Abstract
Few notions in American culture have had as long and durable a life throughout US history as the idea of racial progress. The view that citizens of color would become freer and society more just over time has been widely assumed, powerfully defended, and strategically used as a clarion call from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, from the Progressive Era to Civil Rights, and the post–Civil Rights period today. 1 Strikingly, however, virtually every moment of optimism about the possibility of racial equality would be met with the harsh reality about its glaring failure. The abolition of slavery gave rise to the short-lived experiment of Reconstruction, but was soon abandoned for the sake of Jim Crow segregation and its everyday terrors. De jure segregation was rendered unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court with Brown v. Board of Ed. (1954) and was followed by the antidiscrimination legislative victories of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. But this was soon followed by de facto segregation, racially based police brutality, and hyper-incarceration where black lives were, and still are, subject to the unequal threat of injustice and violence. And the election of the first black president, Barack Obama, in 2008 and again in 2012, was followed by the election of Republican Donald Trump in 2016, a candidate who began his political career propagating the racist “birther myth,” which claimed that Obama was a Kenyan Muslim. Trump’s successful campaign played on white supremacist tropes of taking back America for authentic white Americans and his administration has been pushing for “tough-on-crime” and “law and order” policies that disproportionately impact and punish people of color.
A survey of this racial history might lead critical observers to claim that progress is a naïve and indefensible concept—a myth that only has currency because of powerful American romantic fantasies of reconciliation and triumph but one that is ultimately threatened by history. On this view—shared by black political radicals like Martin Delany, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, and Angela Davis—progress should be abandoned because it helps alleviate white Americans from the collective, direct, and strenuous task of tackling white supremacy. Others in the black political tradition like Frederick Douglass, antilynching activists like Ida B. Wells, or Civil Rights activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., disagreed. They would use the idea of progress strategically, even if they did not always believe in its empirical validity. For them, imagining a new world beyond one of racial domination and tyranny required invoking a beloved community to come. 2
These competing understandings of progress, central to the debate within the long history of African American political thought, still matter today. If progress should be abandoned, what view of political time and history should take its place? Is there a way to articulate a horizon of political possibility without progress? If the idea of progress confuses and obscures, providing cover for continued injustice, what would a post-progress politics and form of citizenship look like? Is there a way to reconfigure some of the organizing ideas of progress—the transcendent desire of imagining a better place, a more just polity, the hope for a more vibrant democracy—without its most pernicious effects?
Two timely books take up these pressing questions. Written during the Obama years by non-political scientists—Winters is a religious studies scholar and Sharpe a literary and cultural theorist—their arguments are not only of great significance for political theorists interested in the politics of race and resistance during the Trump Era, but for those concerned with expanding the vocabulary of political theory.
Over the past decade, a number of political theorists (Shulman, Balfour, Turner, Roberts, Bromell, Lebron, Hooker), drawing on the tradition of African American political thought, have tried to expose the centrality of race—not simply showing it to be a socially constructed, politically salient concept but as an institution and ideology that exposes the limits and anxieties of democratic life. In their work, race undermines the potential for a just social contract and the potential for recognizing political claim-making; it helps promote fantasies of individualism; it demarcates the boundaries of citizenship and visions of equality and freedom. Although they do not consciously reference this burgeoning field, Winters and Sharpe deepen its arguments. In particular, they dramatize the methodological innovation of reading cultural texts politically and of forging a notion of political resistance that isn’t bound by the dream of transcending the precariousness of racial existence, but rather exists from within its confines. 3
Joseph R. Winters’s Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress is a deft meditation on these questions, which offers a persuasive argument for abandoning our familiar understanding of progress. In lucid prose and with a fluid grasp of diverse cultural texts—W.E.B. Du Bois’s essays in Souls of Black Folk; novels like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Paradise, and Beloved, Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope and his various speeches, and films like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off—Winters demonstrates how a central strain of the black cultural tradition has been to disrupt the narrative of progress, which “harbors a pernicious side . . . downplays tensions, conflicts, and contradictions in the present for the sake of a more unified and harmonious image of the future” (6). Against historians who simply cast racial progress as historically inaccurate and posit more cyclical theories of history (that the past recurs in unexpected ways), Winters powerfully contends that progress-talk helps keep injustice in place, creating the justification for collective moral apathy toward racial violence and a disregard for radical racial disparities—all in the name of their eventual eradication. “A pervasive commitment to the idea of progress in American culture,” he writes, “when invoked, mitigates experiences and memories of racial trauma and loss” (4).
