The Problem of the Color[blind]

Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black PerformanceBy BRANDI WILKINS CATANESE

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2011University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-05126-7

Contents

CHAPTER 1. Bad Manners: Talking about Race......................................................................................1CHAPTER 2. The End of Race or the End of Blackness? August Wilson, Robert Brustein, and Color-Blind Casting.....................32CHAPTER 3. The Limits of Color Blindness: Interracial Sexuality, Denzel Washington, and Hollywood Film..........................72CHAPTER 4. Transgressing Tradition: Suzan-Lori Parks and Black Performance (as) Theory..........................................112CHAPTER 5. Are We There Yet? Race, Redemption, and Black. White.................................................................143Notes...........................................................................................................................173Bibliography....................................................................................................................201Index...........................................................................................................................209

Chapter One

Bad Manners: Talking about Race

Let me begin by burnishing what has become, in fairly short critical order, an old chestnut: within the United States, blackness and performance are ineluctably linked. Some of the nodes of this linkage are already quite obvious within black cultural and performance studies: from the ignoble tradition of blackface minstrelsy to contemporary NAACP boycotts of television networks that underutilize black talent on- and offscreen, to Barack Obama's recent history-making presidential campaign, we are by now keenly aware of the politics and burdens of representation within the United States. Critical and political attention to the quantity and quality of black cultural performances is certainly warranted, given the ever-increasing power of cultural representations to shape public attitudes in matters of race, and the global commodity that hip-hop culture-often collapsed into a complicated synonymity with black culture—has become.

What I want to add to this truism, though, is the suggestion that we couple our attention to the power of expressive culture with an understanding that other modes of performance—related to institutional and capitalist imperatives of surveillance, productivity, and efficacy—play equally significant roles in constructing the lived experience and political possibilities of black Americans. As Jon McKenzie illustrated in Perform or Else, the isolated valorization of cultural performances as liberatory, transgressive practices risks ignoring the other, more normative registers of power within which notions of performance have always also functioned. He writes: "Our attentiveness to liminal performance has kept us out of the loop with respect to the performativity of power, and in doing so, has limited our liminality," and this is nowhere more true than where black subjects must contemplate which thresholds we may or may not cross during the presentation of self in everyday life and elsewhere. This, too, guides Herman Gray's critique of an outdated mode of black cultural politics that "continues to privilege representation itself as the primary site of hope and critique." Representations in the realm of cultural performance—just like bodies (Butler) and race (West)—continue to matter, of course, but should be analyzed relationally rather than hierarchically in order to understand how the multiple formulations of performance cohere to regulate, to provide pleasure, to enact possibility. For example, if we accept the central role of slavery in the production of the African American subject, we must address not only the performative affect of certain twice-behaved behaviors in stylizing black bodies to occupy a certain social role, but also the economic imperatives that performance opens up in relation to these black bodies at different moments in history. Surveillance of black bodies through the system of slavery, for example, was designed not just to quell any assertions of subjectivity that would threaten white supremacy, but also to ensure that these working black bodies performed their labor tasks as efficiently as possible. Indeed, as Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection demonstrates, the relationship between performance as aesthetic practice and performance as evaluative rubric of labor is not just one of complementarity but of mutual constitution. Observing black bodies engaged in what was acknowledged as physical labor had entertainment value for white spectators, just as "the transubstantiation of abjection into contentment" required a great deal of faith and work, given the abject circumstances into which enslaved blacks were forced.

This supervisory dimension of the national investment in black performance manifests in other areas as well: as a mundane example, library searches for work on "black performance" reveal an extensive bibliography of research not just on expressive cultural forms but also on black academic and athletic performance, and the external factors contributing thereto. This quantitative analysis resonates both in California, where I live and work, and across the country, as efforts to dismantle affirmative action in higher education routinely rely upon disparaging arguments about undeserving, underqualified minority applicants. The argument in favor of California's 1996 Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action programs in the public sector, used inflammatory language to explain why affirmative action was wrong: "set-aside" policies "hijacked the civil rights movement," creating "terrible programs which are ... tearing us apart," an outcome that "naturally [causes] resentment when the less qualified are preferred." Such rhetoric makes clear that one of the most urgent current discussions of blackness and performance in their many meanings revolves around national anxieties over the racial crossroads at which we have arrived (or stalled): are we a consciously pluralistic nation, or a color-blind one?

This book is an attempt to understand the function of these complementary, even overlapping, modes of performance—aesthetic and efficacious—in settling this question. The Problem of the Color[blind] argues that an examination of black performance practices from the last decade of the twentieth century, after the abatement of the 1980s culture wars, exposes color blindness and a strictly quantitative multiculturalism as far more ideologically linked than they are oppositional responses to the politics of racialized representation, and clarifies the need for a new vocabulary and evaluative framework through which to understand how performance in particular might intervene against the limitations that stereotypes impose upon black expression. On both institutional and cultural levels, performance has become the medium through which American anxieties about race (and in particular, blackness) are pondered, articulated, managed, and challenged. Whether we talk about artists who subvert our habits of looking at black bodies or we discuss conservative politicians' attempts to measure and yet detach performed productivity from the racialized bodies that execute various types of work, looking at what black bodies do through the conceptual parameters of performance and its attention to embodiment, temporality, and repetition's concretization of discursive formations allows us to understand the simultaneous, even mutually constitutive, opening up and shutting down of representational possibilities that shifts in our national discourses about race have produced for black performers and black performance.

