Engineered Oblivion: Racialized Fetishization, Objectification, and Religious Denigration As Coping Mechanisms for the Oppressor
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“...panic motivates our cruelty, this fear of the dark makes it impossible that our lives shall be other than superficial; this, interlocked with and feeding our glittering, mechanical, inescapable civilization which has put to death our freedom.”
Since their largely involuntary introduction to intercultural society, Blackness and its people have been subjected to unquantifiable injustice and general relegation. Aside from an equally unquantifiable amount of instances aimed at the physical and psychological subjugation of Black people at the individual level, an even more insidious horror might be found in the engineered social impairment of the Black community as a whole. This deeply ingrained, sparsely acknowledged impairment has informed much of the world’s interaction with Blackness for centuries, and finds its roots in a variety of colonial and religious concepts. Historically, said concepts were, of course, proffered by oppressive white parties as means of legitimizing acts of imperialism and the installation of chattel slavery. Over time, these concepts – and the aforementioned impairment they stand to perpetuate – have taken on more modernized forms. Nonetheless, their overall influence remains the same.
This work’s intention is to illustrate that imperialist notions suggesting that Black people are inherently “uncivilized” or “in need” of the advertised refinement of western religion and society are still not-so-subliminally present in many contemporary instances of race-based aggression (micro, macro, etc.). Oppressive parties’ continued espousal of said notions (and their more modern manifestations) will be examined as the coping mechanism that allows the prejudiced to stomach racially derived inequality on a global scale. By this line of thinking, common transgressions against Black people, such as fetishization, objectification, and the commodification of Black bodies and cultural values, will be exposed as mere symptoms of Black people’s religiously and politically sanctioned dehumanization.
Analysis of foundational works like Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964) and James Baldwin’s essays in Notes of a Native Son (1955) can help us to establish both a functional definition, as well as a historical precedent, for this socially sanctioned devaluation of Black life. Attention to a number of more contemporary works, such as Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play (2018), Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), and others can reveal more about how this devaluation continues to manifest itself in a wide variety of contemporary spheres. By tracing the pathology of oppressors’ practiced unwillingness to see the full extent of Black humanity and suffering, or “engineered oblivion,” we can come that much closer to divining the why of persisting racial aggressions. Additionally, we’ll be able to observe these phenomena’s varied, lasting effects in the lives of Black people, past and present.
Baldwin’s essays in Notes of a Native Son brilliantly blur the lines between literary critiques and provocative social commentary. Particularly, Everybody’s Protest Novel makes an impressive display of infantilizing Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s approach to capturing the true plight of Black folk of the time period. Baldwin insists that Stowe’s novel, though widely praised as a testament to national progress in its time, makes no true effort to shed the lens of engineered oblivion. As such, her portrayal of Black characters (which Baldwin contends many of them do not truly qualify as) is steeped in the kind of religious fervor that had validated the race’s devaluation for generations. Said fervor, as Baldwin remarks, functionally absolves Stowe of the authorial obligation of portraying Black characters that embody the true, real-world issues of the race without embellishment: “Apart from her lively procession of field hands, house ni[***]rs, Chloe, Topsy, etc. — who are the stock, lovable figures presenting no problem — she has only three other Negroes in the book. These are the important ones and two of them may be dismissed immediately, since we have only the author’s word that they are Negro and they are, in all other respects, as white as she can make them” (Baldwin 16). Here, Baldwin is referring to Eliza and George, a married couple who, through an otherworldly quality of fortune, are able to make a comparatively unhindered journey to Canadian freedom with their young boy, Harry. All three characters are able to pass as non-Black, and both parents are endowed with some level of beauty or mechanical prowess that sets them apart from the stereotypically characterized slave. Accordingly, the unlikelihood of their journey’s conclusion mirrors the unlikelihood of their fortuitous personal attributes, as they attain their long-sought freedom with the added boon of George’s later education in France.
Baldwin’s intention here is to highlight the unproductive nature of Stowe’s headlining the narrative with two characters that are effectively whitewashed. While this portrayal of the shrewd, pious, white-passing Black figure likely helped to foster solidarity in the minds of her largely white readership, it only contends with a gussied, palatable version of a people’s real-world experience. According to Baldwin, the novel and its author drive at nothing so much as a call for religious zealousness. As such, characters are granted devoutness, rather than actual, much-needed characterization. Here, Baldwin gives particular regard to the novel’s titular character, Tom, whose only notable victory as the one semi-realistically derived Black figure in the story is virtuously enduring the hardships and dehumanization of his life until his unnatural death:
“His triumph is metaphysical, unearthly; since he is black, born without the light, it is only through humility, the incessant mortification of the flesh, that he can enter into communion with God or man. The virtuous rage of Mrs. Stowe is motivated by nothing so temporal as a concern for the relationship of men to one another — or, even as she would have claimed, by a concern for their relationship to God — but merely by a panic of being hurled into the flames, of being caught in traffic with the devil.”
