"In the groundbreaking essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, Hortense Spillers argues that how gender has been configured for Black people through slavery and its afterlife is outside of “American grammar.” Calling it “the dehumanizing, ungendering, and defacing project of African persons,” Spillers points out how, historically, Black gender has not been used to indicate a shared womanhood or manhood with people within white society, but to highlight how Black people are out of step with womanhood and manhood. Black gender is always gender done wrong, done dysfunctionally, done in a way that is not “normal.”
Even if we didn’t have the language to describe this experience, all Black people have lived through it. This is why Black boys are hyper-criminalized just as Black girls and other Black non-male children are made invisible when talking about the issues of Black children. But instead of accepting the impossibility of Black gender as reality, and using it to create a different, freer, understandings of Black being, we are pressured to force our way into categories that weren’t just not made for us, but designed specifically for our exclusion."
FB: "This is also not a “race first” argument as propelled by hoteps in order to obscure how cisgender, heterosexual Black men commit intra-communal violence against the rest of us. “My gender is Black” is an argument that is rooted in the understanding that Blackness is not a race, and therefore could never be “race first.” In the afterlife of slavery (hat tap to Saidiya Hartman) Blackness is that which is denied access to humanity, and thus Blackness is denied access to human gender/sexuality identities. Because the Black people we read as queer or as women epitomize this lack of access to gender uniquely, fore-fronting Blackness is actually an attempt to bring these realities into the conversation about anti-Blackness in a necessary way."
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