As a corrective, drawing from Freudian psychoanalysis and Frankfurt School critical theorists like Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin—and this is one of the book’s major contributions to expanding how we conceptualize the disciplinary boundaries between political theory, critical race studies, and the black political tradition—Winters recovers what he calls a “melancholic hope.” Melancholic hope not only rejects progress but “undercuts familiar affirmations of hope, or hopefulness, to gesture toward a different kind of hope, future, and set of possibilities” (20). Melancholy, for Winters, thus cuts against the idea of progress, which, in the Western philosophical tradition has generally meant the notion that, through individual and collective rationality, injustice would slowly be diminished and suffering mitigated. Melancholic hope poses a counterargument and critique to the philosophical architecture upon which progress depends: the rational subject found in progress is replaced with a vulnerable one, looking forward is replaced with looking backward, optimism is replaced with mourning. In melancholic hope, negative affects and painful truths are not whitewashed, but brought to the fore—they are worked through, rather than worked around. In the words of Winters, “Melancholy…is one way to register death, tragedy, and loss, including the losses, exclusions, and alienating effects of social existence” (20).
If our vocabularies for addressing racial injustice need to be refreshed, then Winters’s fascinating juxtaposition of black cultural texts with critical theory models how disciplinary boundaries need to be sacrificed to gain access to ideas that may not always be readily available through deductive political-theoretical arguments but may only appear—however briefly and indirectly—in culture and art (for instance, through literary dialogues and plots in novels, the condensed metaphors of poetry, and the world presented by cinematography). 4
In Winters’s skilled hands, for example, Du Bois’s Souls is read not simply as an account of post-Reconstruction black struggle but as both a critique of G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of civilizational development and a precursor to Walter Benjamin’s view of history as fractured and unsettled. Specifically, “What connects Benjamin and Du Bois,” Winters writes, “is a shared sense that a better future depends in part on how we remember and keep alive the cries, struggles, and missed opportunities for enslaved ancestors” (51). Reading Souls as an aesthetic text that can “affect, disturb, and prompt the reader . . . qualities that invoke feelings of sorrow, loss, alienation, pleasure, joy” (58) and “curb desires for reconciliation and inclinations toward complacency” (54–55) allows Winters to challenge reductionist accounts of politics that see legitimate political change to occurr only within political institutions. This is a notable contribution of which theorists should be reminded—for politics, like racism, is as productive of a cultural field, which plays on emotions and affects, as it is organized by institutional structures.
Furthermore, Ellison’s classic, Invisible Man, becomes for Winters a statement on the cyclical nature of history; the repetition of the past—a theme that has been a subject of recent debate in political theory and memory studies. 5 Through various examples of moments in the novel where time is not linear—the communist organization, the Brotherhood’s marginalization of Invisible Man’s distinct black concerns for the sake of a larger universal project of social equality or the unjust murder of a young black man, Tod Clifton, by police officers—Winters describes how, unlike Du Bois who evokes a blues-like rhythm of time, Ellison provides a jazz-like version, which “registers possibility and limitation, hope for a more inclusive world and memory of the cuts, ruptures, and breaks that mark our social world” (113). Later in the chapter, Winters develops this further through Toni Morrison’s novel, Jazz—the story of a murder and love in Harlem—but with an important revision, modeling the kind of perspectival shifts necessary for future work in critical theory. Through Morrison’s novel, he dramatizes what an Ellisonian notion of time would mean when considered with an eye toward gender violence and the intersectional nature of racial and gender oppression—something to which Ellison himself was blind.
