Border Citizenry and the Arbitrary Civil Protection of Black Males

Introduction

Blackness is a compelling performance against the logic of slavery and colonialism by those people whose destinies have been inextricably linked to the advancement of the West, and who therefore have to learn the expressive techniques of modernity—writing, music, Christianity, industrialization—in order to be uncolonizable. (Diawara, 1992, p. 290)

The modern Black Diasporan problematic of invisibility and namelessness can be understood as the condition of Blacks’ relative lack of power to represent themselves to themselves and others as complex human beings, and thereby to contest the bombardment of negative, degrading stereotypes put forward by white-supremacist ideologies. (West, 1999, p. 128)

Most of the time when we hear the terms border and citizen in the same phrase, immigration reform policies and legislation are being referenced. Although the merit of each immigration case is often complex, what is crystal clear is the legal definition of a citizen as one who is a native or who has earned the rights to be protected as a citizen under the law. In academic literature, “border citizens” (DeChaine, 2009; Meeks, 2007; Shneiderman, 2013) or “borderlands” (Cooks, 2010) refer to the interstices where marginal citizen identities are situated. The border is indicative of a betwixt and between positioning. It is not a comfortable place to be. In fact, those who do not stand in the gap have a bit more certainty about their acceptance or rejection as a citizen. The border is indeed a figurative demarcation of difference. Those who live on the border are there because there are structural barriers in place that prohibit their ability to be accepted as full citizens, either in the literal or figurative sense.

So, imagine what it must be like for an entire already naturalized community deserving of legal rights to citizenship to endure the abuses, invisibility, dismissal, and devaluation ordinarily reserved for outgroup members or for those who are not fully naturalized citizens. That describes the experience of African Americans in the United States, especially African American males who have for years been ascribed pejorative labels such as endangered species or as the source of urban blight. African Americans are U.S. citizens. African American males are U.S. citizens, yet they have historically and contemporarily endured relegation to border citizenry and have been subjected to arbitrary civil protection, a kind of treatment that has led us to acknowledge in this essay that Black masculinities and Black masculine bodies have too frequently been prohibited from being associated with normal American values. We will explain in this essay how this identity politics has spanned generations and has denied equal citizen rights (i.e., fair treatment) to Black males who presumed they already had those rights but learned that their dark skin, thick lips, hair texture, and other preverbal physiognomic characteristics precluded them from gaining access to the full privileges afforded to those whose racial and cultural particularity are more aligned with the American ideal, that is, Whites. In other words, their physical bodies alone have led to them being deemed as a threat. After exploring these two components of transhistorical identity politics and the prohibition of Black masculinities, we will take a look at the Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis cases as present-day parallels of what we call the prohibition of Black masculinities. Finally, we’ll conclude with a commentary about where we must go next to save our society from the continued social debilitation that comes with racism.

Transhistorical Identity Politics

When W. E. B. DuBois (1903) rhetorically asks in his book The Souls of Black Folks, “How does it feel to be a problem?” he is referring to Blacks. It is an ineludibly complicated query that presupposes the reader fundamentally understands the kind of racial dialectics that has strategically emplaced Whites as the societal norm, the benchmark, and the exemplar to which all U.S. citizens should strive to be like. It is a sinister set of racial dialectics that suffocates the possibility of structural equality. Furthermore, it attempts to cement the social positioning of Blacks as the least capable, least attractive, least competent, and in fact, the heel of our society eternally bereft of honor and dignity. It attaches itself to media discourses, which act as a bonding agent that reifies this concocted social myth. Consequently, we discover that those who have never had a chance to become closely acquainted with Blacks begin to take on the myth as their own, using it as evidence or behavioral confirmation of their presumptive beliefs around Blacks as inferior human beings. DuBois’ question was one that sought to uncover the discursive practices at work to undermine Black existence; after all, how can anyone’s entire existence be a problem? Surely, there are some redeeming values. DuBois wanted his reader to recognize the peculiarity of Black identity politics. On one hand, Blacks are ignored or treated as invisible, irrelevant, or insignificant. On the other hand, Blacks are treated as persons whose bodies are hypervisible. That is, Blacks’ bodies contain all the visual and discursive cues necessary to activate racial identity politics, which render Blacks as ineffectual citizens. Within this logic, Blacks’ bodies became racially encoded speech acts, utterances, or messages that marked a refereed boundary between Blacks and others. Of course, when this racial dialectic took hold, its most harmful and prominent property was its permanence.

