“Why Did the White Woman Cross the Street?”: Cultural Countermeasures against Affective Forms of Racism

Abstract

This article outlines the distinct logics that govern embodied, affective forms of anti-Black racism in order to theorize cultural countermeasures that disrupt them. I argue that attempting to dismantle affective forms of racism by creating “positive” representations of Black people is an ineffective strategy in the long term. This approach tends to amplify investments in racial exceptionalism, fetishism, and restrictive conditions of acceptability, ultimately leaving Eurocentric epistemological and ontological frameworks intact. Instead, I consider cultural methodologies and epistemological frames that allow the complexities of Black ontology to thrive and proliferate. I examine Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly for the ways it uses Black epistemological frames and methods that hold the potential to diminish affective forms of racism.