We Have Yet to be Community: How Racial Capitalism Keeps Black Community from Being Fully Realized
In the chants and cries and tweets that say #BlackLivesMatter, I hear a silent “some”.
#SomeBlackLivesMatter.
Because if all Black Lives Mattered…
Breonna Taylor’s death would have elicited nationwide protests.
Because if all Black Lives Mattered…
Tony McDade’s name would be known and his correct pronouns said (at least).
Because if all Black Lives Mattered…
Nina Pop’s death would be decried by all, and not just primarily by fellow queer/trans folks.
When those that have been rendered invisible are made visible, the silent “some” of our chants is deafening.
We hear leaders chant: “SHOW ME WHAT COMMUITY LOOKS LIKE!”
But I wonder: Is this what community sounds like? Is this what community looks like?
In my wonder, I realize that we are sitting with pieces, fragments: community that has yet to be fully grasped but is yet being pieced together.
Many of us speak of the Black Community as something that has been fully realized, but how can it be realized if so many of us are not fully recognized or, at worst, completely erased? To think we have arrived, is to neglect the work that is still undone and the journey to be had. Black community should be reconceptualized as a struggle, a divine unfinished project rather than a present reality. We must demonstrate that it is still under construction, that it requires deliberate action to become what it is meant to and needs to be.
Before explaining this further, I should first define community. A community is a kinship network of mutuality, interdependence, and interconnection, of seeing and being seen, of centering the most marginalized. I would argue that this is how community was divinely conceived to be.
In Genesis, we see that it is “not good for [hu]man to be alone” (Gen 2:18). Human-ing was never designed to be done in isolation and detachment, it was meant to be done in connection and communion with all of creation. Jesus was fully God and fully human, and thus he embodied the most divine, tangible way to be human. We see in Jesus the consistent value of being with others, that was the foundation of his ministry: eating, drinking, sitting, walking, being. We also see that Jesus was very mindful of his social location and that of those he encountered, so he was intentional about who he called in and empowered and who he called in and humbled. All were called in. Jesus was reconnecting folks that had become disconnected from the divine design of humanity due to the human-made hierarchy of dignity.
Despite Jesus’ modeling for us and the power of the Holy Spirit in us, we find ourselves struggling to realize this divine picture of community. Why? We are not in a vacuum. The reality is that we are creating community in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchal* empire. The methodologies of community-building, and even simply relating to one another, are often derived from the very empire we are seeking find refuge from. Thus, we find ourselves reifying the disconnection, marginalization, exploitation, normativity, and dispossession that we fight outside of us, inside of us.
One dimension of the complex of oppression is racial capitalism. Racism existed before capitalism. Racism was the scaffolding of stratification that capitalism required and was built upon. Thus, all capitalism is racial capitalism**. The insatiable demand for capital and the reduction of Black folks into those that produce capital and are capital in of themselves is a more commonly understood structure of racial capitalism. What is less known is that racial capitalism is also a system of “anti-relationality”***. Racial capitalism’s function was established afterit disassembled connections, that were divinely woven. Then, a new network of utility, commodification, dehumanization, and exploitation was formed. Racism predated capitalism, but capitalism allowed racism to have material utility.
With this context we see where we learned the problematic ways of being community. Thus, the imperative of reconceptualizing Black community as a divine unfinished project begins with unlearning these problematic ways. We exist in a hierarchy that places the most normative of people at the top and the most marginalized at the bottom. We commodify, and muleify, our most oppressed members for their labor of “liberation” without considering their full humanity as part of our collective liberatory imagination. Valid concerns from these very groups are met with the similar refrains of “divisiveness” or “distracting from the cause.” Sound familiar?
We need new tools, new methodologies, new ways of being and becoming community. The tools we are currently wielding are the very tools that have harmed us across the globe and across the centuries. The life of Jesus and the embodied hope of the Gospel offers us the alternative. It gives us tools of alternity that help us build a new home: radically different from that of the master and like the one that is divinely promised.
I say all this while acknowledging that there are those who are already doing this divine work of building community with new tools and new methods — they are often the most marginalized of our community. We are indebted to them. And, we must wholly commit ourselves to wholly follow Jesus’s model of radical inclusion, connection, and communing. We must co-labor to re-form the divine tapestry of mutuality that was torn apart by the brokenness of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy**. It is then that the implied somein our chants of “#BlackLivesMatter” may not only no longer be heard, but totally replaced by an action-backed all.
#ALLBlackLivesMatter
*A phrase coined by bell hooks.
**A phrase coined by Cedric Robinson.
***From the article Racial Capitalism by Jodi Melamed (Journal: Critical Ethnic Studies)
