Black 'Feminisms' and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan's Negro Family

Black 'Feminisms' and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan's Negro Family Tiffany Lethabo King Theory & Event, Volume 21, Number 1, January 2018, pp. 68-87 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/685970 Access provided by University of Minnesota -Twin Cities Libraries (14 Feb 2018 20:07 GMT) Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan’s Negro Family Tiffany Lethabo King Abstract This article reads Kay Lindsey’s (1970) “The Black Woman as Woman,” and Hortense Spillers’ (1987) “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” as abolitionist responses to The Moynihan Report’s pathologization of the Black family and it’s naturalization of the family as the ordering episteme of social life. Lindsey’s and Spillers’ critique of the family exposes the violence that creates its conditions of possibility and paints a horizon where the family is beyond redemption. Refusing redemption, I gesture toward modes of Black life akin to Hartman’s (1997) fugitives without genealogy and the character Precious from Sapphires’s (1996) novel Push who create new Black relations. The family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit. Daniel Patrick Moynihan1 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (from here on referred to as The Report), known in popular vernacular as The Moynihan Report (1965), celebrated its iftieth anniversary in 2015. In 1965, amidst a backdrop of Black urban rebellion, Moynihan’s anxiety about the crumbling fabric of the negro family headed by the Black matriarch inspired his characterization of the black family as a “tangle of pathology.”2 Alongside the sociologist’s attempts to police and surveil unruly Black urban life through producing the ‘Black family’ as an object of knowlegde and problem for national security, Moynihan also reafirmed the family as the singular epistemic mode of knowing and regulating the self and American (or US) civil society. Moyhihan afirmed for the United States that, “The family is the basic social unit of American life.”3 Since The Report’s publication, Black scholars and activists have felt compelled to respond to The Report and its legacy that has marked Black single mothers, Black genders, sexualities and family formations as self (and nationally) destructive. Since it’s introduction into mainstream public discourse in 1965 the Black Matriarch has embedded Theory & Event Vol. 21, No. 1, 68–87 © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press King | Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism 69 itself in the US imaginary in an almost archetypal fashion. In fact it has become the primary discourse used to both imagine and speak about the ‘Black family’ speciically as a problem and thus an object of disquiet. Black academic ‘feminists’ and Black women activists have critiqued both Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s and Black bourgeois attempts to castigate Black female headed households as perverse and deviant.4 Black feminists have labored to illumine the ways that the “controlling image” of the Black matriarch forecloses upon the possibility of imagining viable non-nuclear family formations, viliies Black single female sexual autonomy, reinforces an ethos of personal responsibility and disavows structural inequality making it almost impossible to imagine a politics of redistribution. To date, Black feminist and queer scholarship continues to propose Black matriarchal, non-heteropatriarchal and queer models of afirming Black family life in an attempt to counter the legacy of pathologization left by The Report. However, after ifty years of ever-evolving and increasingly nuanced Black feminist responses to The Report, rarely do critiques and alternative modes of the Black ilial interrogate the viability of the notion of the family itself. While, Black feminist responses to The Report and the discourse of Black matriarchy have argued for alternative forms of family, ranging from intergenerational, extended, non-sanguial, and queer; the family as a sociolgical unit and as a self evident and natural form of human organization persists. Even when Black and Black queer feminists call for alternatives to the the ‘normal family,’ these modiiciations and revisions to the family still retain attachments to the liberal humanistic concept of the ilial as the organizing frame for legible Black collective life.5 Black ‘feminist’ abolitionist responses that trouble the very concept of the family as a way of organizing Black life still remain unexamined and perhaps even “unthought.”6 In this essay, I argue that while most Black feminist and queer modes of critique exhibit a suspicion or ambivalence toward the family, the responses of Kay Lindsey (1970) and Hortense Spillers (1987) offer a distinctly abolitionist critique of the family. Unlike “suspicious” or reformist critiques, which tend to hold