Winters’s readings of post–Civil Rights black films, which cut against the fantasy of post-racialism, are as riveting and probing as his readings of black literature. Burnett’s Killer of Sheep—a story of black working-class life in Watts a decade after the Civil Rights legislation and racial rebellions of the 1960s —is put into conversation with Marx’s notion of alienation; while Gray’s Set It Off—a narrative centered on four black woman—is seen as a lens through which to rethink race, theft, and gender and which performs the failure of the American dream.
While it would be tempting to simply interpret Winters’s readings as fresh interpretations of canonical black literary figures and films in an effort to situate them in the tradition of political theory—a worthwhile project, which still deserves more work from scholars—perhaps his book’s most ambitious hope is to reframe our perception of the orientation citizens ought to take in the struggle for racial justice. He defends a new vision. Not progress, but, echoing elements of what Cornel West called a tragic-comic attitude, 6 a hope “draped in black, a hope made possible by melancholy, remembrance, and the contemplation of suffering and loss” (243).
Some political theorists might treat Winters’s provocative position with hesitation. Are these orientations, attitudes, and emotions truly adequate, or even necessary, for meeting the demands of the kind of political resistance necessary for racial justice? Shouldn’t we simply focus on collective organizing and abandon these dispositions? Furthermore, even conceding that attitudes might be important, what makes these particular attitudes so useful?
Though these issues are not fully resolved by the text—and this is one of the book’s few shortcomings—one of the book’s central claims is, in fact, that confronting racial injustice is not simply about collective action, but actually requires a direct engagement with durable American cultural attitudes. To be sure, at no point does Winters argue against the idea that political procedures, structures, rules, and norms are essential for collective life. Instead, he tries to foreground that black politics depends upon, and thus requires a shift in, certain orientations to the past and the time of racial trauma. And this is important intellectual work. Indeed, it would not be an overstatement to claim that recalling the racial trauma of slavery in public discourse is one of the major third-rails of American culture; or that talking about economic responsibility or reparations for past racial injustice is a political non-starter. Moreover, contemporary racial violence in the form of police killings of unarmed black men is often seen as unrelated to systemic oppression, while the repeated exoneration of officers in these killings is seen as understandable, rather than as a continuation of the preemptive criminalization of blackness, which has had a long history in America. Winters’s bold challenge for citizens and theorists is to think about these events—with all of the complex pain, suffering, erasures, obfuscations, and unseen contradictions they embody and conjure—as never quite disappearing. This opens up space for appreciating the likelihood of political failure or disappointment, but also makes these moments into spaces for democratic struggle.
If Winters wants us to rethink racial progress for the sake of recovering a tradition of hope, Christina Sharpe, in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, wants us to understand the sheer difficulty, if not impossibility, of conceptualizing progress when it comes to the problem of black agency. In Sharpe’s probing work, the specter of slavery continues to haunt black subjects long after its abolition. Using the metaphor of the “wake”—as the aftermath of an event, and a mourning ritual to commemorate one’s life after death—Sharpe argues that the afterlife of slavery recurs in what she calls a pervasive “antiblackness,” which makes black citizens not only more subject to violence and punishment but also more subject to erasure from the public discourse about normative value. “The disaster was and is planned,” she writes, “terror is disaster and ‘terror has a history’ and it is deeply atemporal” (5).
Sharpe skillfully uses numerous examples to illustrate her thesis. For instance, consider Glenda Moore, who tried to obtain, but was refused, shelter during Hurricane Sandy in New York in 2012—which led to her two boys dying from drowning. The white man who denied Moore shelter saw not a vulnerable person but an imposing, invulnerable black woman who “forced” him to stay with his back to the door (79–80). Or the justification offered by the white police officer, Darren Wilson, in his killing of Ferguson, Missouri teenager, Michael Brown, whom he saw as a super-human monster coming to destroy him (82). But as Sharpe rightly points out, antiblackness is as much a social reality as a cultural production. She turns to the photograph of a young black girl, a survivor of the 2010 Haitian earthquake (46) who, without her awareness has the word “ship” taped on her forehead, to dramatize the ways in which black citizens, especially the most vulnerable, become culturally repositioned as anonymous and disposable within the logic of white supremacy. All this is an instance of the way, as she puts it, “antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies” (106).
