Tianna S. Paschel

The word “Black” is and always has been a banned word, intrinsically. This is not new. “Black” is a word that is perhaps better understood as a feeling, an articulation that comes out of struggle. It is a Herculean attempt to resignify and self-name a group of people who have otherwise been named through historic and ongoing practices of unspeakable violence, super-exploitation, dispossession, and genocide. And while such projects of self-naming always have their limits, even the attempt to do so was still disruptive enough, dangerous enough, to warrant full-scale counter-insurgency efforts, from the moment the architects of the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery and named all citizens, regardless of skin tone, “Noirs,” or “Blacks,” in their 1805 constitution. The project to resignify “Black,” after all, is a project to redefine the human and all the relations of power embedded in it.

Over the next two centuries, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the collective use of “Black” as a positive self-naming was seen by state officials from the United States to Brazil to Trinidad as threatening, whether it was used in explicit political movements or as an aesthetic expression, screamed collectively from dance floors across the diaspora: “I’m Black and I’m proud.” Both, of course, were political, and as such, imbued with revolutionary potential that needed to be quelled. Just as COINTELPRO infiltrated and surveilled not just the Black Panther Party but many other organizations, Brazil’s Ministry of the Interior under its military dictatorship kept close watch on “bailes Black” (Black dances or parties). These parties were part of a larger articulation of Black diasporic and anti-authoritarian movements popping up in Rio de Janeiro and throughout Brazil. The word “Black,” it seemed, was so powerful in the context, that it was often left untranslated, not “bailes negros” but “bailes Black”. Even today, the hairstyle that we call an “Afro” in the US is affectionately called a “Black Power” throughout Brazil. We also see the power and discursive resonance of “Black” with the rise of “political blackness” that emerged among British youth of African, Caribbean, and South Asian descent, who built a multiracial antiracist movement in London in the 1960s and 1970s. There, “Black” became a powerful container for dissent against racism, classism, and colonialism. 

Even when “Black” as a category began to live an institutional life, the taming and co-optation of “Black” never fully worked. To give one close example, when Departments of Black Studies emerged in universities throughout the United States in the 1960s, it was a direct response to uncontainable protests by pro-Black student groups, leading to the partial institutionalization of the word “Black” in that space. Simultaneously, more respectable words emerged as attempts to shake off the taint associated with slavery, and to signal ethnic and cultural belonging: “African-American”, “Afro-descendant.” Through all of this, “Black” never disappeared from its institutional or quotidian use as a kind of radical self-naming. Even the simple assertion “Black Lives Matter” sent the country into a tailspin, even if it also was vulnerable to the same kinds of attempts to incorporate and depoliticize. Despite it all, the positive uses of “Black” still retain a kind of discursive insurgency despite many attempts to contain, coopt, and disappear it, in the US, and throughout the Americas.

“Stay Black,” you still hear Black folks in the US saying to each other affectionately, a phrase likely taken from the many irreverent colloquialisms that have circulated amongst us for generations, like “I don’t have to do nothin’ but stay Black and die.” 

Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black.

The irony in banning words, “Black,” or otherwise, as we know, is that it gives them more power, it often leads to their proliferation. With “Black,” though, there is an added irony to this attempt at erasure: Blackness, whether it is in the US or Latin America or the Caribbean, has long been defined as excess; it is the “too much” and the “too loud,” that which cannot be contained in constructions of decency, modernity, and civility. Yet we also know that blackness has actually framed so much of modern conceptions of “the human” to begin with, making it both foundational and necessary. Because of this, the idea of getting rid of it begs the question: If Trump were actually successful in truly banning the word “Black,” what would be left in its wake?

Ultimately, Trump’s project is not an attempt at banning the word “Black,” because “Black” is actually their foil, their wedge, the negation upon which they articulate their own rightfulness, merit, morality and even citizenship. What his administration actually wants to ban, and what the state in various administrations across various regime types and various geographies has always wanted to do, is to ban the politicized use of blackness. They fear “Black” as an affirmative, they are objecting to Black signifying as anything other than negation. What audacity!

It is also worth mentioning that the joining of “Black” and “Latinx” in this list is perhaps the most peculiar thing of all. Is it a clumsy kind of flattening of unacceptable “others” into one line or is it a banning of specific articulations of afrolatinidad? We know that while the categories “Black” and “Latinx” may function in the imaginary of a white supremacist right in similar ways (“criminal”, that which needs to be expelled, and scapegoated), the words have very distinct origins, and the banning of them, very different implications. Perhaps the one thing the administration did get right is that in pairing them, it bizarrely recognizes “Black” and “Latinx” to not be mutually exclusive, if we take the liberty of interpreting the “and” as “both.” This could be an interesting counter-reading given that there are millions of Black folks in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean, and also Afro-Latinxs in the United States, subject to antiblackness every day. I’d like to willfully misread this pairing and use it as an unintended reminder of the possibilities of “Black” as a hemispheric and even global articulation. 

Ban it if you may, but blackness is inescapable.