onto at least some aspects of the normative and liberal family model, the abolitionist frame organizing this essay opens up the possibility of naming and doing Black relations outside of the categories that currently name humanness. This essay focuses on Black abolitionist critiques that denaturalize the family as a normative and humanizing institution to which people should aspire to belong. More importantly, it opens up conversations about alternative modes of naming the self in relation to others outside of the Western humanist tradition. Because of the ongoing disruption of Black sociality and the understanding that Black relations are under assualt, the ‘Black family’ has taken on an almost sacred signiicance within Black social life due to 70 Theory & Event its heralded role as a protective mechanism to Black vulnerability and violation.7 The Black praxis of family as an everyday lived experience has the potential to ground people, provide material and emotional support and afirm the spirit of many Black people who feel vulnerable in the world. For many, including myself, family helps make life liveable amidst everyday enactments of antiblack violence. To be clear, this essay does not indulge in an nihilistic destruction of the family for the sake of Afro-pessimistic intellectual experimentation.8 Rather, it is precisely because of this need for and commitment to Black sociality as a dynamic and inventive practice that this essay presses toward otherwise modes of thinking and being with one another. This essay conscientiously attends to the ways that the western notion of the family functions as a site of violence and dehumanization that threatens to engulf Black sociality. While Black feminist, queer scholarship and creative work have called for a reimagining of the Black family on radically different terms (non patriarchal, egalitarian and queer) they often do not critique the family in ways that draw attention to the violent ways that the family emerges as a category of violent forms of humanism. I consider the possible abolition of the family (and Black family) because I fear that the institution crowds out the dynamic and emerging ways that Black people reimagine and invent new modes of relation. Black ‘Feminism(s)’: Reform and Abolition Response to The Report by the Black community have ranged from respectable Black bourgeois outrage, Black nationalist (re)commmits to Black patriarchal models, Black feminist valorizations of matriarhcal models, and more recent embraces of Black queer models of family life. Notably, Black lesbian and queer feminists have argued for models of family life and motherhood that consist of Black lesbian egalitarianism,9 Black queer motherhood,10 polyamory and non conventional modes of extending kin and care networks that exceed and disrupt ethos of ownership, consumption, accumulation and class mobility. In her book, Close Kin and Distant Relatives (2014), Susana Morris reworks Paul Ricoeur’s notion of a “hermenuetics of suspicion” as a way of explaining the ways that Black diasporic women have interrogated and negotiated the seductions and obligations of family life.11 Morris argues that within Black diasporic women’s literary traditions one can track an ambivalence toward “respectability politics” that work to counter “the hegemony of the nuclear family and middle class materialism as normative cultural symbols.”12 Due to this Black feminist “hermeutics of suspicion” Black women conceive of and create family and kinship structures outside of the normative protocols and dictates of the heteronormative family. King | Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism 71 While these revisions to and refashionings of the family that appear as Black lesbian, feminist, queer and even poly resignify the family as non-white, non-patriarchal, non-heteronormative and working against the capitalist ethos of property accumulation; it is still possible to fold their feminist, queer, and anti-accumulationist enactments of family into modes of sociality that cohere within liberal humanist epistemes and economies of intelligibility. For example, in 2013 Black gay and lesbian couples were featured in an issue of Black Enterprise magazine.13 In an effort to broaden the base of support for including Black LGBTQIA, largely middle and upper middle class aspiring individuals, under the protection of marriage, Black Enterprise interviewed four queer couples. Similar stories have appeared in popular Black publications like Ebony and Essence in which productive, highly accomplished, conventionally attractive and abled-bodied Black LGBTQIA couples are called on to perform a subject that is deserving of rights and recognition. Often claiming injury due to their inability to securely inhabit the various categories of rights bearing subject and consumer offered through the courts and the market (married as a tax iling status, legal guardian as a parent, inheritor of property and consumer of healthcare