In Hortense J. Spillers‘ 1987 article, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, she concludes by supplementing that African Americans’ break apart from the American encyclopedia and syntax as it is oppressive and limiting. Building upon this, I believe that vocabulary within Western English is insufficient to capture anti-blackness. Namely, Spillers deconstructs words like “beginning,” which carries ideological assumptions. The “beginning,” alluding to Western history, positions history to start at the Transatlantic slave trade and European conquest. History that reaches far beyond these timelines is consequently obscured, which encourages African-American, Indigenous, and Native people to view themselves through a lens of colonial encounter. Through evaluation of syntax and the American English language, we can evaluate how the dynamics of the Black family were excluded from the American Encyclopedia.
Returning to the subject of the origins of the word beginning, the same principle can also be applied to the word family. Whether through observation or personal experience within Black families, the dynamics are often noticeably different from those of their White counterparts. Contemporary conversations about “breaking generational curses” center on individual behaviors, yet they often overlook the familial structures that produce and sustain them. We speak so much about breaking generational curses like the “Strong Black Woman” because she is not merely an individual identity, but a social role produced through generations of familial expectations. I believe Black generational curses like the “Strong Black Woman” are rooted in Western definitions of family that were constructed through anti-black constraints. As Spillers argues, slavery transformed familial relations from sites of cultural continuity into mechanisms through which property relations were reproduced.
“We return frequently to Frederick Douglass’s careful elaborations of the arrangements of captivity, and we are astonished each reading by two dispersed, yet poignantly related, familial enactments that suggest a connection between “kinship” and “property…
In the system that Douglass articulates, genetic reproduction becomes, then, not an elaboration of the life-principle in its cultural overlap, but an extension of the boundaries of proliferating properties.
…Certainly, if “kinship” were possible, the property relations would be undermined, since the offspring would then “belong” to a mother and a father.” (pg. 456)
Throughout the history of the United States, we’ve witnessed the creation of many institutions without the consideration of people of color. Drawing from Spillers’ analysis, Western conceptions of family emerged through social and legal structures that privileged whiteness while marginalizing Black and other ethnic communities. Thus, the normative definitions of family are based on assumptions that exclude the histories of people whose kinship has been disrupted by structures of colonization.
In the case of Black Americans, the origins of contemporary family dynamics can be traced to the disruptions imposed by slavery. In the slave trade, Black women occupied a contradictory position: they were expected to reproduce labor for the slave system, yet they were denied the social and cultural status of motherhood. Racism and patriarchy worked symbiotically to sever the connection between womanhood and maternal autonomy, as enslaved women’s children could be bought and sold as property. All the while, Black men were being degraded to boys and physically removed from the household through U.S. policy. Through both genders, we witness the grounding structures of the household being destabilized if not removed in total. As a result, the Black family was forced to emerge under circumstances of imposed instability rather than institutional support.
Instability does not warrant the grounds for a foundation in any institution, including that of family. Spillers argues that Black people are constantly put into captivity by the colonial psyche. I additionally believe that Black and ethnic people are held in captivity by Western definitions. By partaking in the Western definition of family, with foundations rooted in American and Colonial history, African-American people endure generational trauma instead of the fruitions of generational wealth, which is another concept that is corroded at its historical foundations. In the Black family dynamic, the strong Black woman, the absent Black father, the motherly older sister, and the hustler son are some of the tropes that best fit into Westernized capitalism and Westernized civil society. These ideals are xenophobic (widely applied) and anti-black at their foundations.
In any way that African Americans can deconstruct anti-black structures, including the linguistic frameworks that shape social understanding, they should do so. It may be of use to consider reconstructing definitions to accurately reflect African-American dynamics while navigating the constraints of antiblackness. In the case of Hortense J. Spillers, the decolonization of the Black psyche began with calling out anti-blackness down to the noun because we use language as a tool of understanding, thus it must be precise and culturally sensitive.
Delivered by Fatoumata Traore
