King Kunta & the Black Atlantic

Black Atlantic, Black Liberation

Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich

The cultural history of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and the African diaspora as a “modern political and cultural formation” cannot be adequately understood without reference to the transatlantic slave trade and colonial conquest. ¹ Blackness and the ideology of white supremacy are legacies of European colonialism and its plunder and pillaging of Africa and other continents. ‘Race’, in this sense, is not extrinsic to capitalist modernity or simply the product of specific historical formations such as South African apartheid (c. 1948-1994) or Jim Crow America (c. 1883-1965). Likewise, capitalism does not simply incorporate racial domination as an incidental part of its operations, but from its origins “systematically begins producing and reproducing ‘race’ as global surplus humanity”. ²

Africans caught and sold into chattel slavery provided the unfree labor for the plantation system in the American South and in the Caribbean; they were condemned to the production of cotton, sugar, tobacco and coffee as commodities for the emerging world market – or the misery of domestic servitude. The ‘triangular trade’, which lasted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, was an economic terror regime if there ever was one. According to conservative estimates, 12.5 million Africans were taken across the so-called Middle Passage (of the triangular trade) on slave ships; over 2 million died on this journey alone.

Kunta Kinte, Alex Haley’s iconic fictional character, first introduced in the 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family and adapted to the television screen in the eponymous 1977 ABC miniseries, is a popular representation of the history and trauma of chattel slavery (which considers slaves as personal property), the Middle Passage and the plantation system. In 2016, budgeted at $50 million and featuring famous actors such as Forest Whitaker and Laurence Fishburne, a slightly less melodramatic remake of Roots was aired on the History Channel. Here, too, Kunta Kinte remains the story’s most iconic character. Taken captive in the Gambia and sold into the slave trade, the male Mandinka warrior’s courageous refusal to accept his slave name and numerous daring attempts at escape that resulted in his mutilation are commonly understood as contributing to the cultural memory of slavery and liberation in a way that equally acknowledges black suffering and resistance: “They can put the chains on your body. Never let them put the chains on your mind” (Roots, 2016, ep. 2).

Such focus on individual acts of symbolic resistance and defiant consciousness, however, can also suppress the memory of collective acts of militant resistance such as slave revolts (e. g. in South Carolina, 1822, led by Denmark Vesey, and in Virginia, 1831, led by Nat Turner) and sideline the role of organized abolitionist networks, of which the Underground Railroad was the most successful. Some estimates suggest that by 1850, 100,000 slaves had escaped to the North via the ‘Railroad’, which counted Harriet Tubman and John Brown among its most infamous members.

The original “‘race making’ institution” of slavery, however, did not simply disappear with the passing of legal acts in the nineteenth century such as the (British) Slavery Abolition Act (1833) and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1863). ³ Instead, it was the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the defeat of the Confederate States Army that sealed the fate of the plantation system in the South. The first successful revolution to abolish slavery and overthrow (French) colonial rule in the New World, however, was the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), chronicled by the Caribbean historian C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins (1963).

The aim of this final chapter of our introductory course is to historicize racism; this means that rather than looking for anthropological or psychological reasons for why one group of humans devalues another group on the basis of external markers (like skin color, for example), we are concentrating on the changing socio-economic conditions that enable and form racism. In particular, this chapter introduces a historical materialist analysis of slavery and “racial capitalism” ⁴ in order to provide a conceptual understanding of the role of ‘race’ in capitalist modernity.

As Karl Marx noted as early as 1867, the basis for “primitive accumulation” as a condition of possibility for the capitalist mode of production lay in New World plantation slavery, resource extraction and the extermination or domination of non-European populations on a world scale:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation (ursprüngliche Akkumulation). Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield. ⁵

Marx emphasizes that the different moments of primitive accumulation were first “systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England”. While these methods depended

on brute force, for instance the colonial system (…), they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. ⁶

The position of the slave is generally determined by what Orlando Patterson has termed “social death”. ⁷ African slaves in the New World were by definition excluded from both citizenship (rights) and ‘free’ labor relations (wages). The open racism of the colonial period made the contradiction between enslavement and freedom somewhat invisible, and, in doing so, justified slavery as a legitimate, if not natural, condition for African Americans. This racism was not simply driven by blind hatred, but by the profitable enterprise of forced labor. Historian Barbara Fields reminds us that “the chief business of slavery”, after all, was “the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco”, not the “production of white supremacy”. ⁸

The continuing pursuit of cheap and easily manipulated labor did not end with slavery; consequently, white supremacist ideas concerning the inferiority of Blacks were perpetuated with fervor even after the event of slavery. By the twentieth century, shifting concepts of race were applied not only to justify labor relations but more generally to explain the curious way in which the experiences of the vast majority of African Americans confounded the central narrative of the United States as a place of unbounded opportunity, freedom and democracy.

