![]() The fear lay in electing a Black body with a Black consciousness. His use of Get Out!,Jordan Peele’s film about white people snatching African Americans, is the perfect avenue for this discussion.įollowing in a long Black intellectual tradition, Gordon distinguishes between lowercase black consciousness – recognising that you are a victim of racism – and uppercase Black consciousness, in which you are committed to fighting oppression.įor anyone still questioning whether the US can be racist because of the election of Obama, Gordon explains that having a Black body is not the ultimate barrier to the presidency. The obsession with the Black athlete or tanning beds, lip-fillers and Brazilian butt-lifts makes sense once we understand that it is only the body that is wanted. Gordon explains that the same relationship to blackness exists today, when the Black body is fetishised but only if the mind is subdued. Once Obama demonstrated he posed no danger to whiteness his body became a fetish, an empty symbol of progress ![]() The enslaved were not permitted to read, write or to think, for fear that they would rise up and overthrow their so-called masters. ![]() But the idea that those bodies had minds and were fully human has sparked terror ever since we were shackled to ships. The reason there are so many of us in the west is because we were used as beasts of burden to build the modern world. Gordon reminds us that Black bodies have never been a problem. ![]()
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