Black Intellectuals, Black Archives, and a Second American Founding

Abstract

184 CLA JOURNAL Black Intellectuals, Black Archives, and a Second American Founding Greg Carr “To speak the unspeakable has become an important strategy of resistance. The unspeakable is always, whatever else it is, a political category, a form of censorship. The unspeakable is rendered mute in order to throw a polite silence over contradictions felt as socially unbearable. The voices of the repressed break a silence that respects the sacred, profanes the rituals that propel correct action, unravels the unspoken law of hierarchy, pollutes the codes of purity and threatens language with division. After it is spoken, the unspeakable may be assimilated, but not without new anxieties, new rigors demanded of polite discourse. Such was the case with the Black Aesthetic” (Taylor 5). The color-blind pandemic of COVID-19 has found common ground with America’s perpetual racial pandemic. The country’s natural anti-Black social antibodies, sufficient until now to fend off attempts to infect it with new life as a re-imagined experiment in plurality and equality, are threatened anew with a multiracial, intergenerational, and multi-class general strike against the existing order. This time these antibodies may not be enough to prevent the death of their host, the end of the mythology of the settler colonies-turned-settler state. More even than a Third Reconstruction, what may be emerging from the current viral attack is a Second Founding, this one bereft of the white nationalist anchors of the first. Desperate to hold on to the old ways, policymakers, cultural mythmakers, and corporate owners of the means to profit from it all are making cosmetic concessions—from hastily-arranged webinars on “anti-racism” to market interestdriven adjustments to product branding—hoping to rally their dying hosts for one last extension of their profitable lives before realities of demographics and dissent induce the new birth. Black American “thought leaders” fight to gather coins and fleeting celebrity as white-facing race interpreters in a Battle Royale of the mass commercial mediated public sphere. Everyone else inclined to speak publicly mounts electronic soapboxes, where speaking truth to power is instant and subject to instant surveillance and policing. Contemporary Black academics, more distant from African communities they have interpreted with swelling acuity than at any time in their long American sojourn, are poised to speak, once more, to themselves, their publishers, and their ever-shrinking readership of patrons and fellow-craft. CLA JOURNAL 185 There was a time when American Apartheid separated Africans from open enemies and natural allies in a fashion that required Black thinkers, teachers, organizers, and writers to work openly and more effectively on behalf of the race. The White Redemption followed the dismantling of de jure segregation during the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s, this time including the mining of Black communities for serviceable talent in every area from athletics to academics. The twin effect of this siphoning of essential personnel was the weakening of Black institutions and mass movements and the transformation of Black insurgent academic work into white proximate rhetorical posturing. History provides every generation with opportunities to create realities and, in the wake, to narrate its successes and failures in penultimate acts of witness and testament. In the current moment, scholars of African descent can glimpse possibilities of structural transformation in some ways unprecedented in recent history. The capacity to see what might be accomplished must, however, be strengthened by a renewed memory of what was accomplished by previous generations facing even more dire forces and circumstances. During the second White Redemption,1 Black academic memory of previous generations’often heroic triumphs and sacrifices on our collective behalf was amputated in the operating rooms of white academia,the patient’s self-images sutured instead to contemporary popular culture, French poststructuralists and institutional desire for stone and ivy from Cambridge to Palo Alto. After a long season of studied contempt, some of these Black Frankensteins sought to warm themselves at the fires of the formal Black intellectual formations of the American Apartheid era, tended at the time by a shrinking contingent of wise elders and Negro College apprentices. The pages of the College Language Association Journal, like those of the Journal of Negro History and...