N*gga Theory. Jody David Armour

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СКАЧАТЬ June 7, 2015, two days before the scheduled ruling, about a dozen of us, dressed in white, prayed together and sang spirituals as we filed down Irving Ave., gathering in front of the wrought iron and brick fencing that encircled the mayor’s mansion. I had been to the mansion before, gathered in its lush gardens, eating decadent hors d’oeuvres, blending in with women of means decked out in flowery dresses and floppy hats. I knew Eric Garcetti. We shared mutual friends. He’d given me his personal phone number just months before. I was being considered for commission appointments and had been contracted by the city as a researcher. I was on most “good Negro” lists, and the Black elite often saw me as next up in the line of Black political succession.

      It was still dawn when we knelt at the front gate and poured libation in Ezell’s name. As the sun rose higher in the sky, we took to social media, pledging to occupy, challenging the mayor to come out, and finally catching him trying to leave out the back door the next morning. We blocked his blacked-out SUV with our bodies. As I approached his open window, I could feel my fledgling good-Negro status slip away.

      I’ve been arrested six times as a part of movement work (after a few times as a juvenile … for less noble reasons). I have been threatened with trumped-up charges that could have gotten me some serious time. I’ve been threatened, surveilled, intimidated, and physically roughed-up by police. I’ve been doxed by white supremacists. My children have been targeted and placed on lists. My name no longer appears on lists for official gatherings. I’m no longer the “good Negro” at the dinner table. The husband of a public official pointed a loaded .45 at my chest and said, “I will shoot you.” I have plummeted from the “good Negro” pedestal upon which I was once positioned.

      The truth is, such status is always illusory. It is never assured. The pedestal is always wobbly. The truth is, we are all n****s … even when we pretend to be “good Negroes.” We must not reach for a status that is only bestowed by a white supremacist system that really despises us. We must resist. To claim not only our alignment with n****s, but our identity as N****s ourselves is the greatest act of defiance; it is our sacred duty as descendants of enslaved people, freedom fighters, street corner hustlers, and our own grandparents. Ultimately N**** theory—and praxis—is what will get us free.

      N*gga Theory

      Race, Language, Unequal Justice and the Law

      JODY ARMOUR

      PROLOGUE

      Nigga Theory: A Song of Solidarity

      Call me a Nigga.

      Call ME a Nigga: I utter these words as a political battle cry for the Black, damned, and forsaken—that is, for the staggeringly high percentage of poor black boys and men languishing in jail cells, for those selling drugs, gangbanging, or otherwise scrambling for survival and self-respect.

      I say it because we have a fundamental divide that needs bridging. This divide is cultural fact as well as a social fact. It is an economic divide crossed by moral judgment. It is the divide between the haves and the have-nots, but it is also, for many, seen as a divide between the morally upstanding and the morally corrupt. This book will dismantle that distinction.

      And it will dismantle it with Nigga Theory. So call me a Nigga With Theory. NWT.

      —

      Call me a Nigga is what language philosopher J.L. Austin would call a “performative”—a form of symbolic communication that performs a social action, a “speech act” that doesn’t simply say something—it does something1. Phrases like “I pledge allegiance” and “with this ring, I thee wed,” and “I promise” epitomize linguistic bonding performatives. Nonlinguistic ones include flags (like Old Glory), personifications (like Uncle Sam), and melodies (like instrumental versions of the Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful). In political communication bonding performatives like these unify and rally individuals; they create collective social actors and forge social identities. And re-appropriating ugly racial epithets like “nigga” and “niggas” can turn them into forceful bonding performatives. Reviled and revered rapper Tupac Shakur bonded with black criminals by expressly linking “brothas,” “Niggas,” and “criminal gangstas,” or “G’s” in the following hook, from his solidarity dirge, “Life Goes On”2:

      How many brothas fell victim to the street

      Rest in peace, young Nigga, there’s a heaven for a G

      Be a lie if told you that I never thought of death

      My Niggas, we the last ones left.

      Despite having no criminal record myself, I say call me a Nigga to perform my solidarity with and rally political support for black criminals and convicts: those in my family, those in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods down the hill from my own economically gated community, and those in cynically de-industrialized rustbelt cities like my hometown of Akron, Ohio, where crime goes hand-in-hand with concentrated disadvantage. I also say call me a Nigga to promote unity and assert solidarity among blacks across moral lines of good and bad, right and wrong, wicked and worthy. And because a grossly disproportionate number of the black criminals we judge to be bad, wrong, and wicked are poor, I utter this profane performative to promote a necessary political alliance: an alliance between the statistically less “crime prone” black bourgeoisie and the more “crime prone” black underclass.

      —

      The vilification of a “crime prone” underclass figures centrally in what I call “Good Negro Theory”: the values, beliefs, and assumptions that underlie efforts to morally and politically distinguish between law-abiding “good Negroes” and law-breaking “niggas.” In its place I offer “Nigga Theory.”

      Earlier generations of civil rights advocates found that they were most successful—their rhetoric most effective—when they distinguished and distanced themselves from the most stigmatized elements of the black (for present purposes, disproportionately poor, law-breaking black) community and drew the attention of the public and policymakers to certain black people, namely, those understood by mainstream whites as “good,” “sympathetic,” and “respectable” (for present purposes, disproportionately better off, law-abiding black people). This political strategy—commonly called the “politics of respectability”—was practiced by civil rights era activists and rested on the belief that racial oppression can only be ended if black people prove to whites that they are worthy of respect and sympathy. Even if the basic social order is unjust and racist, this theory goes, blacks must show they look at the world through conventional moral lenses and aspire to the same moral codes as the white middle class.

      Nigga Theory is a repudiation of Good Negro Theory and the politics of respectability on which it rests.

      But first a quick word to those who might object. As part of my political practice, I have made my performative declaration, call me a Nigga, in many venues, under many different conditions. I have said it, or performed it, in prisons and intervention programs for juvenile and adult offenders; in black churches and before formal gatherings of black judges and justices; and in the company of scholars at conferences, in performing arts halls, university auditoriums, downtown law firms, alumni magazines, and on social media. In other words, I’ve vetted this invitation to bond with black criminals with three key audiences: 1) the objects of our criminal condemnations themselves, namely, the truly disadvantaged blacks who are doing time or still doing street crime; 2) the weightiest authorities on morality and justice in the black community, namely, the black church and judiciary; and 3) those who must morally assess black wrongdoers on juries, in legislative chambers, and at the ballot box, namely, ordinary Americans of all races and walks of life.

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