The passage illustrates Stowe’s shortsightedness with regards to the venture she’s chosen as her life’s directive. The novel doesn’t advocate for immediate radicalization or recompense; Stowe’s mindset doesn’t expand to that extent of liberalism. Rather, she advertises the characters that are not unlike whites as having the necessary devoutness and skills to be worthy of their freedom. Their darker contemporaries, unable to conceal themselves in the white world, are granted nothing but an indirect encouragement to suffer, to endure. The prevailing Black body, in all its burgeoning bellicosity and desperation, is gracelessly denied representation here. Instead, victory and development are reserved for those characters that come closer, both in appearance and faith, to the aggrandized aspect of whiteness itself:
“Here, black equates with evil and white with grace; if, being mindful of the necessity of good works, she could not cast out the blacks — a wretched, huddled mass, apparently, claiming, like an obsession, her inner eye — she could not embrace them either without purifying them of sin. She must cover their intimidating nakedness, robe them in white, the garments of salvation… Tom, therefore, her only black man, has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex. It is the price for that darkness with which he has been branded.”
Having dispelled the concept of this particular novel (and several others like it) existing solely (or at all) for the benefit and development of Black people’s societal position, Baldwin begins to drive at the true appeal of the prevailing American protest novel. He posits that, not unlike the modern concept of virtue signaling, these novels stood to gratify the same white sensibilities their writing is catered to. As northern whites passed back and forth their watered, religiously pocked tales of woe, real Black bodies remained caged, functioning as the unsung facilitators of that newfound sense or northern “virtue.” In many ways, the slavery concerned protest novels of Stowe’s age are not calls for the remediation of slave owners, nor for the societal renouncement of slavery itself. Rather, they are disparaging promotions for the rehabilitation of slaves; that they might shed the darkness classically associated with their incivility and join American society as reformed actors, mirroring the proclivities of their more genteel, “refined” caretakers:
“Thus, the African, exile, pagan, hurried off the auction block and into the fields, fell on his knees before that God in Whom he must now believe; who had made him, but not in His image. This tableau, this impossibility, is the heritage of the Negro in America: Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow! For black is the color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white.”
Baldwin’s work brings somber acknowledgment to the fact that, even in works by parties that advertise dedication to assuaging the plight of the oppressed, there lies a deeply ingrained obliviousness to that plight’s true nature. Stowe’s elected argument isn’t that Black people are human beings who must be inherently conceived of as deserving liberty. Her argument is that, with time, and no small amount of piety, Blacks could be refashioned to whiteness, freed of their unrefined dispositions and allowed to transcend their societal denigration. For Baldwin (and this humble writer), this renders the true nature of the such works disappointingly clear:
“They emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream. They are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental… Beneath the dazzling pyrotechnics of these current operas one may still discern, as the controlling force, the intense theological preoccupations of Mrs. Stowe… Finally, the aim of the protest novel becomes something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives, to hurry them into the pallid arms of Jesus and thence into slavery. The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe.”
That religious excuse for Black subjugation, with its roots in imperialist values, is perhaps the most insidious danger the oppressed have ever faced. It validates historic white actions, painting them not as human rights violators and rapists, but as the chosen healers of the world’s uncultured masses. Everybody’s Protest Novel stands as a powerful testament to the fact that even Black people’s premier white advocates were consumed with the rhetoric that dehumanized them, painting fully-fledged human beings as primitive puzzles to be solved for the pleasure of an exclusive god. This rhetoric, the proceeding iterations of which have continued to encourage the westernization of Blackness over time, rings out as a socially accepted excuse for racial devaluation.
Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play, Dutchman, offers extensive commentary on the changing face of racial relations in that time. The play might best be described as a subway-bound conversation between Clay, a twenty-year-old Black man representing the advancing Black populace, and Lula, a thirty-year-old white woman that functions as an analog for America as a whole. Both characters display practiced knowledge of the history of American racial disparity, though Lula’s seems to border on omniscience with regards to every subject except for Clay himself. Though Lula attempts to collate Clay, ushering him towards classification through the use of generalizations and stereotyping, he continuously illustrates slight separation from the inferences she makes about him. This inability to categorize Clay seems to quietly perturb Lula, as she begins to criticize his occupation and appearance in hopes of exposing him as nothing more than an average, stereotypical Black man emulating his oppressors for gain:
“(CLAY) Are you angry about something? Did I say something wrong?
(LULA) Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That’s what makes you so attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate, taking hold of his jacket] What’ve you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat for? And why’re you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrow-shoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn’t go to Harvard.
(CLAY) My grandfather was a night watchman.
(LULA) And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they were Averell Harriman.
(CLAY) All except me.
(LULA) And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
(CLAY) [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation] Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I’ve slowed down since.
(LULA) I bet you never once thought you were a black ni[***]r. [Mock serious, then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black Baudelaire.”
Lula’s incredulity, in tandem with her decreasingly flirtatious insults and generalizations, reflects her (and, in a more literal sense, the nation’s) unwillingness to cope with the educational and professional advancements of Black people. She goes on to suggest that white people’s acceptance of Blacks in society is actually more of a tolerance, born of the fear that a continually advancing Black race would one day seek revenge against their former oppressors:
“(LULA) The people accept you as a ghost of the future. And love you, that you might not kill them when you can.
(CLAY) What?
(LULA) You’re a murderer, Clay, and you know it. [Her voice darkening with significance] You know goddamn well what I mean.
(CLAY) I do?
(LULA) So we’ll pretend the air is light and full of perfume.
(CLAY) [Sniffing at her blouse] It is.
(LULA) And we’ll pretend that people cannot see you. That is, the citizens. And that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history. We’ll pretend that we are both anonymous beauties smashing along through the city’s entrails [She yells as loud as she can] GROOVE!”
Lula’s insinuations suggest that there is no way for Blacks to exist in the nation unhindered without them eventually seeking reparations (or plain revenge) for historical injustices done to them by whites. In this sense, Lula (the nation) needs to see Clay (the Black American) as nothing more than the stereotypical, developmentally obstructed Black man having stolen himself a suit. Otherwise, the oppressor may be faced with the necessity of admitting that the oppressed wasn’t so uncivilized as they thought, that the classically disincluded have come to overtake the system’s own creators. Clay’s later description of himself as acting in the honor of a “corporate Godhead” (Baraka 6) confirms for Lula that he is still working within the bounds of charted (white) societal boundaries. Nonetheless, his unpredictability is a point of stressful fascination for Lula, as she wonders at his need to transcend Black people’s position within the existing status quo:
“(LULA) [Searching aimlessly through her bag. She begins to talk breathlessly, with a light and silly tone] All stories are whole stories. All of ‘em. Our whole story … nothing but change. How could things go on like that forever? Huh? [Slaps him on the shoulder, begins finding things in her bag, taking them out and throwing them over her shoulder into the aisle] Except I do go on as I do. Apples and long walks with deathless intelligent lovers. But you mix it up. Look out the window, all the time. Turning pages. Change change change. Till, shit, I don’t know you. Wouldn’t, for that matter. You’re too serious. I bet you’re even too serious to be psychoanalyzed…
…
(LULA) But you change. [Blankly] and things work on you till you hate them. [More people come into the train. They come closer to the couple, some of them not sitting, but swinging drearily on the straps, staring at the two with uncertain interest]
(CLAY) Wow. All these people, so suddenly. They must all come from the same place.
(LULA) Right. That they do.
(CLAY) Oh? You know about them too?
(LULA) Oh yeah. About them more than I know about you. Do they frighten you?
(CLAY) Frighten me? Why should they frighten me?
(LULA) ‘Cause you’re an escaped ni[***]r.
(CLAY) Yeah?
(LULA) ‘Cause you crawled through the wire and made tracks to my side.”
