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If you were smiling, what would that tell him about your composure in his imagination?

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Is there something essential about blackness? (This is not the same question as is there something essential about "being black?"--a question that I am not interested in at all, really.)

As in “the fact of Blackness”? Ontologically, yes. But that, of course, is a both a cultural production and imposition.

What do you understand "the fact of Blackness" to be?

cultural impositions of “Man” that are superimposed onto the global poor (disproportionately Black) which result in our subordinate material conditions and serve images as empirical facts about our being. - (Monstrous Intimacies)

one at the level of consciousness and how we understand and see ourselves and the other at the level of our material conditions which seek to reinforce the former.

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James Baldwin has pointed out that the US does not know what to do with its Black population now that they “are no longer a source of wealth, are no longer to be bought and sold and bred, like cattle. This country especially does not know what to do with its young Black men.

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“And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant.“ - Claudia Rankine

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“They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.“ - Claudia Rankine

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“But if I walk into your nightmare, and react to what you see, I become what you say I am. And then you’ve won, or, in any case, I’ve lost.”

James Baldwin

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Any action performed by Black males becomes shaped by the pathology others already believe about them; there is no escape from the logics of racism and antiblackness which are rooted on an ontology that considers Black men to basically exist as perpetuating creatures.

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Glenn Ligon | Notes on the Margin of the Black Book | The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation

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Learn about this artwork by Glenn Ligon in the Guggenheim's Collection Online.

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All the horrors of slavery are real to me.

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"While constructions of loneliness in Hemphill’s work archive the feelings of isolation and alienation that sometimes attend the experience of social death, I argue that loneliness is also a form of bodily desire and expresses a yearning for an attachment to the social. By positing loneli- ness as black gay longing, I demonstrate that the queerness of blackness is located both in histories of racial and sexual violence that continue to fix blackness as a site of injury, abjection, and pathology, and in black literary and cultural imaginings of futures beyond the forces of antiblackness and antiqueerness.
(Darius Bost, Evidence of Being)

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Pick 3 questions to speak to- Speak candidly 

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Pick 3 questions to speak to- Speak candidly 

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1. Geography as Formation
How did the place you grew up shape your understanding of Black boyhood?
What did that landscape teach you about safety, performance, silence, or survival?
Where did you feel most seen, and where did you feel most surveilled?

2. Masculinity / Femininity as Governance
How were masculinity and femininity enforced where you’re from?
What behaviors were rewarded, punished, or mocked?
When did you first realize you were being read through a binary that did not hold your full interior life?

3. Inheritance of Manhood
Who were the men who shaped you?
What did they model about tenderness, anger, protection, fear, or love?
What did they never say out loud?

4. The Word “Hood”
When you hear “hood,” do you hear danger, belonging, stigma, memory, pride?
Who gets to use that word with affection, and who uses it as indictment?
How has that label traveled with your body?

5. Civilization and Control
What does “civilized” mean in your lived experience?
Who defines it?
When have you felt required to perform civility at the expense of your authenticity?

6. Vulnerability and Containment
What does vulnerability look like for you as a Black boy or man?
Where have you been allowed to express grief, softness, confusion, or desire?
Where have you had to swallow it?

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The hood as a void/doing away with "nothing"

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The hood as a void/doing away with "nothing"

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I've been working through this after reading The Delectable Negro, Black Men, Black Feminism-Lucifer's Nocturne, and am currently reading On Black Men by David Marriott.

All of them but Delectable and the Marriott book deal best with both the structural and psychoanalytic implications of the consumption literal, figurative, philosophically, of Black males...of Black penises...the homoerotic nature of this...

And I personally use "the dying Black male" as the interface through which people perceive us. It's not enough to be just dead...there has been excessive need in actively seeing us lose vitality...which is why we have SEEN Walter Scott, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, George Floyd, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, lynching victims with 30K plus viewers...we've SEEN them die. We heard Trayvon's conversation...and then the gunshots.

I think it's Calvin Warren who talks about Black people representing "nothing" so that white people can punish and do away with the terror "nothing" through our bodies.

Maybe the brutalization of the Black man, in particular, is the process of converting Black people into "nothing". And I say this because genocide studies has shown that the violence heaped onto battle aged males/men is directly proportional to the violence experienced by the group as a whole.

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Individual stories of a collective
call and response - becoming one
Stop them from telling their stories
Isolation needs to be a part of a whole
"Telling stories- stages in life put it all into one"
"I don't have the time to explain"
I wanted somebody to listen
"I've been listening"
Dialing back-->Tired--> Restraint
Tired from practicing restraint
we never crossed
"he made it" --> touched by moments of "almost"
Disecting
People become what I've experienced
Intentionality--> Modes of Sociality
Intention as a mode of care.
relationality
Nodes of Flesh
I have to care more because I am desensitized--> I have access to fewer senses
Vibrations and energy that are unspoken
"Seeing the world through this" - readjusting, just through.

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Talking to yourself
Reserving the right to interiority

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It was traumatic to make a transition from Fred Hampton to this...

But this highlights everything Williams Jones is talking about in his book “Is God a White Racist.” Especially in the section where he deconstruct the Serving Servant complex black people have. Where summary he say, black people believe they are on a define mission for God to teach their oppressor how to be fully Human by freeing themselves from their racist ideology. When all have been liberated from their racist belief to become fully human then their divine mission is over, and they will return to |

Therefore, their countenance, mannerisms and self awareness is different. Race modifies the experiences of Black men because our society chops down every black man that dares to be on equal footing. Its like an invisible mist or cloud that blurs.

Simply stripping the Black male body naked was sexual violence; & therefore the auction block played a similar role. The Black male phallus remained under constant surveillance & this is why lynching was accompanied with massive crowds; each attendee could take part in ownership.