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Blackness

Blackness is a practical distinctiveness that exists for the purpose of differentiating black form white. The black man has no identity, and what initially defined him before the white is no longer there. He cannot connect to his past or who he was before the white man put the idea of his identity in his head. His discourse is that blackness is considered negativity; black people are coerced to have on the uniform of blacks. Their identity is unchanging, so that it is a fact of blackness. His tale is similar to that of Jamaica Kincaid. Jamaica, the author of the book At the Bottom of the River, says, “I was always being told I should be something, and then my whole upbringing was something I was not: it was English.” In her angry tone, Jamaica talks about the Island of Antigua, where, to paraphrase, lowly Europeans lived and enslaved black people to feel better about themselves.

Frantz Fanon narrated a good account of blackness when he discussed his experience as a black man in a society domineered by white people (Fanon). Instantaneous, the native has been assigned two structures of position within which he has had to place himself. His norms, customs, and beliefs have been wiped out as well as the sources in which they were founded because they did not conform to an unfamiliar civilization that forced itself on him. The Negro in the 20th Century cannot pinpoint at what time his subservience comes into being through the other. Like Fanon, Jamaica discussed the imposition of the English Education system and the negative consequences of colonization she had to experience firsthand as imperialism tried to turn Antigua into England. Jamaica laments the imposition of the ways of the colonial man without concern for the cultures and norms that were already existing among the natives of Antigua

The theme presented At the Bottom of the River is one of anger towards the white man. Jamaica is also furious that his people have not been able to achieve full independence, and to augment the problem, they have not taken advantage of the positives of colonization. By doing so, the Antiguan, a man and woman of African descent, has let their image be curated to be that of someone inferior and let lose the only tool that he and she could use to reclaim their identity. Jamaica portrays this disappointment to support the significance of formal education and hope for the future by discussing the letdown that is Antigua’s only library, which remains in ruins after the earthquake of 1974 (Kincaid 9). This does not help in contesting the image of inferiority that is branded in the mind of the white man, the world, and the back man himself. Thus the storyteller in the story of the Negro, whose story is the background music in every other account of the oppressed in the world, has succeeded in sending the treatise of “fear” and the idea of “inferiority” to all that care to listen.

Blackness creates an image that exemplifies the mental process of the Negro man and woman, highlighting their unsuccessful efforts at asserting themselves a human in addition to rationalizing their color in relation to a system that is unfounded and based on racism and race prejudice. How does the brain digest the fact that a structure (racism) that is applying such force (resentment against the black man and the people of color) on the individual is really based on a falsehood (white supremacy)? Kincaid draws attention to the fact that natives continue to follow the norms of the white man even after he left. With this kind of behavior and attitude, it would be virtually impossible for the black man and woman to regain the identity they so passionately yearn. Kincaid continues to say that by adopting the ways of the imperialist (which include looking down on the natives), natives have embraced their inferiority and turned their degradation and humiliation in their day to day lives into their own tourist amusement.

Similarly to how the black man and woman struggle with identity in a world influenced by the opinion of the white man, Kincaid struggles with female identity as instilled in her by her mother in a world that is controlled by men. In order to overcome the identity fabricated by the white man, the black man should try to be self-aware by challenging himself not to identify in response to whiteness. Kincaid, on her part, plots a journey to self-discovery that takes an exploratory journey through the idea of love, hostility, affection, and death.

Works Cited

Fanon, F. (2000). The fact of blackness. Theories of race and racism: a reader, 257-266.

Kincaid, Jamaica. At the Bottom of the River. Macmillan, 2000.