So, real talk, I can save you from what you may perceive as “the trouble” of reading what’s ahead in the next few paragraphs by first offering a paraphrase: the USA’s dominant ideology is white supremacy and is enacted by and to protect the interests of male white embodied people and then those interests of other males, the protections of those non-white males being not necessarily intentional but mainly incidental.
If you choose to continue reading, then next, perhaps, is the claim that what I have just written is obvious. Ok. Point taken. But obvious how? Made obvious by whom? For what purpose? I mean, the degree to which there is strategy in the conspiratorial depends partly upon the goals. We all know white supremacy’s goal regarding creating a skin color hierarchy with so-called ‘whiteness’ as the measuring stick. However, skin is on bodies, so there must be an accompanying body narrative that, like the incidental protections afforded to non-white males, is also incidental.
Well, you’re almost done now, so, I figure you may as well finish reading. I mean, I can’t guarantee that it’ll be worth it. However, I can guarantee that you’ll find it maybe only slightly annoying. Ok then, so, the USA is a Hierarchically Racialized Heteronormative Patriarchy Constituted On Privileged Male White Then Other Male Bodies: HRHPCOPMWTOMB: H-TOMB. I revealed H-TOMB using a Racist Analysis as a starting point for my analysis of the USA that posits racists―authority, leaders, institutions―as constitutive of its founding, emergence, and continued existence. Moreover, those racists continue making power demands that perpetuate certain stories about bodies in the USA, especially male bodies. Ok, annoyed yet? No? Well, continue on then. A racist analysis mediates the pathology of existing in H-TOMB because it presents these founders and all participants as agents, and, more importantly, all participants as being acted upon via what W. D. Wright calls the anti-human of racism that inevitably pathologizes (49). In other words, racism is about erasing people, rendering them discursively, if not corporeally, invisible, activity that—because this action is not how human beings thrive—causes individual, cultural, and political maladies and disorders. Well, how about now? A Racist Analysis by a Black person, specifically a male Black embodied person, posits that the true act of power in the USA, in which Slavery is constitutive, is domination of and over male Black corporeal and discursive bodies, action intended to obscure the vulnerability of bodies, male bodies, and male White bodies. Ok, you’re definitely annoyed by now. I mean, I’m annoying myself! Moreover, and this is a recent realization, this domination over male Black corporeal and discursive bodies is aimed at preventing the males from physically and psychically protecting the females. The H-TOMB—system of domination—accords the female, Black embodied person the utmost value in the system by making enslavement heritable via her body. Again, this utmost value in this particular system being incidental. I’m not speaking of so-called ‘nature,’ but of a system that was created by male, White embodied people mainly to hide the value of female, Black embodied people and the vulnerability of male, White embodied people.
Well, damn, you made it! Ok. So, now, on a scale of 1-10, just how annoyed are you? Leave your answer in the comments. S|F Blog*
Wright, W. D. Crisis of the Black Intellectual. Third World Press. 2007.
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