the weeks continue I feel like I am more prepared before engaging with the materials, through continuing to learn more about the historical and present day experiences of black people. Although I had no past exposure to either the Saidiya Hartman podcast or In the Wake, I felt prepared to engage with the knowledge I have been collecting. The image of “the wake” that Sharpe uses to describe what the post-slavery world is like for black people reasonates with me and I find myself being able to visualize and understand what she is trying to get across to the reader. I saw the theme of emancipation as an unfinished, ongoing struggle emerging from her piece and that reminded me of last week’s reading from The New Jim Crow and the preceding piece from W.E.B Du Bois. Du Bois spoke of how emancipation is “ongoing at best, a failed project at worst”, and he relates this to the era of an economic slavery that emerged from share cropping. Michelle Alexander took this a step further with the mass incarceration system as a new racial caste system with no opportunity for social mobility. Once you have a criminal record it sticks with you for life, just like the title of “slave” stuck with black people after the Emancipation Proclamation. The past is never truly gone and this week Sharpe hit on how history continues to come in to disrupt the present.
Black criminality continues to be an emerging theme among the literature that we engage with and Sharpe’s recalling of police brutality against her cousin Robert caused me to think of “Look! A Negro” and “A Birth of a Nation” where black men are played out to be animals and beasts and how this same image is seen today in instances of police brutality. Robert was schizophrenic and had a large stature, so he was taken as intimidating by the police that shot him multiple (11–19) times in the back. In The Wake was published 4 years ago, and 4 years later we are still hearing of the same awful police brutality and it seems as though the situation is only exacerbating. Criminality is also featured in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives as she expounds upon the fact that if you’re black, you’re looked at to be living as a criminal. In her discussion she talks about this dimension of her book and how black people are “not supposed to live” and that “living is a crime”. She then explains her fear of dying before the end of white supremacy contrasted against the harsh reality that that is how we have been living for our entire lives. No matter how old one is, they have lived in the era of white supremacy and racism since it has been a part of American society since conception. I truly cannot help but think of the political climate in America and the desperate call for change that is ringing out in light of the upcoming presidential election. We hold the future of America in our hands, and it is up to us to have heard what we want this country to look like. Do we want the next four years to look like the last four, or do we want a new face for our country?
