FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe: nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
we are deathlessness
awakening
from a deep deep sleep
— M. Lamar, Funeral Doom Spiritual
The assumption that goths are categorically depressed misanthropes has always bothered me. It’s a lazy judgment based on a very narrow definition of what happiness is supposed to look like. When this occurs I point people to Morticia and Gomez Addams, one of the most blissfully romantic couples in popular culture. It’s for these same reasons why we don’t consider the blues a morbid or bleak form of music. It’s a glorification of sentiment.
It may use horror, death, melancholy, and the macabre in its methodology, but the gothic (and goth) is above all else romanticism. Both the gothic and the romantic have the issue of being nebulous things to define, but they both “privilege the imagination” over reason, and resist bourgeois social norms for what is internal and emotional.1 The Gothic is an anathema to order and rationality, forgoing restraint for excess. It will always choose the fanciful over the pragmatic, the numinous over the tangible. It is a black-velvet-in-the-summer kind of culture and if you are Black, to willingly succumb to a life of whimsey is foolish at the least and dangerous at the worst. Colonialism comes with vigilance (both from the colonists and the colonizers), with the exhausting strain of disaster preparedness, and this frivolous pursuit is a belly exposing vulnerability.
The Privilege of Frivolity
A video circling around my social media feeds show a group of goth guys in front of a nondescript office building. Dressed in long black skirts, black zippered pants, and black t-shirts, they stand out against the drab grey/beige building, chosen perhaps for its strikingly paradoxical blandness. There’s no sound, but from the frenetic yet precise dance moves and the outfits, they resemble a post-apocalyptic cheerleading team, and I can guess that the genre of music they’re dancing to is industrial. They are an unabashedly misfit collective, taking their fun seriously.
Expertly Photoshopped into the foreground is a Black boy, around eight or nine years old, in a yellow t-shirt, creating a stark contrast to the white skin and black clothes behind him. He’s standing stock still, holding a beverage and staring straight ahead. Then with perfect comedic timing, his eyes shift toward the camera with a deadpan look that can best be described as WTF — what Margo Jefferson calls the “survival side eye.”
This phenomenon is known as “digital blackface.” There is a library online of snippets of videos capturing a smug smirk and eyeroll plucked from television shows, movies or personal videos to be copied and pasted when words fail or are too cruel for language. The fed-up Black woman smirking as she grabs her purse to go, the old Black woman fainting in church overcome with the spirit, the dramatic sassy entrance of a reality TV show contestant; they are all removed from context to become human emojis symbolizing disgust, excitement, or confidence. The affective currency of Black people is traded back and forth all day on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook.
I get it. I give the video a digital thumbs up and respond with an unenthusiastic LOL, but like most memes, the joke is usually at someone else’s expense, and by the third or fourth time someone sent it to me, it stopped being funny. The Black kid in the yellow shirt represents the straight man, the seasoned foil to this spooky suburban weirdness. The punch-line relies on a construct of Blackness, in which there is an expectation of gravitas and wisdom, and a burden of cool. Goth lies in that realm of “crazy shit white people do,” along with Burning Man and Renaissance Fairs and things that are ostentatiously frivolous — attributes contradictory to the Black veneer of skepticism and street savvy. This “coolness coat of arms” is a clever way of avoiding vulnerability by using a bulwark of dignity to protect oneself from the danger of racism. It also strips away authenticity, subjectivity, and play, leaving little room for velvet top-hats and black-lace parasols.
In the video, the dancers do not acknowledge the kid because he was never there. The kid never saw those goth dancers. He wasn’t passing judgment on anyone. Someone clipped him out and expertly edited him in, using him to judge by proxy, speaking for everyone who thought they were lame or ridiculous or geeky but were too afraid to say so. His presence is not just saying, “Look at these weirdos,” it’s saying, “Look at these white folks,” with a confounded shake of the head. What bothered me the most about the use of the judgmental Black kid in the video is that it falls into that tired old gag of “white folks do this / black folks to that” mentality, and puts the clothes, the music, the dancing into another category of things Black people don’t do.
