Extravagant Abjection: Blackness And Body Language

Darieck Scott argues in Extravagant Abjection: Blackeness, Power, and Sexuuality in the African American Literary Imagination that Blackness is code and functions like any other language (95). Language bridges the gap between the thoughts and feelings of individuals and the rest of the world. While people usually think of languages as something that is spoken or read, language extends beyond the verbal and textual. One frequently overlooked example is body language. While each individual has a unique body language that may depend on their gender, age, race, ability, or any number of factors, certain standards remain for the interpretation of body language. For example, backing away from something typically represents discomfort or fear,

In particular, the traits associated with Blackness are assigned in opposition to whiteness, which is alleged to represent purity, intelligence, beauty, modernity, and other mythical ideals. On a surface level, the terminology of Blackness is assigned to people who fit a particular set of characteristics, including, but not limited to, dark skin, or any skin that does not resemble the pale, non-melanated skin of Europeans. According to Cooper, racialization is based on the “Western self, reflecting its fears and obsessions concerning the body, sexuality, and mortality” on Black people (95). Characteristics, including ugliness, hypersexuality, and criminality, are then assigned to the category of Blackness, which further distances Black people from white people, who consider themselves to be superior (Fanon 10). Furthermore, the process of racialization is inherently gendered. Because Black people are not humanized, they are not permitted access to gender in the same way as their white counterparts. During slavery, Black women simultaneously faced gendered violence including rape while being hypermasculinized to perform manual labor. On the other hand, Black men could not access masculine privileges of protecting their families or owning property. Because the racial formations of Blackness rely on these gendered assumptions, gender continues to influence the way Blackness is

As Cheryl Harris explains in “Whiteness as Property,” the law was formed with the rights of white people, and white men in particular, in mind. Not only does property law provide legal protection to the material and intellectual property of white people, it also upholds their exclusive access to whiteness itself as a form of property. Harris opens her article with a personal story about her grandmother, a Black woman who could pass as white in certain settings. This story illustrates the idea that Blackness is a language that can be read and a code that can be switched. Harris’s grandmother understood the language of Blackness well enough to switch codes at the office in order to pass as white, but it also reveals that passing as white does not always grant someone access to white privilege. This is because whiteness shares an essential feature of property, “the right to exclude” (1714). Black people, then, are legally excluded from accessing whiteness and the rights and privileges associated with