Ascribing a totalizing absence of progress is just as linear and reductive as the narrative they’re indicting---effaces the diversity and complexity of experiences.

Most discourses on Blackness in the United States and the Caribbean locate themselves in the history of the Middle Passage, linking our cultural practices and expressions, our politics and social sensibilities, to the historical experience of slavery in the Americas and the struggle to achieve full human suffrage in the West. These histories are both constructed and phenomenological: they are a chosen arrangement of historical events (spaces and times) perceived to be the defining moments of collective Blackness. At the same time, for the purposes of this theoretical analysis of Blackness, it is important to underscore that these are not so much histories as epistemologies: narratives of knowledge that are taught, learned, relayed, exchanged, and debated in discussions on the “facts” of Blackness. These historical-cum-epistemological events are usually linked by or narrated under the theme of overcoming obstacles through struggle (or “uplift”), with the defining aspect of contemporary Black collective histories focusing primarily on slavery (Middle Passage histories), European colonization (postcolonial histories), or the dominance of ancient African civilizations (Afrocentric histories). These themes create either a linear progress narrative or, when reversed (as in Afropessimism), a reverse linear narrative indicating that no Black progress has been made because of the continual oppression by white Western hegemonies that began with slavery, moved through colonialism, and now deploy an array of cultural, political, economic, and military power through social and governmental technologies to keep Blacks not only as subalterns—those who are subordinated by power—but also as the (white) Western Other. The question of defining Blackness has become more urgent as the collectives that perceive themselves through these multiple histories find themselves encountering each other more frequently. As recent anthologies such as The Other African Americans show, many Western nations are now (and in many cases have been since the postwar era) receiving Black African immigrants whose histories, while certainly tied to Atlantic slavery, more often narrate themselves through colonialism or postwar socioeconomic changes than through the Middle Passage. These two collectives of historical and ancestral Blackness, while most certainly intertwined (and at times also often facing the same kinds of racist violence) nonetheless understand themselves differently. Denoted simply as “Black” almost anywhere outside of Africa, their encounters must negotiate their differences even as Blackness enjoins them to work together toward the common goal of racial uplift. In short, they have experienced differences that these linear progress narratives of Blackness strongly encourage them not to discuss, perhaps not even to see, much less acknowledge. However, in many of these moments, experienced or expressed, the phenomenological aspects of Blackness subvert even the most eloquent construct of collective unity. In other words, perceived differences will be expressed, but because most dominant constructs of Blackness cannot understand differences within, difference is often expressed as a dichotomy between “Black” and “not Black.” In “Colorblind,” her 2007 opinion piece from Salon.com, conservative Black columnist Debra Dickerson produces a cartoonishly distorted imagining of those differences that nonetheless reflect some of the greatest reservations some Black collectives harbor about others. Obama isn’t Black. “Black,” in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with mark- edly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and politics. At a minimum, it can’t be assumed that a Nigerian cab driver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won’t bother to make the distinction. They’re both “Black” as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally Black, as we use the term.8 Like most arguments seeking to separate some Blacks from Blackness, Dickerson’s plays fast and loose with history and in doing so also reveals (unwittingly) temporal and spatial gaps that belie the notion of the linear progress narrative. While most scholars of contemporary African immigration would take issue with her qualifier of “voluntary”9 (when one’s family is faced with death by starvation, violence, etc., is emigration truly born of free will?), it is her focus on the differing “outlooks” of the Harlemite and Obama/Nigerian cabdriver that bear the greatest scrutiny. Under this logic, histories not only uniformly shape collectives in the “now”; they are also unbroken, passed perfectly from one generation to the next.10