There are few, if any, choices a black body can make that do not speak its history, including the requisite traumas and proud triumphs over them. Under the gaze of the status quo, this body, with its history written all over it, is an indictment of the status quo. Erasing that physical body becomes critical to sustaining not just the aesthetic of the status quo but more importantly its structure.
Erasure is not necessarily the literal murder of it, though that is one way to erase it, but more typically, the suppression of it. Suppression often comes in the form of assimilating the black body into the status quo.
When we support assimilation of the black body into the status quo, we are complicit in its erasure. To physically kill the black body has never been the goal of the status quo; there are benefits in owning and using it in service to the maintenance of the status quo after all. Which requires we be wary of the simplified argument that the black body does not matter. That is only the first line of the narrative. We didn’t kill slaves; we broke them—lynching a few as examples. Today we imprison and steal labor from black bodies; perhaps killing a few as examples…
Read the rest at Free Black Space
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