coverage); the Black “queer” family must perform everyday life along the coordinates of civility, tax payer, legal guardian and responsible consumer-investor in order to survive. Survival under this order of civil society must cohere through structures and orders of family life that sustain themselves through Black death. Abolition Even the transgressive capacity of Black matriarchal and queer formations folded into the appellation family, fail to arrest the historic and ongoing violence of the western family. Further, Black people’s entrance into the category of the familial functions as a ruse of incorporation that conceals the historical and enduring surveillance and violence to which Black sociality is subjected. In Kay Lindsey’s (1970) essay, “The Black Woman as Woman,” and Hortense Spillers’ (1987) “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” one inds an ambivalence not just about ‘respectability politics’ and the normative nuclear famliy, but the family as an institution itself.14 Both essays respond to The Moynihan Report’s pathologization of the Black family and matriarch, yet do so in a way that interrogates the very violence required to ensure family life. Neither Lindsey nor Spillers offer reformed versions—matriarchal or queer—of the family as viable options for Black sociality. Due to Lindsey’s refusal to redeem—she is in fact intent on destroying—the institution of the family for Black social life and Spillers’ indifference to the category as a viable or meaningful way of signifying Black life within the symbolic economy of slavery, I argue that Lindsey and 72 Theory & Event Spillers enable a horizon where even the family is beyond redemption within an antiblack world. While Lindsey calls for a destruction of the institution of the family and Spillers questions this viability of the violent formation for Black life; I contend that both Lindsey and Spillers utter (and make conceivable) the possibility of the abolition of the family and its attendant violence in the wake of slavery’s and The Moynihan Report’s modes of surveillance.15 More importantly, Lindsey’s and Spiller’s abolitionist position aligns and conspires with the various anti-geneological fugitive formations that Saidiya Hartman’s (2007) motherless and stateless tribes take up during slavery and its afterlife. Lindsey’s charge to destroy the institution of the family and Spillers’ profound sense of doubt in the promise of the family contribute to a generative form a pessimism that forces one to seek out the elswhere of something better. First, I examine the ways that Lindsey tethers the violence of conquest, slavery and the ongoing surveillance of Black life to the institution and episteme of the family. Secondly, I interpret Spillers as assuming a position of agnosticism about the potential of scholarly efforts to recuperate the ‘slave family.’ I also read Spillers as gesturing toward a new or otherwise economy of naming free of the entanglements of the ilial and the violence of the human in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” Further, my own rereadings of the trope of the Black matriarch through these Lindsean and Spillerian lenses compel me to consider the Black matriarch anew. My irst reading of the Black matriarch takes her up as an unassimilable igure of destruction of the family and the nation during the urban rebellions of the 1960s. My second reading of the matriarch conigures her as a subject bound to failure and beyond redemption in the novel Push. As I plumb the Black matriarch’s negative or pessimistic aspects in ways that foreclose her reclamation, I ind a way forward or a mode of Black social life through iguring Precious, the Black girl protagonist of Push, as one of Saidiya Hartman’s motherless slaves and fugitives without genealogy—or biological family— who have to recreate Black sociality on new terms. Revisiting Black Family Studies In 1978 sociologist Walter Allen charted the formation of family studies and in particular Black family studies through a genealogy that marked its origins in Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859).16 In Darwin’s seminal Enlightenment tome, Black families (speciically Australian Aborigine and African families) were placed on the bottom of the evolutionary continuum as a primitive form of family. The scientiic category of the family was applied to Black and “Aborigine” populations in order to mark out a space of subhumanity or an outside to the normal, European family. The Moynihan Report (1965) sets up King | Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism 73 a similar comparative schema in that family is imposed upon Black households in order to mark a racial-biological and now cultural space on an evolutionary continuum. In Moynihan’s iteration of this evolutionary continuum, the disorganized Black family is a lesser form of family and works primarily as a unit of comparison to help mark whiteness and white families as normal. The