THE PROBLEM OF THE COLOR[BLIND]

In 1903,W. E. B. DuBois published his landmark text, The Souls of Black Folk. A collection of essays that fused culture with politics, Souls offered a meditation on the possibilities of black progress within American society, criticizing entrenched racism while carefully enunciating black responsibilities for racial uplift within a society that saw blackness and Americanness as quintessentially opposite formulations. Key among the many foundational concepts that DuBois explicated within his text was the notion of double consciousness, understood in relationship to the system of segregation that the Supreme Court had affirmed in Plessy v. Ferguson a mere seven years earlier. DuBois recognized that by declaring the possibility—even desirability—of a nation with "separate but equal" social, economic, and political infrastructures, the Supreme Court had ensured that "the problem of the Twentieth Century [would be] the problem of the color line," a dividing principle that was problematic in part because of the misapprehension of blackness that it fostered and foisted upon whites and blacks alike.

On October 7, 2003, a century after the publication of DuBois's text, California voters participated in an unprecedented recall election that ousted Democratic governor Gray Davis from office, replacing him with Hollywood action hero and Republican party candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger. The spectacle of this election garnered national attention, with movie stars, child stars, porn stars, and career politicians all vying for the top elected position in the state. While Schwarzenegger's eventual victory was a foregone conclusion to many, the fate of another measure on this special ballot was far more suspenseful: Proposition 54, dubbed the Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI), would amend the state constitution to prohibit the "classif[ication of] any individual by race, ethnicity, color, or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting, or public employment ... [and] in the operation of any other state operations." Spearheaded by Ward Connerly, who in his previous capacity as a regent of the University of California successfully led the effort to eliminate affirmative action in college admissions (the aforementioned Proposition 209), the campaign for Proposition 54 branded racial consciousness an inherently divisive discourse that only perpetuated, rather than ameliorated, racism.

Voters defeated the Racial Privacy Initiative by a margin of nearly 2 to 1, protecting a place for race in public discourse. However, while the campaign for Proposition 54 was centered on achieving a color-blind society in which racism had no discursive or procedural defense, opponents of Proposition 54 chose not to rely upon the typical, politically inflected critiques of color blindness. Instead, they cannily focused on medical research and treatment as proof of the continuing relevance of race in public life, predicting the disastrous consequences of ignoring health disparities between racial groups, such as unequal rates of diabetes, sickle cell anemia, and osteoporosis. After the election, Ward Connerly conceded, "I think the voters generally embrace the ideas of Proposition 54, but the opposition very, very effectively raised doubts about the health issue." Indeed, Eva Paterson, then-director of the Equal Justice Society, fore-grounded health in her celebration of the proposition's defeat: "'The people of California rejected being blinded to race. They realized there were health implications.' ... It is a great day for civil rights.'" Paterson's conflation of health implications and civil rights strategically reframed the consequential dimensions of race, making it indistinguishable from civic personhood in contemporary political life: the possibility of privacy that the initiative aspired to offer was, in practice, impossible. Or, as one senior scholar quipped when we were discussing the RPI, some of us don't have the option of racial privacy, do we? She and I laughed, imagining the seclusion that would be required to keep our brown skin to ourselves, even as we recognized the political quagmire tactics such as the RPI initiated: privacy is an important and contested privilege in American society today, granted to some and denied to others, but for people who have been denied voluntary, protected access to both private and public spheres of their own choosing, privacy can end up feeling a lot like exile.

While Proposition 54 dealt directly with the proper role of race in American life, it was in fact part of a much larger cultural struggle relating to the tensions between the public and private sectors. Electoral and legislative activity in the earliest years of the twenty-first century have established deeply important yet seemingly inconsistent boundaries between personal and public (group) rights, from the "defense of marriage" statutes that have spread across the country to deny same-sex couples the legal protections that marriage affords to the second Bush administration's efforts to privatize Social Security. In the former instance, the public (and by extension, the government) has a right to structure the most private of relationships between consensual adults, yet in the latter case, the public and government are framed as intrusive presences in what ought to be personal decisions regarding finances, wealth, and quality of life.

