“When I grabbed him the only way I
can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan . . . That’s
how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm.”
--Officer Darren Wilson, describing
to a grand jury his encounter with Michael Brown[i]
“Officer Pantaleo testified that when he put
his hands on Mr. Garner, he was employing a maneuver taught to him at the
Police Academy, hooking an arm underneath one of Mr. Garner’s arms while
wrapping the other around Mr. Garner’s torso . . . But then things changed. As
the struggle continued, one of Officer Pantaleo’s arms moved around Mr.
Garner’s neck. Officer Pantaleo told the grand jury that he became fearful as
he found himself sandwiched between a much larger man and a storefront window.”[ii]
--New York Times report of Officer Daniel
Pantaleo’s testimony to a grand jury, describing his encounter with Eric
Garner.
Two large black men, criminalized because of their bodies. Minor scuffles with authorities, in each case
over tobacco, cause the deaths of large black men—both laden with descriptions
of fearful police officers, both large, armed, white men. In one case, in Ferguson, the broader (white)
public questions the truth of the account.
If only we had video, we would know what happened. Then, in Staten Island, with Eric Garner, we
know, but that knowledge hardly seems comforting: a grand jury, supporting the
bias of institutional racism and extreme deference to police authority will see
a different truth than so many others who view the images and the videos. As scholars have pointed out for some time,
the camera does not equal an unmediated truth; such conclusions always emanate
from social circumstance, always in our modern world inflected by race. Large black men are illegal in this country,
illegal because they cause fear and anxiety, all laden, perhaps, with repressed
desire, a desire that becomes more explicit when we connect these two incidents
with a third recent event: a photographic collage of Kim Kardashian miming the
position of the South African woman displayed as the overly sexual freak over two
hundred years ago by scientists emphasizing her large posterior.[iii]
Over the past weeks, the United States has dealt a blow to
the post-racial vision that some had advocated in the wake of Barack Obama’s
election. This short-sighted ahistorical
vision ignored the long linkage between the history of race and the history of
embodiment in the United States, a history based on particular encounters with
European empires that led to the modern construction of race. It appears that it is now illegal—punishable
by death—to be a large black man. It
appears that it is now desirable—punishable by lustful looks that break the
internet—to mimic the supposed large buttocks of the black woman. This state of affairs can only be understood
through a historical analysis of fear and lust, of anxiety and desire.
When Wilson says that he felt like a five-year old child,
one can certainly question the perceptions of the armed 6’4”, 210 pound man. And one can further suggest problems with the
more ludicrous fear that Pantaleo portrayed in relation to Garner,
alternatively described as overweight and asthmatic. However, the ubiquitous narrative that
Pantaleo, Wilson, and much of the media reference relates to a historical
construction: racial fears of the physically and sexually aggressive black male
body. One can witness such anxiety in
the history of lynchings, in the more recent manifestations of young black men
killed, seemingly, for no reason (Trayvon Martin), or in the popularity of gangsta rap.[iv] In each case, racial anxiety stemmed from a
misreading and fear of the desires of those deemed other (Black men supposedly
lynched over disrespect for white women, Trayvon Martin supposedly killed over
the fear that he was in a neighborhood in which he did not belong for the
purpose of robbing people), combined with an attempt at asserting political
power of whites over blacks.[v]
The point here is not to question the legitimacy of these
anxieties, but rather to analyze them as particular historical phenomena that
make it illegal to be a large black man in this society. For here we can find Wilson’s words instructive
(even if they are lies): he felt like a five-year old. His emotions and reactions became childlike,
and his body filled with anxiety, thus allowing him to unleash a fury of
bullets into the hulking body of the large black man.
These killings fit into a pattern that we only begin to
understand as we connect anxiety with desire. Thus Jean-Paul Goude and Kim
Kardashian, along with the editors of Paper,
enter our consciousness. Goude,
re-creating some of his earlier photographs, as portrayed in his aptly named
book, Jungle Fever, has Kardashian
posed in such a manner that emphasizes one of her physical attributes, her
famous large ass.[vi] In doing so, he has her balance a cocktail
glass on her buttocks, carrying a bottle of champagne, looking as if the cork
has just been popped, complete with champagne bubbling up and over her body,
landing in the glass. The not so subtle
cum shot references lust and desire, related to an explicitly racialized
history. Goude’s “original” 1976 shot
featured a black model; Goude, asked about this, claimed that he had “jungle
fever.”[vii] Indeed, both cum shots refer to a South
African woman on scientific exhibit at the beginning of the nineteenth century in
London and Paris. Saartjie Baartman, or
the Hottentot Venus, was examined and put on display to show the freakish
nature of African sexuality and to create some scientific knowledge regarding
human sexual development. And, of
course, her prominent large posterior featured in all images and accounts of
her until her death in 1815. After that,
Georges Cuvier, a professor of anatomy, dissected her and put parts of her
remains (including her genitalia) on display in Paris’s Musée de l’Homme, where
they remained for over a century.[viii] Goude seeks to remind us of this history,
not so much to confront our racist orientations, but to peer into his own
erotic entertainment, his jungle fever.
This is ethnopornography, gazing at the other in order to engage one’s
own prurient interests. Here the
photographer asserts the power of the cum shot over the South African subject,
even replacing her with Kim Kardashian, a sign of our own troubled (and
ethnically ambivalent) decadence.[ix]
Is it a coincidence that these three events have all become
spectacles at the same time? All present
us with narratives of the freakish size of the sexed African (American) body. The narratives of embodiment display anxieties
and desires, signified through various representations that we must overcome in
order to institute a system of justice.
For those now clamoring to
suggest that Pantaleo’s chokehold of Garner was exceptional, and the grand jury’s
decision not to indict unthinkable, you need to develop a greater understanding
of the sexed history of racial anxiety.
[v]
See Timothy Tyson, Blood Done Sign My
Name (New York, 2004), for a poignant example.
[vi] http://www.papermag.com/2014/11/kim_kardashian.php. See also Jean-Paul Goude, Jungle Fever (New York, 1981).
[viii]
See Clifton Crais and Pamely Scully, Sara
Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton,
2009).
[ix]
Kardashian, of Armenian descent, maintains that she never thought about racism
until she had an African American child with Kanye West. See http://msmagazine.com/blog/2014/11/14/kim-kardashian-the-butt-of-an-old-racial-joke/. Accessed 12/5/2014.