In the original video, the boy is standing in line at a fast-food restaurant. Next to him is a little girl and his shifting glance reads more like the nervous confusion of a first crush. It’s a boring moment in comparison. In the original he is not representing anything but himself, just pudgy sweetness, but when re-purposed in the other context, he is superior coolness.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me is a letter to his son, warning him about the world he’s been born into, in which he is made suspect just by existing. He warns his son about the dangers of falling for the “American Dream,” a promise that was never intended for him, which as a Black man can be a distracting and disarming pipe dream, a dangling carrot. He says:
As a black man I could not afford the luxury of dreams, of lighter thoughts. A third of my attention span was devoted towards survival. I think I somehow knew that that third of my brain should have been concerned with more beautiful things.
He writes about the constant vigilance against saying the wrong thing in the wrong place, of walking down the wrong street at the wrong time, and the persistent mistrust of the world he lived in and the people who ran it.
The goth dancers are free to use that extra third of their brain for “beautiful” things, and can enjoy the luxury of self-determined otherness. The gothic encourages a slowness prone to daydreaming and longing for something other than the here and now. It is a culture whose mind is elsewhere, a dangerous attribute for a Black person in America, where meandering or lingering is considered a threat worthy of deadly force, and where simply existing in a space is enough to warrant a call to the police. Being Black in America comes with a baseline of anxiety, a consistent fight-or-flight response that is calmed from time to time, but ready at any moment — and it is exhausting.
In the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, the hashtag #CarefreeBlackKids2k16 began making the rounds as a balm to counteract the barrage of images online of dead Black bodies on sidewalks and weeping mothers. According to Monica Williams, clinical psychologist and director of the Center for Mental Health Disparities at the University of Louisville, “graphic videos (vicarious trauma) combined with lived experiences of racism, can create severe psychological problems reminiscent of post-traumatic stress syndrome.” Articles extolling the “carefree black man” appeared and little girls exuded Black Girl Magic. Photographer Andre L. Perry published a book called Happy Black People: Vol.1 (it’s refreshing to assume there will be a volume two). Tropes like The Stoic Blackman and The Thug, The Angry Black Woman or The All-Knowing Magical Negro are so pervasively insidious that public acts of authentic happiness and embarrassing silliness become a kind of dissent. In the effort to humanize the victims of police violence, the instinct is to show mothers clutching framed school photographs, to Say Their Names. But it can have the opposite effect in creating another symbol, another icon — the Grieving Black Mother. But in the same way that stoicism and mourning can be an act of protest, so can flagrant absurdity.
Coates called it “the luxury of dreams — of lighter thoughts.” To take one’s eyes off the prize for just a minute can be misconstrued as a reckless naivety, but the lighter (or darker) thoughts are the best kind. In the season finale of the HBO series Random Acts of Flyness, a Black woman whispers into the void, “You are entitled to flaw, folly, fuck ups, failure, foolishness, fuckery, phantasm, fixation […] without any harm coming to your person, spirit, or earning potential.” A reminder that frivolity is a right that must be taken and insisted upon, and I quite like this militant stance in defense of humanism, the right to fantasy and a future.
It’s why I understand the desire and the need for a Black Panther perception of the world, one in which history can be reimagined, and reclaimed, a history in which the transatlantic slave trade never happened. What would it look like if colonialism never happened? AfroFuturism takes a technocultural perspective of the African diaspora and reimagines a world not framed by white supremacy, and instead envisions a universe that orbits around Blackness. While futurism may seem the very opposite of the gothic, they are both romanticized views of the past — one glorifies and the other corrects. It is a decisively non-white historical reconstruction of a “lost future,” a nostalgia for what should have been.2 It may seem contradictory, but there is an optimism to the AfroGothic in its reclamation of history.
I saw M. Lamar before I heard his music and felt that little burst of warm familiarity when seeing a fellow brown-skinned punk rock/goth/metal person — the other one in the room. His eyes are heavily ringed with black and a bandanna holds back long, mussed, straight black hair. He is rail thin with tight black pants in the classic goth balance of feminine and masculine. He wears a gigantic inverted cross necklace and heavy silver rings on every finger. He hits all the right notes in the visual language of goth, so much so that it is at first a bit surprising to hear his music, but after one moment it’s not surprising at all.
