My Visit to CAAM: California African American Museum

From Mammy to the War on Drugs and Everything In Between

“...the structure of chicken wire, formally and metaphorically signifying the tension between the body and experience” (Artist Duane Paul).

Tension. If there were one word to describe the history of the black experience, it would be the word “tension.” Tension between the Africans who willingly sacrificed their own kind and those who were sold into a life of servitude and bondage; tension between slaves and white slave owners in the Antebellum South as they clung to any amount of humanity they could conjure up; tension between being human but never fully being recognized as such; tension between the fight for rightful acknowledgement as an equal and the abuse of power to enable systemic practices that reinforce socially constructed hierarchy; and thus, tension between the body and the experience.

In the piece featured above entitled “Heavy Metal” by Duane Paul, he interprets chicken wire as representing the threshold of what is sacred and thus worthy of protection through themes of “identity, alienation, and shared and individual struggles.” The overall message of tension being relayed in this art directly reflects the tension that Mattie Nelson felt in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman. In addition to being arrested, confined, and falsely criminalized, Mattie’s incarcerated life brought about even more torment. Mattie had been beaten, called out of her name, and choked. When Mattie wrote to her mother, she could not write the whole truth because all of her letters were censored by the guards. Hartman writes, “she would not have been able to say, Mama, they are hurting me” (Hartman, 73). She goes on to detail that even though Mattie routinely wrote to her mother and passed notes to friends, her letters went missing. Hartman iterates, “what stories were shared in all the letters lost and disappeared” (Hartman, 75). Mattie’s circumstance displays the ultimate portrayal of tension between systemic power and a black woman’s truth; between irrefutable facts and historical manipulation, and between the desire to speak truth to power and the risk of extreme punishment. Just like the interpretation of the chicken wire, Hartman aims at protecting what is sacred: Mattie’s truth. Hartman takes the fragments of the lives of black women to collectively revere their shared and individual struggles to fill in the gaps and both restore and protect not only their stories, but their voices and identity. This process which she coined, “critical fabulation” that was used to rebuild Mattie’s history encompasses all of the themes uprooted in the chicken wire structure showcased in the museum.

In addition to Duane Paul’s portrayal of tension, another historical gem that takes up space in the delineation of the history of the black experience is the most infamous caricature of black womanhood: mammy. Being both a symbol of historical falsehood and of the stripping of individuality from the black woman, the ideologies behind the mammy caricature run parallel to the exact historical erasure that Saidiya Hartman fights against. This caricature was adopted and revered on a fallacious historical memory in which black women joyously assumed a cloak of servitude and degradation. As featured above, songs like “Mammy’s Shufflin Dance” were popularized and used for the amusement of whites, presenting mammy as not only just a vessel of servility, but a tool for exploitation through entertainment. Within this entertainment, the mammy figure was almost always portrayed as verbose, overweight, and simple-minded, a representation that only works to flatten and belittle the image and individuality of black women during this period. In Saidiya Hartman’s essay entitled, Venus in Two Acts, she catechizes the blatant negligence in documenting black female’s stories and lives during the Middle Passage and beyond. She discusses how only the sexuality and promiscuity of the black females seem to be denoted, as in every place that they are featured, they are called Venus. She goes on to question, “What else is there to know? Here is the same fate as every other Black Venus: no one remembered her name or recorded the things she said” (Hartman 2). Thus, it is evident that there is a pattern of black women’s voices and legacies being stifled and suppressed by myopic archetypes. Like the name “Venus,” the mammy image was used as a way to compartmentalize the individual significance of black women, ascribing them to one singular representation and depriving them of their strength, femininity, and agency, just like the “Black Venuses.” The book featured above is emblematic of the exhibition’s investigation of the systemic legacy of the mammy caricature, uprooting the vestigial elements of slavery and the erasure of historical truth. In this way, this caricature illuminates the kind of violence that Hartman references in her essay when she states, “the archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence. This violence determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power” (Hartman 10). The act of reformulating a history that depicts black womanhood as being founded upon a joyous attitude toward servility and subjugation is in fact a violent act against the truth, making the image of the mammy both a subject and an object of power that rests on the shoulders of a deceptive account of history.

Although the history of the Black American experience is a heavily loaded topic, there are some historical events that left an indelible mark on the black community as a whole. A prime example of this is Nixon’s “War on Drugs.” The still featured above was taken in June 1971 during a press conference in which Nixon first announced the initiative. During the conference, he detailed a government lead campaign designed to play a role in preventing the use, trade, and commercial benefit of illegal drugs. One of Nixon’s main strategies for achieving this goal was to increase incarceration rates for those who engaged in the aforementioned illegal drug activities. While this may sound like an innocuous initiative on the surface, the heightened prejudice and discriminatory regulation made it one of the most systematically oppressive presidential initiatives in United States history. Essentially, Nixon’s “War on Drugs” transformed into “a war on black communities.” African Americans felt the brunt of the regulation tactics as they were “twice as likely to be arrested, compared to whites, for drug crimes.” The laws put in place by both Nixon and Reagan blatantly targeted black men in particular, creating a giant disparity between incarceration rates for drugs commonly used by whites versus for drugs commonly used by blacks. This political stunt exemplifies the statement made by New York Times correspondent, Nicole Hannah Jones, in which she discussed in the assigned 1A podcast entitled, The 1619 Project, that we are often taught that slavery is marginal and that it is a mistake that doesn’t have larger ramifications in contemporary society. She stated that therefore, we do not often think of slavery as being a foundational. Her New York Times initiative, The 1619 Project, however, serves to argue against this marginalized mindset of slavery. She advocates that slavery has vestigial aspects rooted in the seams of America, which is proven by this 1970’s example of yet another institutionalized attack on blacks. The discriminatory tactics of the “War on Drugs” were rooted in the same systematically oppressive mentalities that were responsible for importing blacks on that very first ship in 1619. There is an evident history of the correlation between criminalization and slavery. Particularly in the instance when the institution of slavery itself was abolished, the 13th amendment served to legalize enslavement under the umberbrella of criminality, making it is safe to say that the prison system became just another extension of legalized slavery. Thus, we see that slavery rears its ugly head, still, in the zeitgeist of centuries following its abolishment.

In addition to The 1619 Project’s commentary, Angela Davis discusses the residual effects of slavery in her essay entitled, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison.” This essay evaluates Frederick Douglas’ legal analysis of slavery, the convict lease system, and his speeches and essays that serve to uproot contradictions in in the legalistic definitions set in place. Davis writes, “throughout his life, Douglas periodically referred to the criminalization of the black population as a by-product of slavery” (Davis 74). This quote confirms the direct link between residual effects of slavery and the strictly enforced criminalization of the black community perpetuated during the Nixon and Reagan presidencies. Davis goes on to state, “blackness is ideologically linked to criminality in ways that are more complicated and pernicious than Douglas ever could have imagined” (Davis 75). There is no dispute that the “War on Drugs” ordered by Nixon in June of 1971, is not an isolated attack on the black community, rather it is simply a continuation of a normalized and historical practice of the politically enforced legalization of enslavement of the African American community. Again we see the presence of tension, as blacks perpetually fight against forms of systematic enslavement even 400 years after the first slave stepped foot on American soil.

References

Angela Y. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and

the Convict Lease System,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, MA:

Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 74-95.

Paul, Duane. Heavy Metal . Los Angeles

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (pp. xiii-10; 44-79)

The Ole Mammy's Torment. The Ole Mammy's Torment, Fellows.

“The 1619 Project.” Washington.

War On Drugs, June 1971