In surveying this condition, Sharpe, like Winters, tries to posit an ethical response to it. What for Winters is melancholic hope against progress for Sharpe is “care in the wake,” which is based in witnessing. She writes, “I want to think care in the wake as a problem for thinking of and for Black non/being in the world” (5). Both Winters’s and Sharpe’s ethical formulations try to stay within, and build a mode of survival and persistence, within the immanence of pain, trauma, and the disaster of black precariousness, rather than trying to carry easy answers, resolutions, or reconciliations. In a formulation that crystallizes Sharpe’s project, she writes “to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (14).
At stake for Sharpe is a new mode of political thought that could alter perceptions of subjectivity or political community: “What happens when we proceed as if we know this, antiblackness,” she writes, “to be the ground on which we stand, the ground from which we attempt to speak, for instance, an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who know, an ‘I’ or ‘we’ who care?” (7). As an example, she turns to the work of audiovisual artist, Charles Gaines, and his proposed installation memorializing the Middle Passage, called “Moving Chains”: “each chain link weighs ten points, and each chain is two hundred feet long. There are seven chains; three silver chains; a red chain in the center to represent blood, and then three additional silver chains. They are mechanized, and the silver chains move at the speed of the Mississippi, while the red chain moves at the speed of the barge on the river” (62). Sharpe reads this as a reminder that the past is not past, that the past should not be pacified in its representation; that its traumatic weight and afterlife is difficult to fully digest and appreciate. But attentiveness to this past represents what Sharpe calls in the conclusion “an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness; as a way of remembering and observance” (131).
Sharpe’s book, like Winters’s, creates fruitful lines of exploration for political theorists concerned about the ethos of citizenship necessary for confronting white supremacy. Rather than calling for a Rawlsian-inspired “veil of ignorance,” which asks citizens to adopt a view of justice that begins with imagining themselves beyond their identity in the so-called original position, or a utilitarianism that hopes to maximize happiness for the greatest amount of citizens (including black citizens), both Winters and Sharpe boldly call for an ethics that begins with appreciating human finitude, vulnerability, and the unconscious forces that threaten racial harmony. Recognizing this, both argue, requires understanding its unequal impact of people of color. In other words, it means knowing that certain populations are, in fact, disproportionately vulnerable to violence, domination, and inequality. But it also means developing resistance strategies that chart out new terrains of struggle, which speak from, and try to create new ways of engaging from within this condition of precariousness.
But what would it mean to actualize this for political transformation and emancipation? It might entail not only expanding the boundaries of what constitutes political knowledge—the photograph, the poem, the film—but which claimants deserve recognition. Pedagogically, it might mean teaching Toni Morrison’s narrative, Beloved (1987), of post-Reconstruction black life as part of a high school US history course, or developing antiracist activist training that disrupts the myth of American exceptionalism and instead foregrounds the everyday brutality and terror of race in American life. In terms of more direct forms of activism, it could mean fusing experimental forms of politics with aesthetics that speak to and dramatize the condition from within the wake—think of the black protestor, with a shirt that reads “Black Death Spectacle,” standing in front of the white artist, Dana Shutz’s Open Casket, which is an abstract painting of the open casket of Emmett Till, the thirteen-year-old black child who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi for speaking to a white woman. Or Black Lives Matter activists marching with duct-tape across their mouth with the inscription, “I Can’t Breathe,” to commemorate the dying words of Eric Garner, a black man who was suffocated to death by a choke hold of a white police officer in Staten Island, New York, in 2014.
In the wake of the Obama presidency, and especially after the election of Trump, it is tempting to resort to familiar interpretations of the American racial scene. To assert, for example, that the past is prologue and that political time moves in ebbs and flows, where moments of optimism for radical transformation are quickly eclipsed by heightened despair about this possibility. But since our perilous moment is rife with uncertainty about what the future might bring, it might be worthwhile to adopt frames of thinking and action that are experimental and truly imaginative—that transform pessimism into a source of resistance, that make melancholy into a source of clearer vision, that remake the US into a place that is less blind to, and less willing to continue, its history of violence and domination upon its black citizens.