N*gga Theory. Jody David ArmourЧитать онлайн книгу.
black community “nigger-” and “nigga-rize” and, 2) I use “Nigga” (upper-case “N”) politically to stand in solidarity with wrongly vilified black criminals and rally resistance to a common foe, namely, “tough on crime” “eye-for-an-eye” “lock ’em up and throw away the key” retributionists responsible for the disproportional incarceration of black criminals, especially violent ones. I say call me a Nigga to contest what that condemnatory word and concept mean, and through that contestation to unite law-abiding and law-breaking blacks and more generally to undermine the moral distinction between criminals and non-criminals of all races. This book rests on the basic premise that struggles over the meaning of troublesome and transgressive words and symbols can drive radical social change.
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But I say call me a Nigga, first and foremost, to assert solidarity with and express love for a criminally condemned man whose conviction relegated him to the status of a nigga in the eyes of many and whose legacy lives in every word I speak or scribble about blame and punishment: I look at our criminal justice system through lenses ground and polished by his experience. I cannot think about legal writing without seeing a black man desperately click-clacking on a Royal manual typewriter on his cell floor, deep into the night, in search of his own salvation. That man, doing 22 to 55 in the Ohio State Penitentiary for possession and sale of marijuana: he was my dad. All that stood between him and a lifetime of iron bars and cell blocks and prison yards was word work—nothing but the Queen’s English he and that Royal keyboard could crank out. After teaching himself to talk and think like a lawyer from the warden’s own law books, he drafted his own writs and represented himself pro se through the state and federal court system, delivering his own oral arguments to appellate tribunals along the way, and ultimately vindicating himself in Armour v. Salisbury (492 F.2d 1032), a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals case I now teach to my first-year criminal law students. #PoeticJustice.
My love for and sympathetic identification with this particular black convict makes me, according to the logic of those who seek to niggerize black criminals, a Nigger Lover. That logic makes my mom, grandmom, eight brothers and sisters, and everyone else who sympathetically identified with him, Nigger Lovers. Indeed, given the millions of moms, dads, sons, daughters, relatives, and friends who sympathetically identify with black criminals, including violent and serious ones, Nigger Lovers in this poignant and supremely ironic sense number in the millions. Indeed, it will be useful to make Nigger Lover a term of art, properly applicable to anyone who empathizes or sympathetically identifies with a black criminal, including those who are violent. The substantive criminal law requires that jurors convict only morally blameworthy wrongdoers, under the ancient legal maxim actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea—in Blackstone’s translation, “an unwarrantable act without a vicious will is no crime at all.” Under this mens rea principle, as it has come to be known, it is unjust to punish someone who commits an “unwarrantable act”—the actus rea—unless he acted with a “vicious” or wicked will. This requirement invites jurors to fully or partially excuse wrongdoers with whom they sympathize, and so a black defendant’s freedom in a criminal trial often rides on the ability of his lawyer to transform often racially resentful jurors into Nigger Lovers. Ironically, as a child I often heard other whites refer to my mom as a “Nigger Lover” for her participation in what many around her viewed as morally condemnable conduct: the dreaded commingling of gene pools called miscegenation. Of course, the commingling of black and white gene pools has been going on in America since its inception. White male slave owners violently injected their genes into the black population through the rape of black female chattel for hundreds of years under slavery. Nevertheless, the sight rankled many in the late 1950s and early 1960s: my Irish American mom, with her head full of flaming red hair, and my 6’8” barrel-chested black dad, the two of them looking like Lucille Ball and LeBron James, kicking along main street in stride—one, two—arms locked, unmistakably matched. The obscene thought of this big black man skinny-dipping in their European gene pool provoked racially resentful cops and prosecutors to railroad him.
I also say call me a Nigga to forcefully assert my solidarity with and love for the black boys I grew up with in Akron, Ohio, once home to all four major American tire makers (Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, and General Tire) and known as “Rubber Capital of the World.” Until, that is, tire makers took their unionized, good paying, low-skilled jobs to cheaper labor markets down South and overseas, leaving behind neighborhoods mired in joblessness, alienation, and crime. If the Midwest is America’s heartland, this nation suffered a myocardial infarction and gross necrosis in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s due to interruption of the job supply to this area. The destructive consequences of rustbelt necrosis never reached our family while my dad was a free man, but when he essentially got “25 with an L” (a sentence of 25 years to life) a week after my eighth birthday, his eight kids and wife went from a comfortable Cliff Huxtable and the “Cosby kids” standard of living to crumbs and roaches and rats. Most of the poor black boys I suddenly began running those cynically de-industrialized streets with have been convicted of criminal wrongdoing—especially the ones with ambition, backbone, and grit. That makes them, by the Black Criminal Litmus Test of a nigga—by our shared history, and by our bonds of mutual love and respect—“my Niggas.” In calling them my Niggas, I am saying that even though they meet the litmus test of criminal condemnation and I do not, and even though they are morally responsible for criminal acts that I have never committed, there is no real moral difference between them and me. All that distinguishes us is luck.
In my years writing these reflections on the power of linguistic bonding performatives like call me a Nigga to promote unity and political action, I inadvertently grew a vociferous nonlinguistic political performative on the top of my head: a lengthy, kinky, loud-and-proud Afro. Unabashedly nappy and self-affirming, big Afros in my youth represented the gravity-defying antithesis of the wind-flapping-in-your-hair white standard of beauty by which many black people’s full lips, broad noses, kinky hair, and dark skin were deemed inherently ugly. Many world cultures shared this negative view of natural black features and many black Americans internalized Eurocentric beauty standards, frequently referring to straight hair as “good” and their own naturally nappy variety as “bad”—fit only for lye and presses and weaves and relaxers. Thus, those who donned big “naturals” took so-called “bad hair” and contested its negative social meaning, inverting and transvaluing nappiness into a sensuous nonlinguistic bonding performative, the exact equivalent of linguistic ones like “Black is Beautiful” and “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.” Both the Afros and the slogans promoted social and political solidarity among black people in the mid-to-late 1960s, creating alliances of loyal individuals capable of producing change through unified social action. This is why Black Power proponents of that era—including members of the Black Panther Party and iconic political activist Angela Davis—routinely “uttered” big Afros as part of their oppositional political discourse.
Black Power proponents who donned Afros and used follicle fashion to protest undemocratic subordination were far from the first “radical” Americans to use the symbolic power of fashion to fight illegitimate assertions of power. This honor and distinction goes to the early revolutionist Philadelphia militiamen, who in the mid-1770s resisted putting on conventional uniforms, preferring instead hunting shirts, which they said would “level all distinctions” within the militia. In so doing, they were both struggling over the meaning of symbolic communication and using the symbolic force of fashion to bond together.4 This American political tradition of using the bonding force of fashion to rally resistance in the face of illegitimate assertions of power resulted in suffragette bloomers in the mid-19th century5 and, more recently, produced another forceful nonlinguistic performative: the hoodie. This article of clothing was worn by black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on the occasion of his fatal shooting by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who claimed to reasonably believe that Martin posed an immediate threat of death, serious bodily injury, or “forcible felony.” After the killing, students, pundits, and politicians donned hoodies to stand in solidarity with victims of racial profiling and to bond with others who saw a miscarriage of justice in the failure of police to properly investigate the shooting or charge Zimmerman. Like “nigga” as a word and “bad hair” as a physical characteristic, a hoodie as an article of clothing carries a negative social meaning. Especially when pulled over the head of an unidentified black man, the