Moynihan Report marks a moment where science, speciically the social sciences are explictly linked to social policy. The Report, if understood as a form of Foucauldian productive power, sought to make Black families visible and produce them as objects of knowledge. Methodologically, The Report reproduced scientiic empiricism in order to measure and assess Black normalcy and deviance from the statistical norm, the white family. This methodology was then used to produce data that informed the drafting and implementation of social policy. Beginning with Darwin and continuing through Moynihan, social (and natural) science’s will to knowledge and subsequent taxonomization of Blackness as a primitive population through the discourse of family makes family studies a suspect endeavor. Black abolitionist responses like those of Lindsey’s and Spillers’ evince a distrust of violent categorizations of Black families as disorganized and thus sites of surveillance. Further, Kay Lindsey’s essay, included in the 1970 anthology The Black Woman, explicitly links the institution of the family to conquest and other forms of imperial violence. Lindsey calls for the abolition of the “family.” According to her Black revolutionary politics, the family is a social form beyond redemption. Moreover, Lindsey’s call to dismantle the family draws attention to ways that Black women were critiquing and attempting to subvert the epistemic violence of social scientiic inquiry like The Moynihan Report in the late 1960s into the 70s. The proliferation of studies on the ‘Black family’ and urban communities post-1965 intensiied surveillance of Black female headed households and made them objects of social scientic inquiry and empirical investigaton. Within the context of Black women’s responses to this kind of epistemic violence, Lindsey’s critique of the family can be read as a way of challenging the epistemic tradition of taxonomizing difference and deviance through a deployment of the family as a scientiic unit of analysis to study Black people and Black life. Lindsey’s refusal to even acknowledge the family—as a lesser or primitive form in its Black expression—could act as a way of refusing social and behavioral sciences’ attempts to make Black people knowable objects of knowledge. I read Lindsey’s rejection of the family as an attempt to confound and frustrate Western knowledge production (including Moynihan’s) about the Black ‘Other.’ The ‘Other,’ or the Black matriarchal stucture that social science aspires to know is treated as a confounding and disassembling igure. Read within the context of the urban rebellions of 74 Theory & Event the mid-sixties and the white anxiety relected in The Moynihan Report, the Black Matriarch could be interpreted as threatening to the coherence of the family as a property-generating institution and cornerstone of the nation. The Family’s Violent Conditions of Possibility During the 1960s and 70s a cadre of Black women activists and cultural workers aligned themselves with a form of anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, at times anti-homophobic and decolonial politics. Some of these Black women were featured in the anthology The Black Woman (1970). It is in her contribution to this volume that Lindsey deconstructs the family as a violent formation and calls for its abolition as an institution. Lindsey’s critique of the family departed from white radical and lesbian feminist critiques in the sense that it linked the family to antiblackness and conquest. It’s intersectional analysis reaches far beyond a critique of patriarchy and capitalism implicating the family in everyday forms of imperial, genocidal and antiblack violence. Lindsey’s abolitionist critique calls attention to the ways violent processes of property accumulation give white heteronormative gender, sexuality and family formations coherence and secure white ascendency through antiblack racism and Native genocide. The American family is far from a benign and innocent site of existence. Lindsey pens, “The family and the land on which it lived and cultivated its crops became the man’s property, man moved on to the seizure of the land of others and his prisoners of war became his slaves. Upon this base, the state evolved and empires were created.”17 For Lindsey, the family is the core and animating unit of property creation and of the imperial state. In the essay, Lindsey connects family, land, slaves, property, state and empire in order to situate the family within various forms of historical, state and genocidal violence. Lindsey’s indictment of the family invites a spatial analysis of its power. The family as a social formation can be reconcieved as an amalgamation of land, slaves, property, conquest and the state. The family could be constructed as geopolitical unit or assemblage (family-land-slaves-property-state-empire) that creates the American frontier, or the time-space coordinates of the human. The family as the geopolitical unit