Darius, I have a confession. When I first read your novel, Negrophobia, I wasn’t sure if I should like it. Your book presents its black characters as ghoulish and hallucinatory embodiments of some of the most flagrantly racist stereotypes laundered through 20th Century American culture. There’s the tyrannical and almost illiterate maid who abuses the novel’s bubbly albeit racial paranoiac, Paris Hilton-esque protagonist Bubbles. An evil witch doctor pulls rabbits out of Bubbles’ vagina in a horrific “Voodoo” ritual gone wrong. Hell, Darius, you even personified lawn jockeys as animate beings! What was I to do with this novel?
I was mesmerized by the way you structured it. It reads like an uncommonly readable screenplay: three acts, dialog blocks, expository setting descriptions. The banality and formality of the screenplay structure functions as a set of boundaries through which the chaos of your prose is contained within. Inside this semantic matrix, a vortex of violence threatens to explode outward – beyond its parameters and off the pages – by conjuring a chimeric atmosphere of grotesqueries, body fluids, and racial animosities. But, in being seduced by your prose, was I condoning racist propaganda? Were you tricking me into outing myself as something I never thought I could be? Your art holds a mirror up to its readers through which they see their reflections distorted and distended, face to face with the inner-ugliness we all struggle to suppress.
And while Negrophobia does force readers to take stock of their own bigotries, it doesn’t denounce them as evil for holding such animosities. Instead, it deconstructs the ways in which these bigotries are socially, culturally, and politically conditioned. What Negrophobia really is, is one of the most hilarious, provocative, and upsetting works of literary art to ever question the notion of race as a signifier and point of human distinction. If anything, it condemns the cultural fetishism of race that continues to define our discourse! Your book boldly draws attention to the fact that “race” only exists to the extent that racism exists! We have CULTURAL differences, Negrophobia declares in its exaggerations of ugly stereotypes, but racial difference doesn’t make us “different.”
The provocations of Negrophobia begin with its structure: a screenplay. By shunning the form of the novel, you dismissed the novel as the historical embodiment of literary genius. “Fuck that bourgeois shit!” you said. By using the screenplay format, you signal towards the legacy of blaxploitation cinema, an art form known for its use of stereotypes. But it was this choice that laid the groundwork for what Negrophobia became. In your text, the racial stereotypes become so absurdly grotesque and terrifying that they begin to liquidate the meaning that the stereotypes held in the first place. Instead, the stereotypes serve the function of making the reader aware of how stupid such stereotypes are at root. Everyone, regardless of their race, is inherently idiosyncratic. A singular entity. It doesn’t even matter if one conforms to a certain stereotype, the human subjectivity is always more complicated than that. Deeper and richer. As much as the psyche conforms, it transgresses. We’re all so very different, and yet, we need the same things: security, a home, love. By busting the stereotypes through the vicious exaggeration and fragmentation of the stereotypes, the larger purpose of Negrophobia unfolds.
One of the most troubling notions of identity politics, on both the political left and the right, is that both sides of it tacitly accept the notion that there are inalienable distinctions amongst us based on the levels of melanin in our skin. Through this minute physical difference, we are led to believe that the gaps between us can not be bridged. And it’s not just outright racists who enforce this fallacious belief, but also liberals who, either well-meaningly or cynically, think racism can only be overcome by deep engagement with race as a difference. This is an absurdity, and it’s the absurdity that animates your vicious critique of racism and racial difference in our culture, Darius! It’s the absurdity that drives the manic dreamscape of pervasive racial paranoia that is Negrophobia.
Political scientist Barbara Fields uses the term “racecraft” to describe the phenomenon in which racism produces the illusion of race as a material force. True to its name, this is an act of cultural sorcery that manifests on every side of neoliberal discourse. Right wing republicans will talk about and dog whistle towards “baggy pants” and loud rap music and black on black crime. Left liberals, conversely, treat the “black community” as a hegemonic voting block that unanimously shares political interests, despite the myriad class distinctions and varying degrees of power and influence within communities of people of color. The left liberal needs to portray its subject as a victim, because victimization in late modernism is the last virtue. Negrophobia, Darius, embodies the banal occultist practices of racecraft, in which people of different races are pitted against one another, and people of the same race with nothing else in common besides the vague similarities in their skin see them treated as one solitary unit. Black people. White people. Always at odds, never to find solidarity, much less any form of brotherhood or camaraderie.