Once again, Lula returns to this rhetoric that portrays Clay as little more than a slave that’s traded the field for an office cubicle, masquerading as a white man in pursuit of his portion of an American dream that wasn’t created with him in mind. The mention of the other passengers on the train, who encompass an array of races and personal circumstances, brings the wider society into the conversation as well. Lula insinuates that nobody — including a number of developmentally complacent Blacks — is keen on witnessing the continued advancement of the unaccountable Black. With the crowd established, and all of metaphorical society watching, Lula springs her grand trap, descending into a full-bodied display of hysterics and using insults and embarrassment to goad Clay into response. His resulting diatribe renounces Lula’s extensive disrespect, drives at Black art’s existence as a coping mechanism to deter retributive racial violence, and advocates for the Black American’s right to exist in the professional landscape without facing accusations of white mimicry: “If I’m a middle-class fake white man … let me be. And let me be in the way I want… Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It’s none of your business. You don’t know anything except what’s there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart” (Baraka 9). The monologue is a striking warning directed at the nation to give up attempts to box in the methods and motivations of the advancing Black populace. In spite of Lula’s diminutive accusations of racial imitation and some insatiable sense of grandeur, Clay reveals that she is incapable of even approximating the Black heart’s capacities for endurance and adaptation. He even goes so far as to say that the retaliatory violence Lula reports people as fearing would, in fact, have been the easiest route to equity, and that just the simple act of murder (like the extensive murder of Blacks throughout history) “would make us all sane” (Baraka 9). And though he discounts such prospects, remarking on how he’d “rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with [his] words, and no deaths,” (Baraka 9) Lula’s driving him to an emotional outburst discredits him before the biased masses and confirms their vision of him as a looming danger. And just before his untimely demise, delivered at the hands of a bigoted, unwelcoming nation, Clay displays his knowledge (which he does not present as particularly esoteric) of slavery’s imperialist, religiously excused roots:
“…you tell this to your father, who’s probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these ni[***]rs. Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don’t make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they’ll begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you’ll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can accept them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those ex-coons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they’ll murder you. They’ll murder you, and have very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They’ll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from your bones, in sanitary isolation.”
Shortly thereafter, Lula (with the support of the other passengers) stabs Clay in the chest twice, indicating the communal belief of that hovering, distrustful analog of the nation that there was no room for the 20th century Black figure, nor their progeny, in the continuing American legend. In a broad sense, Baraka illustrates the historical and continuing suppression of Black access to professional prospects and academia as a sort of precautionary. Said precaution is a reflection of the fear of oppressors (and their sympathizers) that an educated, agency-bearing Black populace will seek compensation for abuses, past and present. Unfortunately, this practice would indicate that racial objectification against Black people has taken on forms at both ends of the spectrum of prejudiced social thought. On one end, Black people are sub-human, relegated to secondary (perhaps even tertiary) social positions to provide labor and receive the raw end of most every instance of governmental disenfranchisement. At the other end, Black people are feared as approaching vengeful superhumanity, learning to manipulate societal mechanisms to their communal benefit and plotting the timely downfall of the longstanding, oppressive regime. The gut-wrenching reveal here is that the prejudiced seemingly need to see Blackness as one or the other: a parasitic bane to be loathed or the origin of a coming species of overlords to be feared and prevented at all costs. The reality is considerably less dramatic. A commanding cut of the contemporary Black populace want nothing more than to live, to be seen as nothing more or less than concrete, agency-bearing human beings. After years of subjugation within a nation that still evades accountability for centuries of Black suffering, life doesn’t seem like too high a demand.
So, what effects do the coping mechanisms of oppressors (objectification, disaccreditation, the historical branding of practices like proselytism as charitable, etc.) have on the oppressed? A swift examination of creative works like Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, in tandem with data from several recent sociological studies, can reveal that things making oppressors feel safe and powerful stand to create chronic (even generational) physical and psychological afflictions in the oppressed.
In Slave Play, playwright Jeremy O. Harris’s 2018 work centering around the subliminal effects of trauma and history in modern interracial relationships, a panel of race-mixing partners take part in a fictional study known as “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy.” The goal of said study is to divine the contributing factors behind the three Black partners’ prevailing Anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure (particularly in a sexual sense). Through immersive slavery-era role play and group discussion, it’s suggested that all three characters’ disconnection from sexual gratification with their white partners is “directly related to / the fact that black and brown people / after generations of subjugation, / raping, / pillaging, / now only nurture and birth children who are neurologically atypical / and undiagnosed” (Harris 102). The concept permeates the remainder of the play, as the Black partners recognize the theretofore unseen racial power dynamics and fetishization informing their interactions with their white significant others. Likewise, the white partners were respectively forced to take accountability for racially derived characteristics that they (for the most part) weren’t even aware that they were embodying. The therapy’s success (the partners’ sexual reconnection) hangs on the necessity for all of the partners to contend with racial trauma on an individual basis, and, to an even greater extent, for the white partners to accept that their comfort in their respective relationships did not always (or even often) equate to comfort for their partners.