There was no way to escape one’s own body. There was not much a Black person could do about being born with Black skin. Had the racial dialectic been solely about personality or competence, one could have easily countered those things by demonstrating otherwise. Being born Black was enough evidence to deem Blacks unworthy of equal citizenship and civil protection. There are countless examples of this throughout history. For example, during Reconstruction, black codes were created as a way to legally restrict former slaves from voting, assembling, marrying, serving on juries, and buying, owning, or selling property. In fact, Blacks had to carry traveling “papers” showing they were residents. Jim Crow laws replaced the black codes, and even after Black slaves were freed and permitted to have their own property, they were continually denigrated and harassed by police authorities. Although much of this took place before the 1900s, the Emmett Till slaying, as well as the Black power and civil rights movements are proof that there was still a need for Blacks to fight for their equal treatment well into the mid to late 1990s. There are many other instances in which injustice and unfair treatment occurred, but the Emmett Till case stands out because of how his mother fought so hard to have her 14-year-old deceased son’s open casket tell the national story of White racial brutality. This brutality continued throughout every decade of U.S. history, and the 2010s has been no different. Even as Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president sits in office for his second term, this decade has been riddled with prominent cases of racial turbulence largely targeting Black males. Teenagers Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis are two examples of this horrific physical assault on Black males.

Contemporary Prohibition of Black Masculinities

Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old kid visiting his father’s fiancée in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, decided to take a walk one evening to a local convenience store. On his way home with his soft drink and a bag of skittles, a self-professed neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman, who apparently had just reported him to the police for looking suspicious, approached him. The community had just experienced a rash of break-ins, and Zimmerman was not going to let this suspicious kid get away with what he thought was Martin casing the neighborhood. So, after Martin noticed someone was following him in a vehicle, he began running. Despite direct orders from the Sanford 911 police dispatcher for him to stand down until police arrived, Zimmerman chased him all the way to the rear door of his father’s fiancée’s townhome and shot Martin 70 yards from the door. Sketchy accounts of eyewitnesses indicate that they saw a man with a red shirt seemed to be fighting someone and was yelling for help, but it was too dark to see what was happening. All they heard was one younger voice and one older voice during the tussle. After hearing the gunshot, one man got up and the other, Trayvon Martin, was lying on the grass. A series of conflicting evidence stomped the jury and ultimately with no probable cause found, Zimmerman, a man described by neighbors as unstable, was acquitted.

In the wake of the February 2012 shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin, media commentators focused on the motivations of George Zimmerman. Initially seen as a self-defense incident, media coverage changed after numerous community organizations expressed outrage over how the case had been handled by the local police in Sanford, Florida. While officials contemplated whether to charge Zimmerman, who had already claimed self-defense and cited Florida’s “Stand Your Ground Law,” television news and commentary programs speculated on whether Trayvon might have invited his fate with choice of clothing: a gray-hooded sweatshirt. That sweatshirt apparently made him look dangerous, although the general public understood that when Justin Bieber or any other White kid wears a hoody, they look innocent.

At the end of the trial, George Zimmerman was acquitted by a jury, which had no African Americans. Some commentators continued to argue that Trayvon might have partially been culpable based on his style of clothing—and his reported confrontation with Zimmerman moments before his death. CNN host Don Lemon, an African American, echoed conservative Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly’s opinion that the blame fell partly on the Black community. Lemon hinted that the style of clothing Black men wore made them susceptible to the suspicion of White America.

Less than a year after the Zimmerman verdict, a jury in Florida also found Michael Dunn, a White man, not guilty in the murder of Jordan Davis, a Black teenager. Dunn cited “Stand Your Ground” and claimed he felt threatened by the loud music Davis and his friends played. The incident unfolded when Michael Dunn, a 47-year-old Caucasian Florida resident, exited a convenience store in November 2012 and fatally shot and killed a 17-year-old Black male Georgia native named Jordan Davis. Davis and his three friends were sitting in the Dodge Durango when Dunn began yelling at them and telling them to turn down their loud music or what he called that “rap crap.” As the confrontation escalated, Dunn recalls that he felt so disrespected that he went to his vehicle, pulled his 9-mm handgun from his glove compartment, and unloaded 10 shots into Davis’ abdomen, liver, and heart, then exited the scene without calling the police. He was arrested at his home the next day. During his testimony, Dunn remarked that he felt threatened and that he thought he saw Davis brandish a gun. No gun was found in the vehicle. This tragic incident is the second high-profile Florida case of this nature in 2012 involving a 17-year-old Black male who was slain by an individual who felt he had a right to take an innocent life. Although the judge declared a mistrial on the charge of first-degree murder against Dunn, the jury found him guilty on three counts of attempted murder of Davis’ three friends, which yielded a mandatory sentence of 60 years in prison. Davis’ parents still want justice for their son who was the only one killed. They plan to appeal. Meanwhile, the media brouhaha continues, including a statement from Dunn’s daughter who is shocked her father was convicted and thinks the sentence was unfair to her father (Goldstein, 2014).

The idea that Martin was partly responsible for his demise based purely on his manner of dress or Davis was responsible because he chose to play his music loud parallels the significance of symbolism in the Emmett Till murder more than a half-century earlier. In Emmett’s murder, the significance of the whistle as a border infraction constituted the ultimate penalty in the eyes of White Mississippians. To the racial gatekeepers who acted as his judge, jury, and executioner, Emmett, by even interacting with a White female, had committed a crime punishable by death and as such, invited his fate.

Although U.S. society has changed significantly since Emmett’s death, young men such as Trayvon and Jordan had seemingly committed the same penalty: being Black (young) men who violated the borders (legal, physical, symbolic) keeping them separated from their White counterparts. More importantly, the criminal justice system tasked with ensuring justice for these victims failed them posthumously, exonerating their killers and entrenching the justification for killing young Black men.