In Negrophobia, the protagonist Bubbles is incapable of seeing race until it is amplified through the racialized stereotypes that you gleefully put to page. The stereotypes function as a provocation that demands that the reader think harder about what it means to live in a racialized society, while they also serve to illustrate the inherent hypocrisies within those readers, regardless of their race. As Fields says, race isn’t biological, it is merely a social construct learned and indoctrinated through racism. It is racism that creates the very phenomenon from which race materializes as an ontological force. Race becomes a social projection that is then largely performed. Bubbles can’t decipher “blackness” through physically seeing skin color, blackness only takes form within her mind through the racialized images and stereotypes that the characters she comes into contact with conform to.
The Cream of Wheat Chef. Louis Farrakhan. The Sun Ra Arkestra. Negrophobia illustrates the racial construct as a population persistently force fed Devil’s Breath while “the man” whispers stereotypes and racially loaded concepts into our ears as we drift in and out of consciousness. By the time that we awake, we are absolutely convinced that race is not just real, but so pervasive that it cannot be overcome. This is the terrifying conclusion of Negrophobia, Darius. Bubbles finally comes to terms with her “negrophobia,” her irrational racial paranoia and fear of black people, but at the same time, she finds that she can’t shed herself of her biases. They are too indoctrinated into her, like a cult religion. You can’t overcome what isn’t actually real. You can’t vanquish political voodoo. It’s hauntological, it’s everywhere even if it’s not there. Your pessimism, Darius, was brutal. But it was also prophetic. How can we overcome racism when the very notion of race as difference is enforced by racism?
These categories; “Race,” “blackness,” and “whiteness”; are implemented by the social and political elites to absorb the under classes into a vortex of incoherence, petty resentment, and hate. By fear mongering race, the global elite manipulates the working class into aiming their hatred at each other, leaving it unaccountable and free to wield power and amass wealth. Perhaps you were aware of socialist political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. 's work while writing Negrophobia? Reed implores us to understand that “race reductionist politics are the left side of neoliberalism and nothing more,” he says. “It is openly antagonistic to the idea of the solidaristic left.” Congressman James Clyburne single-handedly destroyed Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign by appealing to his mostly black voters’ sympathies for Joe Biden’s allegiance to our first black president, despite the fact that Biden’s political record is responsible for mass incarceration, which has decimated black communities across America. This is just one example of the myriad ways in which the racial construct is abused by our power elites to mystify the stakes of politics and society. In the end, the bourgeoise is the solo benefactor of the contradictions.
These travesties occur because we are convinced that race exists, and we are convinced that race exists because racism made us believe it was from the moment we slithered out of the womb. Some critics took issue with the hyper-exploitative nature of your metaphors, such as when Bubbles is covered in soot and passing as a black woman only to say “If you insist on poking your fingers where they’re clearly not wanted, you could at least rub a little faster!,” emphasizing Bubbles’ irrationally anxious concept of black men as sexual hooligans who are all violently obsessed with her. But how could it be any different? The enforcement of race as a construct requires a delirious stream of around-the-clock narrative building. The racial construct is a fiction constantly being added to and broadened, like a new bible. It is a narrative that is created through symbols, through platitudes, and through stereotypes! To puncture a narrative of this scope, one must be vicious. And Darius, your writing is vicious, absurd, and animated by a wicked intelligence dedicated to ripping down the whole storyboard.
African philosopher named Achille Mnembe has referred to the persistence of the fetishizing of “blackness” and “race” as “the delirium of modernity.” And “the delirium of modernity,” is at the essence of Negrophobia's exasperated logic. Negrophobia uses delirious and phantasmagoric manifestations of racial stereotyping as a method of exposing the utter absurdities that racial ideology is built upon. Whereas Kierkegaard believed that “absurdism” was a useful artistic and literary technique for exposing the illogical nature of faith, you used literary absurdism for a much more singular purpose: exposing the illogical nature of using the concept of race as a way to distinguish social life and enforce power.
“Camera pulls back and reveals a monstrous, mammy-sized cookie jar of a woman with doughy animal features and crazed incandescent eyes,” you wrote. “Her nappy bleach-blond Afro is a crown of spiky thorns matted with sweat and splashed with splats of Day-Glo colors.” How can anyone mistake something so psychotically over-dramatized for a perpetuation of racist sentiment? It is clearly satire! Though it seems that more and more black artists are given access to the elite institutions of the arts, it is rarer and rarer that black artists of your complicated ideological viewpoint are allowed to speak at all. There’s a reason that filmmakers like Jordan Peele and Barry Jenkins are getting rich in Hollywood, and that is because their films are flattering the social consciousness of white Hollywood liberals or appealing to their white guilt in ressentiment.
