“In
the quest for equality, black folks have tried everything. We’ve
begged, revolted, entertained, intermarried, and are still treated like shit.
Nothing works, so why suffer the slow deaths of toxic addiction and the
American work ethic when the immediate gratification of suicide awaits? In
glorious defiance of the survival instinct, Negroes stream into Hillside,
California, like lemmings. Every day they wishfully look heavenward, peering
into the California smog for a metallic gray atomic dot that will gradually
expand until it explodes some one thousand feet over our natural and processed
heads. It will be the Emancipation Disintegration. Lunch counters, bus seats,
and executive washrooms be damned; our mass suicide will be the ultimate
sit-in.”[i]
In this darkly comedic, decidedly pessimistic excerpt from Paul
Beatty’s The
White Boy Shuffle the idea of black agency is radicalized (has been
radicalized) sometime after the 90’s L.A. Riots, as a movement of mass suicide – a relational gesture in
which the black body (re)commits itself to its own agency (see: Seppuku)
in the face of anti-black racism and hatred. Beatty’s 1996 debut novel walks out
the idea and possibility of radical liberation in the face of oppression – the seeds of which, one
might say, were planted in the popular imagination with the advent of the
American Civil Rights Movement. The White Boy Shuffle imaginatively,
fantastically, and fatally extends the provenance of 20th century
black liberation into the 21st century – an idea marched into the
present. That is: if black bodies are consistently, reluctantly, inadvertently,
and violently imbricated in the schemata of American capital, liberation’s only recourse is to deprive
the system of its corporal capital.
I woke up this morning wondering: are we living through a suicidal
moment? And are we, the living, tragically subsumed in the machinations of a
system which tallies each slow death?