In terms of ideology, ‘race’ is thus in a constant process of being made and remade:

Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. (…) It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re-create their collective being (…). As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand (…). An ideology must be constantly created and verified in social life; if it is not, it dies, even though it may seem to be safely embodied in a form that can be handed down. ⁹

In other words, racial ideology naturalizes the historical and social causes of Black inequality and cultural difference. It can be strategically or unconsciously employed to blame Black people for their own oppression, transforming material causes into subjective causes.

It may be more difficult to see, however, what structural forms anti-black racism took after the original ‘race making’ institutions of slavery and legal segregation (Jim Crow laws) had ended with the Voting Rights Act in 1965. During the Fordist period of industrial production, African American labor constituted a seemingly indispensable workforce in the United States, especially in the industrial centers of the North and major cities on the East Coast, where the majority of black Americans settled during the Great Migration. In time, the new ‘race making’ institution of the ghetto historically superseded the earlier ‘peculiar institutions’ of slavery and the Jim Crow laws. ¹⁰ It inherited, though, the twin political and economic functions of social ostracization and economic exploitation, of “ethno-racial enclosure” and “labor extraction”. ¹¹

In 1964, only a month away from the passing of the Civil Rights Act, Malcolm X (much like Martin Luther King) castigated economic exploitation in the black community as “the most vicious form practiced on any people in America”. ¹² Likewise, the Black Panther Party since their inception in 1966 fought against super-profits from the exploitation of black labor. Yet in the 1980s, in a historical move ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’, black labor increasingly found itself rendered superfluous to the needs of the post-Fordist economy, which had trapped poor and working-class Blacks at the bottom of the social structure.

In particular, the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ (initiated by the Nixon administration and continued and intensified under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama and Trump) has facilitated the rise of what can be called the US carceral state. Black inner-city ghettos and social housing ‘projects’ as well as poor suburban areas transformed into a space that the sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls ‘hyperghetto’. This ‘hyperghetto’ is characterized by a ‘deadly symbiosis’ of ghetto and prison, in which the ghetto increasingly meshes with the prison system so as to constitute the fourth and most recent ‘race making’ institution. ¹³ This is the social space that gangsta rap and trap music refer to as the ‘hood’ or ‘trap’ respectively. ¹⁴

Wacquant’s analysis not only concentrates on socio-economic and political developments, but also emphasizes the significance of (stereotypical) media representations such as the “dissolute teenage ‘welfare mother’ on the female side and the dangerous street ‘gang banger’ on the male side” that are pervasive in neoliberal ‘law and order’ discourse and ubiquitous on national television. ¹⁵ Even bestial metaphors such as ‘super-predators’, ‘wolf-packs’ or ‘animals’ are common in the journalistic and political field. The conflation of blackness and crime (as well as blackness and welfare) thus reactivates ‘race’ and anti-black racism and shapes social policy. This can help to explain the

explosive growth of the incarcerated populations, which increased fivefold in twenty-five years to exceed two million (…) and are stacked in conditions of overpopulation that defy understanding; continual extension of criminal justice supervision, which now covers some seven million Americans, corresponding to one adult man in twenty and one young black man in three. ¹⁶

From the perspective of Cultural Studies, the persistent centrality of ‘race’ in the reproduction of class relations is hardly surprising. “Race”, as Stuart Hall put it in a UNESCO paper, is a “modality in which class is ‘lived’”. ¹⁷ In Policing the Crisis (1978), Hall and his colleagues first argued that race is “intrinsic to the manner in which the black labouring classes are complexly constituted”, at economic, political and ideological levels. Hence,

race is the modality in which class is lived. It is also the medium in which class relations are experienced. This (…) has consequences for the whole class, whose relation to their conditions of existence is now systematically transformed by race. ¹⁸

Uneven deindustrialization, for instance, “first displaces black workers into informal economies and market struggles”. As a consequence, many “now confront extreme policing, hyperincarceration, and the lived experience of being surplus to the needs of the economy”. ¹⁹ Surplus, that is, to an economy geared towards profits, and not towards providing humans with a livelihood.