In subtitling Proposition 54 the Racial Privacy Initiative, Connerly and his associates exposed and affirmed a racial etiquette that dominates contemporary American culture. As I have attempted to suggest with the title of this chapter, twenty-first-century social graces dictate that references to race always be issued sotto voce, so as not to cause any undue discomfort. Proposition 54 extends this logic, in effect criminalizing racial consciousness in the public sphere. Implicitly, the legislation suggests that race is exclusively a matter of private consciousness, only gaining publicly relevant materiality when and if individuals confess their awareness of one another's bodily differences. In this schema, race is the unruly chin hair on the face of an otherwise unblemished America: only bad manners would compel anyone to bring it up, and the politest among us will instead do others the favor of not mentioning a thing that can only cause embarrassment, discomfort, or shame. Anticipating these as the likely and logical outcomes of foregrounding race is a reflection of what John L. Jackson names "racial paranoia," a post-civil rights phenomenon "constituted by extremist thinking, general social distrust, the nonfalsifiable embrace of intuition, and an unflinching commitment to contradictory thinking." Such paranoia overdetermines racial identity rather than racial injustice as the core problem of American society, daring people to speak of race in a perverse game of tag: "whoever mentions race first is the racist in the room."

The irony of such foolish games is their ostensibly benevolent intention. We can read them as facile responses to W. E. B. DuBois's overinvoked claim about the color line. However, DuBois wrote at a moment of unique urgency for black Americans: at the beginning of the twentieth century, decades after emancipation from slavery and the backlash against Reconstruction, blacks continued to exist just beyond the limits of the civic imaginary, to be prefigured, in DuBois's simple yet trenchant words, as "a problem" that could not or would not be solved through incorporation into the dominant society. A century later, we continue to struggle with repairing racial inequality on one hand and, on the other, recognizing the celebratory, emancipatory aspects of both elective and sometimes coerced membership in racialized communities. In fact, DuBois's concerns could now be reframed to assert that the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the color-blind: those who wish to disavow the continued material manifestations of race in our society. For reasons both well intentioned and sinister, a significant number of Americans believe that a total ignorance of race is the obvious, and only, solution to the problems that an acute attention to race has brought our society.

And yet if I am critical of the rhetoric and enactments of color blindness, the supposed alternative, "multiculturalism," is barely more satisfying. Deeply attached to the culture and canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s, multiculturalism was in part a response to the fact that lopsided representations of American society normalized whiteness by making other racial groups (and by extension, cultures) invisible. It affected school curricula as well as public policy, and according to David Hollinger, manifested primarily through two strains, pluralist and cosmopolitan. In keeping with the second of these strains, Robin D. G. Kelley coined the term polyculturalism as an alternative to multiculturalism, "since the latter often implies that cultures are fixed, discrete entities that exist side by side—a kind of zoological approach to culture." According to James Lee, multiculturalism is primarily a discourse of representation that has to date remained detached from materialist concerns over the inequitable distribution of resources. Likewise, after famously arguing "against race" altogether, Paul Gilroy went on to introduce the notion of "conviviality" as an alternative to multiculturalism and its attendant connotations of an impossible "absence of racism or ... triumph of tolerance." Ironically, color blindness, through its efforts to dematerialize racial difference, offers itself as the structural vehicle through which material racialized differences and discrimination will be overcome. Racialized minorities have been forced to navigate an ethical dilemma: visibility where and at what cost?

The competition between color blindness and multiculturalism as the modes through which we could come to know ourselves and others as American was not restricted to curricula or even to court cases about discrimination. Indeed, the "culture wars" moved outside of the university system to include the realm of aesthetic practice, as evidenced most famously by the NEA Four, Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Karen Finley, artists who received modest funding from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 only to have it revoked because of objections to the content of their work. Although the artists eventually had their funding restored after years of litigation whose costs far exceeded the value of the original grants, the NEA subsequently enacted a "decency clause" that enabled them to censor future funding recipients in order to preserve particular understandings of both "National" and "Arts," and also did away with grants to individual artists, who could be harder to pressure into compliance than organizations relying upon NEA funding for institutional stability and longevity. Notably, most of the artists we hear referenced in relation to government funding conflicts and affiliated concerns over the decency of images produced in the name of publicly funded American art were white. In some instances, these white artists were also engaged in representing blackness, such as Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial nudes, or the Wooster Group's use of blackface in Route 1 and 9. For the most part, though, black artists themselves were not as visibly implicated in this understanding of the battle lines drawn in the war over American culture. According to Michele Wallace, "the culture wars represent[ed] a pitched battle among hegemonic white insiders only," because "black artists rarely (actually never) occupied the hallowed berths reserved for art world stars." Nevertheless, black artists and audiences were present in other spheres, especially hip-hop, whose various elements all challenged the spirit of what gets valorized as art that reflects positively upon the nation. From the freestyle lyrics of MCs to the appropriated sounds and lyrics of DJs who sampled existing audio tracks to the writers and b-boys who commandeered public space to make graffiti art or to dance, hip-hop, as Abigail DeKosnik argues, is not only raced but also pulled into questions about ownership, appropriation, and appropriate distinctions between the public and private spheres. The culture wars also provide a useful lens through which to evaluate other sites of black performance, from actors in mainstream Hollywood cinema to playwrights working on and off Broadway. The rhetoric of the culture wars seemed to be about the elite registers of high art and higher education and their trickle-down potential, but as I hope to demonstrate through my analysis of an eclectic, variously situated array of cultural representations, the politics of representation had and have urgent, often material consequences at each rung of our cultural hierarchy in its own right.

(Continues...)

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