TO CALL BELOVED WHO ARE NOT BELOVED

On Racismization and Sethe's Law

My Art for No Racism Painting by Gerardo La Porta

When it comes to writing characters of color poorly, here’s something that never seems to go out of style: characters of color who are defined by racism — characters who appear in a text only to be victimized by racism or when racism (against them or other people of color) needs to be spectacularized — characters whose suffering and abjection is, in essence, their character. 

To call these types of representations popular is to say poco. These shits are everywhere — all over our movies, our tv shows, our books, our ephemera, and you better believe they are all over our drafts. I know of what I speak — all through my early years these white gaze characters is all I seemed to write.

No surprise, really. What the dominant culture loves, the dominant culture gets. And there is nothing, and I mean nothing, the dominant culture loves more than gorging itself on an endless torrent of our suffering.

RACE-MATIZED

You heard me talk about race reduced characters in my previous post.  Reducing a character to their race-ethnicity is a lot of no-fun things: bad writing, symbolic violence, a straight-up lie.  This type of writing is also, unsurprisingly, far too common among writers of all colors.  Even when I taught workshops exclusively for writers of color the race reduced characters cropped up with stubborn frequency, became part of our mission to usher them gently off-stage. (There’s an argument to be made that the history of writers of color is in no small part a history of our struggle to write ourselves free from hegemony’s two-dimensional mendacities, into the fullness of our multiversal humanity.)

Now, race reduced characters are one thing — but characters who have been reduced to racism, characters who have been racismatized, are another level of wildness altogether.

Racismatized characters partake in all the bullshit of race reduced characters but dial it up a notch (or three).  Race is a conceptual field that contains a lot of contradictory materials — not all of it obviously dangerous or pejorative.  Some of its reductive fantasies will seem quite attractive to the uninitiated.  Group X is hot or smart, for example. 

Racism flattens all that confused material down to a weaponized edge.  Race, after all, can engage fantasies about desire, athleticism, intelligence — but racism, as Ruthie Gilmore argues, “entails, fundamentally, the question of who is placed in closest proximity to violence and death.” 

Racismization transforms your regular shmegular characters into avatars of white supremacy’s compulsive need to place us “in closest proximity to violence and death.” Racismatized characters always gesture to violence against, and destruction of, people of color. 

The fact that this shit is common distressed me when I was writing them in bulk, and distresses me now, when I don’t.

Does their ubiquity surprise me?

Not really.

Hegemony wouldn’t be hegemony if it didn’t get us, its victims, to do its work for it.   

WHAT I’M NOT SAYING

I’m not saying that a writer can’t bear witness to racism’s crimes, can’t write a character who has suffered enormously from racism or write a book centered on racism.  

In a world so imperiled by what bell hooks calls ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,’ how can we not, in passing or with main force, confront that hideous monstrosity that works endlessly to be our doom? 

(Babylon, after all, is only going to fall when we chant it down.)

Having a character who’s suffered racism is one thing. The problem is when your character is solely or overwhelmingly defined by racism, when your character is denied their Baldwinian complexity, which people of color have to fight fiercely to preserve for ourselves — then you’ve aligned your art with the very forces that slobber for our destruction.  

RACISMIZATION

Racismization, for lack of a better term, produces all manner of morbid symptoms in writers and readers.  For the sake of ease and clarity let’s spell out a few — clearly not all apply to every case, etc.

MORBID SYMPTOM A     as I mentioned, racismization is an act of symbolic violence that robs characters of color of their full Baldwinian humanity, flattening them into white supremacy-approved wafers, and also ever-so-subtly invites violence towards people of color.     

MORBID SYMPTOM B     racismization unfairly burdens characters of color with the “problem of race”. In hegemonic narratives white protagonist characters are allowed to enjoy an infinite variety of stories, but they are rarely forced to becomes avatars of racism (which is the supreme irony as racism is of one whiteness’ most reliable effluvia).  No such luck for protagonists of color in hegemonic narratives. 

MORBID SYMPTOM C     racist spectacles are almost always organized around white supremacist desires (the rarely repressed desire to enact harm on colored bodies and psyches) which often comes with a side shot of disavowal that allows the viewer / reader to enjoy violent acts against imagined colored bodies while simultaneously deploring these horrifying acts. 

MORBID SYMPTOM D     the obsessive focus on despicable individual acts of racism often helps to focus attention away from the hegemonic systems of oppression.

MORBID SYMPTOM E     by linking people of color to racism, racismization keeps people of color closely associated to crime.  If orthodox white supremacy imagines people of color as always crimogenic, racismization is the liberal side of that logic.  In this case we might be victims of crimes but still somehow always in crime.  No matter the politics, these framings keep us forever bound in yellow police tape. 

MORBID SYMPTOM F an increased appetite for more of the same.

SETHE’S LAW

Good writers will avoid these trip-traps simply by writing characters that are Baldwinian complex and by hewing to what I call Sethe’s Law.  In Toni Morrison’s monumental Beloved, the protagonist Sethe is so traumatized by the inhumanities of enslavement and so heartbroken by what those inhumanities caused her to do (crawling already) that her character could easily have been a masterclass on the dangers of racismization.

Morrison, however, is our greatest writer for a reason; even as she sought to map-scar the mortal horrors of American chattel slavery onto Sethe’s back, she imbued Sethe with what I can only describe as a complete soul — a characterization profoundly authentic in its furious loneliness and its frozen vulnerability, a characterization that both acknowledged the infinity of harm Sethe suffered and denied it the final word.  

This is Sethe’s Law.

Sethe’s Law insists that the deeper the racial harm your character has suffered, the more profound their colored humanity must be.

Sethe’s Law insists that your character’s colored humanity (and not white supremacy) must always have the last word. 

THE TEST

How do you know your characters are honoring Sethe’s Law?

Easily:

Imagine removing all the racist / oppressive suffering from the character and their story.

Now ask yourself: does what remains of the character have enough depth and humanity to qualify as a three-dimensional real-seeming person — and carry the story?

If yes, you’re good.

If no, roll up your sleeves and put them to right.

(And you will have placed your hand on the great axle of our future.)

I WILL CALL THEM MY PEOPLE¹

Roger Guenveur Smith famously asked Why does everyone love Black music but nobody loves Black people?  

In a similar vein one might ask Why does everyone love people of color suffering, but nobody loves people of color? 

We all know the answer, for it has its coils about us and is threatening to blood-funnel the world to death.

It is the task of the decolonial artist to insist on the disquieting complexity of our colored humanity — a humanity that will always exceed the endlessness of our historical anguish —

— and to call beloved who are not beloved.

1. I am of course quoting Romans 9:25: ''I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved” which also is the epigraph of Morrison’s Beloved.