“You say, ‘I haven’t left anything in Africa.’ …you left your mind in Africa!”
-Malcolm X

With legitimized trepidation in each step, their soiled and bloodied feet, shackled with rusting iron at the ankle, marched from maritime prisons into a new reality — indeed a prison of sorts. This alternate reality entailed not only the enslavement of their bodies, but the degradation of their culture, erasure of their language, and evisceration of their spiritual lives. In the midst of our retentions we find our Black-selves in continual moments spiritual reclamation. Was not our most precious loss that of our memory, or the knowing of how to remember? African somas, culture, and politics have, from the beginning, been the enclaves of white appropriation for both control and profit.

Management of Black existence has always fused in compelling ways with white perceptions of Black social and intellectual life. When Jim Crow minstrel performers stepped on stage, faces painted black with burnt cork, they projected an image of believable Black life mainly because white-supremacist-created stereotypes, which were by definition of their construction, infused with meanings made palatable and profitable for white audiences.

But what does blackface minstrelsy look like in the twenty-first century? In times past I have argued that it looked like commercial hip hop; I still maintain this. But the current presidential election cycle has witnessed the Republican party render to Herman Cain a national rostrum wherewith to carry out blackface-like buffoonery on national stage. Yet, concomitant with his shameful exit we also witness the xenophobic cultural rejection of the All-American Muslim television series. And it has become apparent that the average white Republican voter is still quite comfortable seeing People of Color subjugated and subservient to political agendas that sustain the interest of a white male ruling class elite (the 1%) — and whenever this can be facilitated by a venal figure with a black face all the better.

Revolutionary Black intellectuals like Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon have long traced the provenance and explained the prevalence of white colonial ideology presented in Black face.

“In order to assimilate and to experience the oppressor’s culture, the native has to leave certain of his intellectual possessions in pawn. These pledges include his adoption of the forms of thought of the colonialist bourgeoisie.”
-Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)

Not only is it necessary that your very political presence be denounced but even your image must be sequestered and re-managed, such that it be not merely arrested, but pressed into the service of a ruling class colonial order. With the issuing of Cain and attempted silencing of All-American Muslim the colonizers have declared that the scaffolds of power shall remain unchanged, while also maintaining a normative, though imaginary, representative aesthetic of America as essentially white and Christian. The deployment of Cain and bigoted denouncement of All-American Muslim signals an eradication of the political interest of those othered.

From intentional Black invisibility at “Slut Walks” and “Occupy” protest, to Black exploitation in the film The Help; from Herman Cain’s minstrel politics, to the ethnocentric disdain for Muslim-Americans, the colonial Right continues to vividly display to the nation and world what their sinister vision of the role those they seek to subjugate should be in this society. As we step forward into the new year we must remain sober and mindful of the necessity to regain the memories of who we were before we became something — or someone’s – else.

Marco McWilliams is an educator, writer and Pan Africanist. He writes from Providence and will pursue a Ph.D. in 2012.