Violence comes in many forms. Sometimes, it is discursive; sometimes, it is physical, psychological, political, or any combination of these. Anticolonialist Frantz Fanon (1967) maintains in his heralded think piece Black Skin White Masks that Black men are forever at war with themselves because of the way in which media representations and racial dialectics produce social configurations, wherein Black males must contend with an imago or plastic inscription of themselves. The artificial set of discourses about Black males being dangerous, destructive, undereducated, incompetent, and irrevocably dispossessed from any sense of ethical, moral, and social responsibility become potent elixirs that stimulate a perpetual hallucination about Black males that is unshakable. It does not matter whether the Black male is a proven industry leader, an accomplished scholar, or leader of the free world. The “imago,” as Fanon calls it, is so powerful that it becomes a stand-in for truth contravening any attempt to reconcile the falsities being alleged about him. The scaffold of lies is too tall, and the borders that protect this resurrected untruth stretch too wide. His only hope as a Black male is to seek protection via the “expressive techniques of modernity” as Diawara suggests in the epigraph, and even that bridge sometimes collapses. In each instance of epistemic, physical, psychological, and/or political violence, there is trauma and terror. The trauma is like a blunt force blow to the community. The lesson that gets reiterated is that Black males are prohibited from full citizenship in the United States. Yes, we have all our papers and legally deserve to live in the United States. We are simply treated as societal outcasts that are reminded periodically that our cultural being is unaligned with the standard, normal, average White guy, which means we deserve only limited acceptance and value. It also means that Black males’ Otherness marks him as one who must be surveilled, disciplined, regulated, and treated as abnormal. As Diawara implies, his writing, music, religion, and work ethic are all questionable. This is what it means to stand in the gap. In this interstitial space, one does not quite belong. As we have demonstrated so far, the situation is severe for African American males in the United States because of the labels assigned to him.

The Black Bogeyman, Border Crossings, and the “Assault on Black Bodies”

Much of American views on race, particularly the Othering of Black men, have been profoundly shaped by media content. Black males have carried with them the stigma of being criminals and aliens within mainstream society (Collins, 2005). The Black Bogeyman, popularized in film and news depictions, has carried significant sway in American public discourse for well over a century, cementing Black men as villains and legitimizing White vigilantism as a proper means for taming the threat. In films such as Birth of a Nation, the Black Bogeyman is presented as rapacious, villainous, and irreconcilable with (White) civil society, which demanded death as the only fitting punishment (Guerrero, 1993). The image of Gus from Birth of a Nation not only manifested itself in various mediated forms but also became a reality in punitive and military-style aggressions by law enforcement against young Black men in the South during the Civil Rights era and in the urban North in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The racial inscriptions of the Black Bogeyman, particularly in media images and in language, continue to serve as important subtexts for justification of violence against Black men. Black men continue to be seen as sexual threats to White women and as disruptions to a White-imagined civil space. The logic of Dunn’s violent response to Jordan Davis and his friends seems to reflect the latter perceived threat.

Implications and Final Thoughts

Perhaps the scariest thing about the arbitrary civil protection of Black males is the presumed forfeiture of his rights to that protection by being himself. It is frightening that young Black males, unlike young White males, with few exceptions do not get to be their cultural selves, lest they concede the acknowledgment of their humanity. The very public structural and racial inequalities at work in the United States are overlooked as though they do not exist, or they are treated as though these are private dilemmas that have nothing to do with the public structures.

In addition, we have learned that marginalized group members, especially African Americans, historically have somehow not earned the same protection under the law as others. Although the law is the site at which ordinary citizens depend on jurisprudence, fairness, and integrity in the United States, the failure of the state apparatus to ensure such protection has facilitated the production of border communities and hence border citizens, persons who never quite get to belong or treated as equal, thus preserving and reinforcing the privilege and entitlement of usually White citizens who set the norm. By “border communities,” we do not mean those neighborhoods that are simply adjacent or contiguous. We mean that there are very real cultural, racial, social, political, and discursive separations that enable new artificial boundaries to be drawn that in effect disable the continuity, commonality, and sense of community that binds us together as human beings. Like all other borders, there are patrols, territories, migrations, police, and politics whose structural parameters constitute barriers to progress. These barriers are also marked by symbols, as the Emmett, Trayvon, and Jordan cases tragically demonstrated. Although we are hopeful about the possibility of dismantling these boundaries contemporarily and allowing the borders to effectively disappear, we have become cemented in our dichotomous thinking about race in America that we are afraid we will always be left with border communities that imprint our citizens with the stain of racial hegemony, entitlement, and patriarchy. The examples of these young men’s deaths are emblematic of a larger social terror and enigmatic set of White privileges that remain unchecked and continue to contravene any chance at liberation. To move beyond the status quo, we as a society must return to those values we evoke in our constitution and demand the respect and “liberty and justice for all” that we call for in our pledge allegiance recited in every elementary school in the United States.