History up to the present moment makes evident that to be black in America is to be a problem. As a white man, I
know in neither my body nor my embodied mind what it means to be a problem in the eyes of passersby. Rather, in America, to
embody whiteness as I do is to know that my very body, walking down the
sidewalk, stepping on an elevator, driving in a car, is, from the beginning,
free from all suspicion, de facto—and, if we’re honest, de jure. To be black, though, is to be held suspect, to be gazed
upon carefully, in case one should make any sudden movement. To be black is to
be—ontologically and otherwise—essentially problematic, a notion upon which a nation has been
built, both figuratively and literally: on the backs and by the sweat, suffering,
and death of people of color.
In terms of the everyday experience of “being a problem” (1),
W.E.B. Du Bois writes in The Souls of
Black Folk of the “double consciousness” borne of prejudice endured in all
facets of life—“this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of
others” (2). For Du Bois, to exist as black in America is to exist in a lineage
of “strife,” a lineage marked by a “longing to attain self-conscious [personhood],
to merge [one’s] double self into a better and truer self” (2). In response to
the fact of being a problem, and the psychological fragmentation it can beget,
Du Bois posits that African Americans must struggle for freedom by achieving
the institutional means to increase their own education, political power,
social standing, and economic stability. As acts of fundamental self-assertion
over against a history of systematic and institutionalized racial
disenfranchisement, such achievements, Du Bois might say, serve to normalize
blackness.
While Du Bois’ thorough and multivalent descriptions of
being black in America throughout The
Souls of Black Folk continue to speak poignantly today, one might
well question whether or not Du Bois’ vision for African Americans’ acquisition
of freedom still rings entirely true. Despite the fact that many of the
realities Du Bois hoped for—increased black education, political power, social
standing, and economic stability—have become a reality (though certainly only in part), I would argue that blackness itself very much continues to
be a “problem” in the United States of America, often in like manner as Du Bois
describes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
For instance, poverty, sustained by a
history of racist economic policy decisions, housing practices, and wage
slavery that continues today, persists among African Americans, 28 percent of
whom live below the poverty level (The Washington Post). Relatedly, African Americans are significantly more likely
to spend time in prison than are whites, with 4,347 out of every black Americans 100,000
incarcerated today, as opposed to 678 out of every 100,000 for whites. As Du Bois
wrote more than 100 years ago, African Americans suffer “an economic slavery,
from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary” (24). Today’s
incarceration rates are upheld in large part by law enforcement and criminal
justice procedures that in many ways criminalize
blackness (for instance, stop and frisk policies in New York City and mandatory
minimums sentencing for certain offenses applied disproportionately to African Americans). As Du Bois outlines—in
1903—particularly in the South, police forces and courts were originally
created to monitor, criminalize, and control former slave populations, which
means that black Americans “came to look upon courts as instruments of
injustice and oppression,” a perspective that continues to resonate today (108).
(Episteme #1)