Badass Nigga, digital video still, 2014, Directed by M. Lamar, Cinematography by Ned Stresen-Reuter
Musician/artist M. Lamar is a self-described “NEGROGOTHIC devil-worshiping free black man in the blues tradition,” who sings in an operatic counter-tenor, channeling Leontyne Price, coupled with wailing howls like Diamanda Galás, pulling from negro spirituals and field songs. Composer and collaborator Hunter Hunt-Hendrix describes M. Lamar as “a queer goth opera singer of field spirituals.” Lamar work lies “between the Eighties counter-cultural aesthetic and Faulknerian South there is a paradoxical ligament, a wormhole between worlds flashing as a psychotic horizon for them both.”
M. Lamar is not subtle, but dramatic, operatic, melancholic, and unapologetically Black and gothic. In the video for “Badass Nigga (Charlie Looker Remix),” he sits elegantly next to a pillory, drinking a glass of wine and reading a copy of Beloved. In “Legacies,” he ascends gallows in a long, hooded black robe. He’s holding a black leather bullwhip to his waist and there are three white shirtless young men kneeling at his feet. Superimposed over the images is an inverted cross, inside of which is an illustration of a lynching. A hooded white man then guillotines the bullwhip, leaving the castrated tail to drop in a basket below while M. Lamar sings in a soaring soprano: “He cut off my father’s private part and likes to play with mine.” In “Trying to Leave My Body,” he sings of human cargo “in the belly of the ship,” standing on a stool, leaning towards a noose, his hands reaching out and mouth open in a kind of catatonic rigor.
M. Lamar is a study in restrained excess; the uncanny occupation of multiple eras, multiple genres, multiple voices and multiple genders is both thrilling and disquieting. We aren’t sure what we are looking at or who we are listening to. You can’t separate M. Lamar’s physical presence from his voice. The voice alone would be a ghostly nostalgia, the operatic trill and the death metal howl, the sounds of layers of anguish through the ages, on top of each other as an aural palimpsest. It is spectral, but a specter we recognize. When I saw M. Lamar, the clothes, the eyeliner, a ring on each finger, I was yanked into the now (or the near-now), and there was a new context to those ghosts, one that was from my past as well as from my ancestors’.
Make America Goth Again
Gothic Lamb is a Black-owned goth clothing brand. The tagline on their Instagram says “Depressed, Stressed, & Black Obsessed,” a slogan that could apply to the African American experience or to a moody emo kid. Among the shirts with slogans like “Future Corpse” and beanies emblazoned with “666” is a black baseball hat with the phrase “Make America Goth Again” a re-imagining of Donald Trump’s infamous catch phrase, “Make America Great Again.” It begs the question, when was America great before? The insistence of the cis-het, white, suburban middle-class or rural working-class, as an idyllic representation of America, has always been an illusion. It is less about when America was great, but for whom it was great. The role of the gothic is to pull back the curtains on the idyllic and show the dark, the mystery, and the reality, and that includes the fallacy of the one-true American. There is no greater crime to goth than tedium and the homogenous drive for conspicuous mediocrity is just boring.
The first horror movie I ever saw was Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the theater in 1978 when I was six years old. I was with my older brother, who I assume would have preferred not to have to babysit me. Imprinted in my mind is Donald Sutherland’s gaping mouth and wide eyes pointing accusingly at the real humans with an alien screech. It was clear that the replicant pod people would be taking over, that there were only a few human survivors left, and that the only way to resist replication was to stay awake. Aside from the trauma of seeing a human head on a tiny dog, I wonder if deep in my mind something had been imprinted — to never be a pod person, to run away at all costs and remain human… and to stay awake.