Harris’s play is a generously sexual, raw reflection of the fact that, even without our conscious participation, our everyday actions (down to the minutiae) are still disseminated through our lives and relationships, influencing, mirroring, and even creating new instances of longstanding societal dynamics (i.e. oppressor/oppressed, master/slave, sexual pleasure deriver/non). The various characters’ acquisition of this knowledge (especially the white ones) leaves them better equipped to monitor their ingrained biases for the benefit of themselves and their severely sexually inhibited partners.
Claudia Rankine’s book-length lyric poem, Citizen, also displays the effects of race-based aggressions as passive, intrusive changes to Black peoples’ everyday experience. These changes can take the form of mental neuroses and anguish, or more physical manifestations like aches and tics representing the cumulative effects of living in a world that is plainly more unkind to you because of your race. Rankine often returns to reflection on the sigh, illustrating it as one of the foremost raw manifestations of race-related fatigue:
“The head’s ache evaporates into a state of numbness, a cave of sighs. Over the years you lose the melodrama of seeing yourself as a patient. The sighing ceases; the headaches remain. You hold your head in your hands. You sit still. Rarely do you lie down. You ask yourself, how can I help you? A glass of water? Sunglasses? The enteric-coated tablets live in your purse next to your license. The sole action is to turn on tennis matches without the sound. Yes, and though watching tennis isn’t a cure for feeling, it is a clean displacement of effort, will, and disappointment.”
The speaker’s recollection of losing the “melodrama” of viewing themselves as a patient is remarkably poignant. The insinuation is that they eventually stopped seeking professional aid for their afflictions, because they recognize there is no observable malady to be addressed. The ghostly pains and fatigue — and the speaker certainly seems to know this — result from the passive stress associated with living their own life. This stress, or so it is certainly suggested, is largely derived from the speaker’s experiences in being Black. A later poem remarks, “You are not sick, you are injured— / you ache for the rest of life. / How to care for the injured body, / the kind of body that can’t hold / the content it is living?” (Rankine 114) This point of aching for the “rest of life” alludes to the pleasures, or perhaps just some sense of security, that Black people are denied on account of the discrimination they are forced to suffer. Rankine illustrates Blackness as constantly starting from one step lower, as contending with some constant demand. She offers plentiful assurance that those who feel the unique physical and mental strain of this demand are “not sick, not crazy, not angry, not sad—,” they are simply “injured” (Rankine 116).
Non-literary examples of the everyday health hazards of Blackness could assist in grounding the project in reality. Additionally, considering the experiences of individuals that suffer from more than one angle of marginalization, we can observe how these passive afflictions begin to compound, manifesting themselves in progressively severer ways. A 2018 article titled Transgender People of Color’s Experiences of Sexual Objectification: Locating Sexual Objectification Within a Matrix of Domination details the immediate and lasting effects of objectification in modern social environments. With only 15 people having participated in the study, the very considerable list of effects included: general psychological distress (n=15), hypervigilance and physical safety anxiety (n=14), self-doubt and expectation rejection (n=9), transgender incongruence — or one’s body not matching up with their personal view of themselves (n=7), self-objectification (n=7), and increased relatedness to others who experienced objectification (n=6) (Flores et al. 8). The article goes on to detail the various ways in which these individuals went about coping with the long term effects of sexual and racial objectification (i.e. therapy, advocacy, self-care, redefinition of gender to combat transgender incongruence, etc.). The study’s findings are doubly representative of the potential effects of the fetishization and exotification ascribed to Black individuals by oppressive parties.
The minimization of marginalized peoples’ bodies and/or character has been the practice of oppressive parties since the advent of intercultural society. It could be the belief of said parties that this practice absolves them of the responsibility of becoming familiar with, or acknowledging the agency of, groups they’ve historically viewed as inferior. With regards to Blackness in particular, the bane of objectification laid the foundation for centuries of imperialism and chattel slavery under the guise of religious charity. Today, the Black American remains stifled, prospects deliberately palsied by those who chide restitution yet fear retaliation for injustices done. It is not the objective of this investigation to speculate on whether the reckoning that Baldwin and Baraka predict will come to pass. It is simply to substantiate the claim that those who derive a sense of security from the systematic disenfranchisement and commodification of others render themselves inherently inferior. Said inferiority certainly isn’t the result of factors like their race, gender, sexuality, or origin. Rather, it is all a reflection of that abject failing in moral character.