What’s curious now is the way the expectations placed on black artists have been reversed. Postmodern fiction writer Ishmael Reed recently wrote a piece on his collaborator, the filmmaker Bill Gunn who directed the arthouse horror masterpiece Ganja and Hess, and about how Gunn was shunned by Hollywood because he wanted to make non-ideological films about black aesthetes. Instead, Hollywood wanted him to make films that functioned largely as “anti-black propaganda.” When Gunn refused, he was cut out of the industry almost entirely. But now, Darius, it is damn near impossible for black artists to portray black people as anything less than upstanding, moral people, reinforcing the left liberal notion that marginalization is inherently something to celebrate and closing the window on anything resembling complexity and humanity. Art is a reflection of the human psyche, without the darker impulses of man, there is no art! You Darius, you reveled in the grotesquerie and ugliness of contemporary life.
Kara Walker, for instance, an admirer of yours, suffered a fierce backlash after she won the Macarthur Genius grant for her silhouetted depictions of life on the plantation. The mostly black artists who went after her, like Betye Saar, were furious that Walker dared to depict anything other than black uplift! They even went so far as to say that Walker was pandering to the “white art establishment!” But who in their right mind can say that Walker’s brutality was pandering more than artists like Kehinde Wiley, whose only aim is to “rectify” the art historical canon. Wiley wants his black subjects to be worshipped and ogled in the way that the white subjects of Rubens or Caravaggio are.
But the logic of Wiley is fundamentally neoliberal. His quest to have his subjects accepted into the sphere of elite institutions is culturally analogous to the quest of neoliberalism to secure the elite status of some people of color at the expense of the many being left behind. That Wiley was asked to paint the post-presidency portrait of Barack Obama is oh so perfect! Obama’s symbolic victory as the first black president is used to mystify the reality of his presidency, in which hundreds of thousands of Americans, including black Americans, lost their homes, while Obama did his backers in Wall Street a solid and bailed their crook asses out! Wiley’s stately portrait of a hollow symbolic victory is in fact a hollow symbol of what passes for political progress in neoliberalism. As Walter Benn Michaels says, that is the “trouble with diversity,” that we learned to “love diversity” and “ignore inequality.”
What’s so disturbing about the efforts to censor you – to silence you, really – and Walker is that it narrows the window of acceptable content to which black artists are allowed to work within. Imagine David Lynch being told by white artists that he can’t depict anything other than “white uplift!” What so often masquerades as the ethos of emancipation is actually an assault on art itself! It is more RACIST than anti-racist! Why should any artist, black, white or otherwise, limit their fascinations, perversions, and fetishes to those which are deemed morally righteous! They shouldn’t Darius, and you sure didn’t! You did the opposite! You appropriated every taboo – every naughty, ugly idea that both black and white liberal artists deemed off the table – and sculpted those taboos into form.
You made all the right enemies! Right wingers! White liberal publishers! Amiri Baraka! You enraged them all! You suffered from being ahead of your time! You created an art that shattered the walls between truth and lies and amongst the rubble we saw how indistinguishable the two allegedly antithetical concepts really are. “Negrophobia is a work of fiction,” you write in the novel’s introduction, “Every word is true. Fuck you.” When everything you’re told is a lie, then every lie becomes the truth. They lie to us, Darius! But you told us the truth! You told us that the truth is there, buried in the LIES (oh how Freudian)! Negrophobia is a work of post-structuralist fiction that “deconstructs” the titanic narrative that has been constructed to validate the persistence of racial ideology. It is, without a shred of a doubt, a masterpiece.
Had Negrophobia been published now, it would have resulted in outrage, no doubt. But it also would have benefitted from contemporary discourses about the hollowness of neoliberalism’s absorption of identity politics. You were just too early! Tragically, Negrophobia remains your one published work of fiction (if I ever start a publishing imprint, you will be the first writer that I harass to get new work out of, I promise). You expected this, it seems, you even told BOMB Magazine that “if you were concerned about the repercussions” you wouldn’t be doing your job “as a satirist.” And as Karl Marx once said, “Lacking its own ingenuity, the parasite fears the visionary. What it cannot plagiarize, it seeks to censor. What it cannot regulate, it seeks to ban.” You terrified the parasites, Darius, but your artistic genius is preserved, in Negrophobia.
NOTE: this essay is connected to my my essay series for the Quarterless Journal, ‘Conversations in Trolls’
