Racial blackness

The assertion of a pernicious black racism relies for its rhetorical purchase upon an impossible merging of racial blackness with the power of the racial state." All arguments about the supposedly overbearing presence and persuasion of blacks in the United States—from the popular culture industries to the mass media to the court of public opinion—hinge... 

Multiracialism suffers from this conundrum wanting to condemn identification with racial blackness as the source of social crisis, seeking to locate a politicized blackness as the barrier to a postracial future, while affirming mixed-ness in ways that reinforce and expand notions of racial purity and the concomitant hierarchies of value that underwrite white supremacy and antiblackness. This is why the reclamation of whiteness, or more precisely, nonblackness, is elevated to the status of a virtue, a sign not only of mental and emotional well-being (openness to diversity, within and without) but also of moral rectitude (tolerance for difference and commitment to reconciliation) (Daniel 2002). It is more than contradictory that this... 

Within the parameters of racist culture, to move away from the low areas of the body and the carnality of desire is also to move away from racialized blackness. See Frantz Fanon s prescient commentary throughout Black Skin, White Masks (New York Grove Press, 1967). See also the extended quote from Hernton that follows. 

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