Ordinary Notes.
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Black literature for my comprehensive exams. These books approach what it means to exist as a Black person from so many angles. Reading them altogether makes my own understanding of what it means to be Black ever-changing. As I keep reading, my understanding continues to shapeshift. I’ve yet to land somewhere permanently and maybe never will.
For example, in Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson argues that Black people aren’t human because to be human means to be treated like a human, and White people can never treat Black people like humans because Whiteness requires oppression to exist (Whiteness is defined by marking others as non-White and thus less worthy of care). In Black Bodies, White Gazes, George Yancy argues that Black people as non-human/unworthy is true in the White imagination but that we can all disinvest in Whiteness, move on from that way of relating to each other. bell hooks, in Reel to Real, argues that the way we’re represented in movies influences how we understand ourselves and others and that Black people are often represented badly because it’s beneficial for Whiteness and for capitalism. In case all of this makes you want to leave the West for good, Saidiya Hartman warns in Lose Your Mother that we can never go back to Africa and be who we were before slavery because Africa is not the Africa that it was before we left—400 years have passed and they are no longer waiting at the coast with open arms—they’ve (understandably) moved on.
It’s a lot to deal with, a lot to work through. I just finished Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, and in it, she gives us moments—sometimes of racism, sometimes of Black community, sometimes of ideas, sometimes of books she loves. She collects things—thoughts, photographs, stories—and assembles them. Amidst all of the books that I love but that are certain in their structure and in their argument, the collage-like nature of Ordinary Notes gives me more room to breathe.
Sharpe orbits Black death—the men and women who have been killed by the police, the grief of losing her mother and brother—and Black life: the children she comes across, their joy, books that people have told her make them feel seen.
She goes to a museum and thinks not just about what’s there but who goes there and what they have to say and how this adds to the meaning of the museum. What does it mean when in a Black history museum a White woman comes up to you, crying and sorry? Why are we always asked as Black people to make space, to forgive?
Sharpe writes that the “we” that’s meant to be all of us— “we’re” all in this together, “we’re” all better than racism, “we” all need to watch and rewatch the violence of it until we change—is not an all-inclusive “we” because “we” did not all oppress people the same way. She argues that Black people especially should not be lumped into this “we,” as if even though we’re the ones who have been violently oppressed for centuries, we also are the ones who need to suck it up and figure this shit out.
She writes, “In the face of the murders of Black people, murders that endlessly repeat, how can one presume, still, that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘we’ that are in something together?”
I love Ordinary Notes for its candor. It is not coddling and not always gentle. It is not a hopeful guide out of racism for White people. It is at times condemning, unforgiving unless real and wide-ranging work to change occurs. It’s not interested in your crying sorries.
Reading all of these books for my exams, I am now sometimes hyperaware when walking around my neighborhood. I live in Atlanta, but I also live in one of the neighborhoods near my school, which means that sometimes when I go on a walk in the streets behind my apartment complex, people look at me. Often, they cross to the other side of the road, even if that other side does not have a sidewalk. Once, a woman locked her car door as I passed in broad daylight, and it was so bewildering to me—that she assumed I would come up to her car and hurt her, that she didn’t care if I knew that she thought that, didn’t think about what I would think when I inevitably heard the click of the lock.
I tend to align with the writers who don’t want to coddle White people, who don’t want to do the work for them, but are interested in working with them if they’re actually and honestly willing to give up some things to change. I tend to veer toward hopeful, but sometimes when it’s made clear to me that who Black people are in real life and who Black people are in the White imagination are not the same, I think about Christina Sharpe’s “we.” If you’re crossing the street to avoid whoever you imagine me to be, if you lock your car door because you think I might hurt you, clutch your bag in case I rob you, leave the seats around me empty, if, like Fanon said, “I exis[t] triply” to you—larger than life and untouchable, a force to be reckoned with—then how exactly are we in this together?
Image: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
