Meditations on Blackness and Disability
By Derefe Kimarley Chevannes
As I have been writing on race, specifically focusing on the construction of black subjectivity, I realized that I have taken what seems to be forays into uncharted territory, at least, uncharted for me. As I explore the anthropological depths of Africana Studies, I have found myself squarely within Disability Studies as well. And that realization, while difficult, has been exceedingly rewarding.
By difficult, I mean to say, my philosophical training per se, had not primarily engaged with Disability Studies proper and thus, I was left with a conceptual deficit. Political theory, a subfield of political science, tends to turn on three major thematic foci: race, gender, and class. Yet, it became apparent to me that the questions I had about what it means to be “black” necessarily demanded a turn to critical disability. There could be no blackness without disability.
[Fred Beam, Not Black...not Deaf... But BlackDeaf, 2020]
For example, I have written previously about black speech and voicelessness. [1] By which I mean, I am concerned with questions about the political implications that attend what it means to be silenced as a matter of colonial oppression. In other words, what are we to make of black mutedness, or imposed black silence, as a result of anti-black racism and colonial power? This question led me to Deaf Studies as I attempted to make sense of what it means to possess a human “voice,” and correspondingly, what it might mean to be rendered politically and existentially voiceless. Indeed, there is this rooted social grammar, in the American way of life, which portrays black folks as being “too loud” and therefore, lacking civility, become savage-like or in the parlance, ghetto. Induced silence has always been the demand of a racist society. Yet, how might blacks “speak truth to power” when there are systemic forces that attempt to muzzle their voices? How might the turn to black deafness provide answers in navigating “voicelessness” or even deconstructing “registers?”
What’s notable here is that such questions not only intersect blackness and deafness together in contesting white supremacy, but they also denude blackness of an a priori ableism by critically confronting the question of its own disability. That is, the disabled black subject, or more specifically, black deaf people, reveal through their lived experiences philosophical truths about how race and disability upend dominant, “common sense” notions of speech. Moreover, the conceptual and philosophical questions raised by centering such agents necessarily expand the cartography of black liberation. [2] In this regard, what might Deaf Studies, specifically, have to say to Africana Studies? How does Deaf Studies “speak” to philosophical questions about oppression, coloniality, and anti-black racism in their sui generis considerations?
Take another example, on the question of madness, or insanity. Historically, it is unsurprising that many black folks within the United States have been labeled “crazy” or “insane” in their contestation of the American white supremacist regime. That is to say, blacks have often been deemed, and even clinicalized, for being “mad” enough to run away from the plantation, or “insane” for doing sit-ins, or bus-ins, in order to protest and contest Jim Crowism within American life. [3] Or, even today, those who have been called “out-of-their-minds” for advocating for prison abolition in an era of black mass incarceration. Here, we realize that black freedom becomes pathologized as black madness. In this formulation, the solution to living a “good life” becomes simple: black folks, in order to be sane, must accept their oppression. In this inverted reality, freedom is madness.
[Fred Beam, Ostracizism, 2020]
Moreover, being “crazed” or “crazy” is often intimately related to the pathologization of black reason. Crazy, then, collapses into, or becomes “imbecility.” This move becomes rearticulated as a commentary on black rationality, or more surgically, functions as “proof” of black irrationality. As such, the cure for black craziness is white sanity, which is nothing but the normalization of anti-black racism. For example, Kristie Dotson's “How is this Paper Philosophy?” argues that white reason operates within the discipline through a culture of justification which reinforces anti-black norms and discounts the appearance of black reason. [4]
Indeed, to critically assess what it means to be “insane” in an irrational world would require examining how the white supremacist Euromodern world also raises crucial questions about the complexities—social and philosophical—surrounding sane insanity, as it were. This, therefore, opens the door to Disability Studies once again, more specifically, Mad Studies, in order to make “sense,” as it were, of black madness in the construction of an anti-black world.
Taken, together then, when we account for black Deafness and Madness, race and disability, we witness the imposition of “idiocy” as being fundamental to a subjectivized account, and construction, of blackness as rendering us not only as subhuman or improperly human, but even more existentially eviscerating, as inhuman—absent humanity altogether. Not only is such a move racist, but it is also ableist, meaning that blackness is always structured and contoured in tandem with racialist ableism and ableist racism. Yet, it is precisely within this dialectical moment that radical anti-ableist and anti-racist, perhaps, decolonial, conceptions of race and disability proffer new fundamental pathways for thinking through, and enacting, black and disability liberation projects, collectively construed.
This is all to say, Black Studies and Disability Studies seem to be an understudied intersectional philosophical domain, though rich and groundbreaking work has been ongoing. Further meditations in this scholarly direction are certainly a welcomed approach. No doubt, the centrality of transdisciplinary thoughts in crisscrossing, if not overcoming, disciplinary lines become a necessary decolonial move in not only deconstructing black subjectivity but also in the lengthy ongoing struggle for black freedom. Such creolized crossings bring a new, necessary “noise-making“ and “sense-making” to the study of race and disability. It is what the late John Lewis calls, “good trouble.”
Notes
[1] See Derefe Kimarley Chevannes. “The Philosophical Project of Political Speech.” APA Black Issues in Philosophy, August 21, 2018.
[2] See Harry G. Lang. Fighting in the Shadows: Untold Stories of Deaf People in the Civil War. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2017.
[3] See La Marr Jurelle Bruce. How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021 and Jonathan M. Metzl. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Boston: Beacon Press, 2011.
[4] For instance, Dotson argues: “In a culture of justification, historical, unwarranted exclusions come to inform the very justifying norms relied upon for legitimation. That is, the presumption of commonly held, univocally relevant justifying norms, when informed by unwarranted exclusions, creates means of validation incapable of tracking those exclusions. In fact, those exclusions can easily become seen as ‘reasonable’ via disciplinary practice itself“ (11).
References
Dotson, Kristie. “How is this Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3-1 (2012): 3-29.
Dr. Derefe Kimarley Chevannes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Memphis, who specializes in Africana Political Theory. Chevannes’ research interests center on issues of black liberation and black radical thought in the modern world. He writes at the intersection of Political Theory, Africana Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Disability Studies.