Whereas Humans exist on some place of being and thus can become existentially present through some struggle for, of, or through recognition, Blacks cannot reach this plane. [Hortense] Spillers, [Frantz] Fanon, and [Saadiya] Hartman maintain that the violence that continually repositions the Black as a void of historical movment is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog becauause it does not simply oppres the Black through tactile and empiracle violence of oppresion, like the “little family quarrels” which for Fanon the Jewish Holocaust exemplifies. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, “wiped out [his or her] metaphysics … his [or her] customs and sources on which they were based.” Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmann) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.
- Frank B Wilderson, Red White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (via so-treu)
(via heavenrants)
