Traditional models of debate force a Racial Contract of denial and rejection that can only be brought down through performance of restructuring the truth of Western Rationality. Theorization of rhetorical movements co-opts the politics of the captive Black body exposing structural racism against Black Debate. Only a sonic reckoning to disrupt assimilated logistics of “Problematized” can changes the binaries of white epistemology.

In her book Scenes of Subjection, a text that mothers and births the field of Afropessimism, Black feminist literary scholar and historian Saidiya Hartman coins redress as “a re-membering of the social body that occurs precisely in the recognition and articulation of devastation, captivity, and enslavement.” This generation of Atlanta’s rappers embrace the darkness and dwell in the Black hole; many are planted and grown from the ashes of Sherman’s March to Sea, a historical moment that marks a time of transitional failure as the enslaved subject attempts to shapeshift “American citizen” and “Human.” The hoods and projects that rappers like SahBabii and Yung Nudy originate from represent the instability and corruption of ethics relating to American pragmatism and ethics. Many of these homes were promised to Black Americans after fighting in World War II and saving up enough money to escape their racially violent conditions in the South; however, no amount of performance of citizenship could shift an already fixed anti-Black necropolitical system. Eternally, Black matter, living-unliving corpse, rests in a state of fungible ungendered flesh: “the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory.” Under partus sequitur ventrem, the intimate familial grounds of sexual violence breed the grounds for particular psychoanalytical realities to arise as the father of an enslaved mother’s child was rendered null and void in the court of law. This causes the assimilation into the category of “citizenship” and “Human” to be further complicated as it is defined under the logics of white gender binary. Without recognition of a paternal father figure, how does one easily transition into the “Human” category? The failure to explicitly recognize the intimate and familial nature of sexual violence on the plantation must be read as parallel to the Black American’s exclusion of aspired American citizenship.

Trap music, specifically the genre of Atlanta Trap music, ought to be considered Afropessimissm tradition as it embraces the failure of the “Black Man” to be fully assembled and neatly fitted into the category of the “Human,” in other words, the White Man; rappers curate their image through villain-like imagery, such as Vampires (PlayBoi Carti refers to himself as King Vamp) to represent a psychoanalytic craving for self-esteem and acceptance in the face of oversexualization, criminalization, and failures to assimilate into hegemonic masculinity. Patrick Moynihan's rhetoric is retained through state propaganda that claims the socioeconomic failures of the Black community root from the inability to possess a strong family unit with a male head of the household. In reality, the question is not in relation to the “effectiveness” of Black families but rather its failures to assimilate into a white patriarchal family that owns land and retains its generational wealth through the sexual conquest of the Black womb. Political campaigns and programs, such as the welfare system and criminal justice system, are created to reap profit from “Black pathology” by hyper-surveilling and controlling Black inner life in attempts to “correct” an already “pathologized” community of people who lack a stable family unit. Due to the legacies of partus sequitur ventrem, a white enslaver’s paternal involvement is invisibilized; in contemporary Black urban culture, the narrative often blames Black fathers for leaving their children without contextualizing abusive racial-sexual violence committed against Black families. Subconsciously, Black men in a way attempt to reconcile with the deadbeat enslaver who they were unable to inherit any land or generational wealth as they were assigned to enter as human commodities and not “sons” (heirs to property). The question to be proposed is how does an enslaved Black person, both property and commodity, inherit other properties? The contemporary Atlanta “rockstar” rapper lifestyle of money/sex/drugs and overall apathy and detachment from one’s self can be read as a fusion of an imagined dream-space of Afrosurrealistic expressions in a white, Chaucerian social matrix. In this realm, Black men cosplay as their deadbeat white enslaver fathers who owned land and women as sexual property. The requirement of the stabilizing Black feminine subject in an over-sexualization postured, can perhaps relate to the racial-sexual geographic structures of the auction block. Black men’s gendered performance could be read as a process into the psychoanalytic reckoning of the category non-human’s failure to assimilate white gendered performance. In a failed attempt to disassociate from the traumas associated with the legacies of slavery, the white social matrix is replicated in Black dwellings; it is here where the club represents a memory that “enacts the contradictions and antagonisms of enslavement, the ruptures of history, and the disassociated and dispersed networks of affliction.”

The distinction between the non-Human and dehumanization refers to the requirement of white proximity and non-Blackness to have protection in this hegemonic state. These Afrosurrealist, yet white Chaucerian social matrices, are governed by memories as being held of human property and eternal social death; it is no coincidence that the subject of oppression may aspire to perform racial class structures to be granted economic power. Perhaps, including Trap music in the Afrosurrealist tradition has the ability to challenge white essentialist binary epistemology in Black music rather than reinforcing Black male trauma (depression, loneliness, police brutality, incarceration, sexual violence, etc.) as naturalized properties to signify as Black Man. The lack of advantages that white patriarchy has to offer to the intimate lives of Black men is a testament to not only the lack of integrity of gender in the social lives of Black people but an affirmation of bell hooks’ teachings and meditations on the effects of white patriarchal culture on men: “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.” 55 Music and art exists as the only outlet for Black men to meaningfully express and articulate emotions, while confined in some regard, as the entry into subjectivity relies on misogynistic, stabilizing Black feminine figures; its ability to convey Black men’s subconscious interiority is a representation of Black literacy and collective thought that ought to be valued rather than problematized under the rules of white epistemology’s criteria of good/bad. Art is a medium that is most distant from the white time matrix and has the ability to rupture white epistemologies that otherwise would go unchallenged in white hegemonic societies. Without the performance of white gender, Black art and Black feminist world-building gives all Black folks the space to exist in a way that affirms their bodies and souls as sacred. We return to the Black feminist literacies, intellectual genealogies, and world- building as the origin to map and dream our freedom.