I am anticipating that one-true goths will disagree with me; that cultural purists will say that goth(ic) is British and white, hands down; that music critics will complain that I haven’t mentioned Christian Death, Fields of the Nephilim, or Militia Vox; that gate-keepers will question my credibility. But just as there is no one-true American, there is no one-true goth. In all its variation of fashion and music, its essence is an ineffable sublimity, and the harder you try to solidify it, the more liquid it gets. But it can be distilled to one common point, the axiom by which all goths and the gothic is understood: Black.
My favorite genre of horror is the haunted house, and of this sub-genre Poltergeist is my number one. Unlike the castle in The Castle of Otranto, the Poltergeist house wasn’t a moldering manor on a hill taken over by vines. It is a new construction in a subdivision, one that expands and grows in an ominous “sprawl.” The evil that threatens the Freeling family goes to the heart of the American promise: home ownership.
Steven Freeling is the top salesman for the Cuesta Verde planned community in southern California, distributing the American dream through sunken living rooms and wall-to-wall carpeting. Unfortunately, his Phase One house has sucked his daughter into some alternate metaphysical dimension, originating in the children’s bedroom closet. He discovers that not only was the house built on top of a cemetery, but that they only moved the headstones and left the bodies. From a hill looking down upon the tidy rows of the idyllic Cuesta Verde planned community, behind them is a dismal view of old neglected tombstones, resembling something you’d see in the Old Country, not Orange County. His boss, Mr Teague, explains his plans to expand Cuesta Verde on to the cemetery land, that the graves and markers would be moved to another cemetery nearby. Freeling, is doubtful, but says with trepidation:
Freeling: I suppose that’d be okay.
Teague: For who?
Freeling: For whoever might complain.
Teague looks at him quizzically: No one’s complained until now.
America has always been goth — from field hollers to the Sunken Place, the role of the Black gothic has served as the shadow over the shining city on the hill. The Black gothic rips the mask off of the thief and the villain who would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids. Every time the veil is lifted, when the zombies get woke, when the skeletons come out of the closet, when the ghosts start complaining, is when America gets goth.
The first track on M. Lamar’s Funeral Doom Spiritual, “The Demon Rising,” is a prolonged guttural wavering growl and an occasional high-pitched cry under a thunderous piano trill and the consistent boom of a bass drum. It reminds me of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” a disorienting, primal, fearsome piece, suggesting something large being awoken from a long hibernation. Or as M. Lamar puts it, “a Negro zombie apocalypse”:
The dead can’t sing, but we know that the dead are singing to us all the time through spirituals and black music. If the dead can’t sing then maybe they’re just asleep. And if they’re sleeping there’s always the possibility of awakening.
Unlike the mindless gait of the risen dead, this zombie is charged, activated —the waking of a sleeping giant. This awakening, this state of “woke,” shows itself in resistance, resting in power instead of peace. The dead still have work to do. This is what the gothic does, it does the work of processing our darkest fears, molding our deepest trauma into something not just manageable, but pleasurable. While everyone is asleep the gothic is up in the middle of the night making beautiful music.
In the 2016 British horror film, The Girl with all the Gifts, directed by Colm McCarthy, Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is a Black girl of about ten years old with a neat TWA (Teenie Weenie Afro) and an eager-to-please smile.3 She sits in a concrete cell patiently waiting for armed military guards to strap her to a wheelchair. She greets them with polite “good mornings,” addressing them each by name with the enthusiasm of a teacher’s pet. In this post-apocalyptic world, the planet has been afflicted with a fungal infection that turns human beings into flesh-eating zombies. In a gruesome twist, for women who were pregnant at the time, the virus spread invitro and the zombified babies ate their way out of the womb, born with the incessant hunger for human flesh. Melanie is one of several such children, but is particularly charming and more human “presenting” than the rest. But her cleverness is dismissed as the virus mimicking human behavior. To them she is still monstrous, dangerous, and frightening. She eventually proves her specialness to the guards and scientists and warms them over, but when it becomes evident that the virus was winning and the zombies would rapidly outnumber them, one of her human allies bemoans that the world is over. She watches him die as the fungus takes over his body and says comfortingly: “It’s not over, it’s just not yours anymore.”