"blackness" and "deadness"

Sharon Holland writes in her article “Death and the Nation’s Subject” about what it means to be black in the United States and how that relates to what it means to be dead and black in the United States. According to Holland, black bodies in the United States have experienced “social death”. This separation from one’s ancestry removes that person from a major part of themselves. We build our character and who we are based largely on our cultural background, and when we are separated from that history, we become socially “dead” because we have lost our lifeline to the past.

The historical position of black bodies as slaves in the past in the United States was a time of negativity that their offspring choose not to remember as their own history. Black bodies in denial of their past have nothing tangible to remind them of their ancestors. The “silence” of these ancestors creates genealogical isolate which has a negative impact on the formation of one’s self. This figuring of black bodies being socially dead – or already dead as Holland explains it – is still prevalent today. The separation from history is carried on generation after generation, and the way others view black bodies carries on with it.

This leads to question of which lives matter? Which bodies get mourned and which lives count as lives? For bodies that are socially dead, real physical death is not so far off. Even today “blackness” in the U.S. means being already dead so the short step to actual death is not as deeply mourned. A complicated relationship with our past is evident in the documentary “A Good Man” about Bill T. Jones’ work “Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray”. The work was for President Lincoln, a man who was praised for his work of ending slavery, while at the same time being known as a racist man. Jones, a black body himself, struggled with dealing with this lack of knowledge about the true character of Lincoln while being taught as a child that Lincoln was a man to be loved for what he did for black bodies.

One controversial person who brought about lots of controversy about what it means to be a black body was Michael Jackson. His transformation of skin color from black to white and the corresponding plastic surgery he underwent could be examined forever for what it means to be black in the United States. While this was this controversy heightened his fame while alive, it seems to have been almost forgotten in his death. Black activists who spoke against his actions while alive praised him after death. A nation that only years before considered him strange and unable to be categorized, seemed to forget the negative and focus on the positive aspects of who he was. A simple YouTube search for “Michael Jackson tribute” will bring up thousands of videos of people recreating works of the famed musician. Reading through the comments on one such video I found phrases such as “his legacy lives on!” and “his moves made the world a better place”. I think not only is Michael Jackson’s “legacy” interesting because of his lack of ties to both the black and the white community, but it is interesting because of the negative public opinion of him before death, and the positive turn it took after his death. In this particular YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVJVRywgmYM we can see a crowd of mostly white twenty somethings paying tribute to a man whose race was controversial. This is probably due to the location of the video (Sweden), but still interesting to note the race of those who chose to pay tribute.

During the last few years of his life, Jackson’s life did not count as a life to most of our society. After death, rather than being forgotten like other black bodies, Jackson became even more famous. He is an interesting figure when thinking about blackness and social death. What happens when we deny the negative parts of the past of a deceased person and praise their life only in death?

Gere, David. "T-Shirts and Holograms: Corporeal Fetishes in AIDS Coreography". Theatre Journal. 54. The Johns Hopkins University Press: 2002. 45-62.

Holland, Sharon P. "Death and the Nation's Subjects." Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 13-40.

Video from www.youtube.com