According to Joshua Clover, those ‘surplus to the needs of the economy’ are the exemplary subjects of “a global recomposition of class within which the riot of surplus populations is not a likelihood but a certainty”. ²⁰ Such “surplus rebellions” generally occur in spaces of consumption or circulation (market squares, shopping malls) rather than spaces of production (factories), from which the most precarious and immiserated groups increasingly find themselves excluded. ²¹ For Clover, writing in 2015, the “recent waves of struggle” from Oakland to Ferguson and Baltimore essentially reveal the riot of racialized surplus populations to be “the other of (mass) incarceration”. ²²

In the United States, the carceral state can be seen as a spatial fix to an economic crisis, a means of managing those who find themselves superfluous to the needs of the economy. In her study of the formation of mass incarceration in California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore concludes that the

correspondence between regions of suffering deep economic restructuring, high rates of unemployment and underemployment among men (most of whom are not white; D. B.-U.), and intensive surveillance of youth by the state’s criminal justice apparatus present the relative surplus population as the problem for which prison became the state’s solution. ²³

Structural racism of this kind no longer needs conscious racist hatred and bigotry, but it still needs people acting in ways that support such structures. Bigotry still exists, of course, including in the police force, as the continuous extra-judicial killings of black people by police indicate. But not everyone who acts in ways that support forms of structural racism is necessarily a racist as these structures often remain opaque.

As Chris Chen argues, racialization and proletarianization are mutually constitutive processes in relation to the production of ‘relative surplus populations’ on a global scale:

The rise of the anti-black US carceral state from the 1970s onward exemplifies rituals of state and civilian violence which enforce the racialisation of wageless life, and the racial ascription of wagelessness. From the point of view of capital, ‘race’ is (also) renewed (…) through the racialisation of unwaged surplus or superfluous populations from Khartoum to the slums of Cairo. ²⁴

Marx analyzed the production of such ‘relative surplus populations’ (that is people in structural un-/underemployment) alongside the reproduction of the wage-relation in Capital, where he used the term to describe that part of the workforce “no longer directly necessary for the self-valorization of capital”. ²⁵ According to Marx, the extended reproduction of capital ultimately produces a growing ‘surplus population’ and it is in this sense that “accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat”. ²⁶ Rather than absorbing more and more labor, capital increasingly ejects workers from the immediate process of (an increasingly automated) sphere of value production (the factory) into the sphere of circulation, where value is realized (the market). While some (already precarious) workers can still sell their labor for a wage in the sphere of circulation (Amazon, Ueber, Gorillas, etc.), others find themselves excluded even from exploitation (slum dwellers, long-term unemployed, etc.).

Given the global trajectory of capitalist crisis since the 1970s, the historical timing could hardly be worse, as Chen notes with regard to the confluence of surplus-proletarianization and racialization. After decades of compounding increases in productivity, accompanied by an unresolved crisis of industrial profitability, capital began to expel more labor from the production process than was absorbed. That, in turn, produced a population superfluous to the needs of the economy in the form of a disproportionately non-white ‘industrial reserve army’ of labor:

At the periphery of the global capitalist system, capital now renews ‘race’ by creating vast superfluous urban populations from the close to one billion slum-dwelling and desperately impoverished descendants of the enslaved and colonised. ²⁷

However, as we discussed before, economic relations do not determine social formations in any simple way; both the black laboring and non-laboring classes are “complexly constituted” at the economic, political and ideological levels, which calls for a “conjunctural analysis” of any given period in the history of capitalist crisis “during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape” – or articulation. ²⁸ Race, class, gender, and other social antagonisms necessarily intersect in various ways and social relations have to be lived, too.

One way in which social relations are lived is through the experience of one’s skin color. In his acclaimed social-psychological analysis of the colonial subject in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon dissected the forced internalization and ‘epidermalization’ of ascribed inferiority resulting from colonial domination and racial oppression. Epidermalization, here, is understood as essential to the ‘racial gaze’ that sees Africa and Africans as an absolute Other outside of history and civilization (or inherently criminal and beyond reform).

Half a century earlier W. E. B. DuBois had insisted in his book The Souls of Black Folk that the “problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”. ²⁹ DuBois here develops a relational concept of ‘double consciousness’ in the context of a fundamental racial antagonism that forces African Americans to partly internalize the dominant anti-blackness of white America:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife (…). ³⁰

If we direct our attention back to the present and to the role of state violence and ‘white anxiety’ rather than ascribed black inferiority, we may come to the conclusion that the most popular monster figure in today’s global media culture – the zombie horde – has a long and racialized history, linked in no uncertain terms to the fear of “a generalized insurrection by the black proletariat”. ³¹ Cultural Studies offers a theoretical framework and methodology that allows us to better understand the cultural work performed by this figure as well as other (non-fictional) media representations. After all, racialized ‘surplus populations’ often have nowhere to go and nowhere to hide as the “police now stand in the place of the economy, the violence of the commodity made flesh”. ³² In this context, ‘Black Lives Matter’ is not a purely American slogan or a simple fact. Rather it is “a universal and generative truth, from which great implications flow”. ³³ The 2020 George Floyd Rebellion, a militant nationwide and multiracial insurrection, extending from Minneapolis to hundreds of cities in and outside the United States dramatically proved that the struggle for abolition continues in the present.