of women-children-land-slaves is a form of property that can be accumulated. Speciically, property is accumulated through the conquest of Native people, the theft of land and the accumulation of slaves as property. According to Lindsey, family formation is a Western formation that is anti-Black. The family, as a white institution, has been held up to Blacks as a desirable but somehow unattainable goal, at least not in the pure King | Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism 75 form that whites have created. Witness the Black middle class or pseudo-escapees into the mainstream. This group has assumed many of the institutional postures of the oppressor, including the so-called intact family, but even here we ind a fantastically high divorce rate and frustration on this domestic level has increased dissension between individual Black men and women, when it should instead be a signal that something is radically wrong with the model they have chosen to imitate.18 For Lindsey, the family is a white institution. The family as a patriarchal unit of property, enslavement and conquest is not a priori to Black sociality. In fact, Black people often fail in their attempts at replicating the formation. Lindsey calls for the entire model to be destroyed rather than succumb to the institution. We have an obligation as Black women to project ourselves into the revolution to destroy these institutions which not only oppress Blacks but women as well, for if these institutions continue to lourish, they will be used against us in the continuing battle of mind over body.19 The institution of the family is constructed as a weapon that will be used in the “battle of mind over body.”20 Further, Lindsey theorizes the family as an organizing logic of control and state power. The family is not a private space or a private matter for Lindsey. In fact, the family is intimately connected to the state and animates its power. Lindsey states, “The family has been used by the white agency to perpetuate the state, and Blacks have been used as extensions of the white family, as the prisoners of war enslaved to do the dirty work of the family, i.e. the state. If the family as an institution were destroyed, the state would be destroyed.”21 As an activist, Lindsey’s work as an advocate for poor single Black mothers made her acutely aware of the ways that the state constructed the notion of the Black AFDC ‘family’22 as a site of surveillance and intervention. Lindsey reminds us that the disciplinary power of the welfare state has access to the internal domestic space of Black women (or the Black matriarch’s house). The increase in state sanctioned surveillance prompted by The Report and administered through a diffuse network of welfare case managers, monthly reporting and documentation of sexual behavior, children, income and daily activity was an issue and concern that weighed heavily on Kay Lindsey. In The Report, Moynihan is deploying the epistemologies and tools of sociological surveillance in order to make Black households transparent in order to assess whether they can be assimilated into the social and spatial formation of the family. Patricia Hill Collins (1989) argues that Moynihan erroneously conlates the Black household with 76 Theory & Event the Black family when he wrote the report.23 Hill Collins is making an argument for a more expansive notion of family in Black life that cannot be contained within or reduced to the empirical unit or data of the household. On the other hand, Lindsey and contemporary Afropessimists would argue that it cannot be presumed that there is such a thing as a ‘Black family’ in 1965 when the report is drafted. Afro-pessimist Frank Wilderson (2010) argues in Red, White and Black that the Black home or Black domesticity is “absolutely vulnerable.”24 Black ‘domestic space’ is not a place that is considered private, autonomous or free from state intrusion and gratuitous violence in the way that white human homes are. For Wilderson, “the Black” is devoid of human contemporaries and “is a void beyond Human recognition and incorporation” and therefore cannot constitute a family.25 The ways that Blacks become legible and temporarily incorporated into the grammatical structures of humans (whites) is through various forms of “borrowed institutionality” like family, community and worker.26 However, these institutions are not permanently available to Black people. Within Hartman’s hermenutics outlined in Scenes of Subjection (1997), this form of “borrowed institutionality”27—or the family—would only extend forms of subjecthood in order to criminalize, police and further extend modes of enslavement for Black people. The family within the liberal humanist tradition is constructed as an inviolable and autonomous unit closed to the intervention and violence of the state. However, in The Black Woman, several contributors chronicle incidents where the state via welfare case managers and instruments of regulation literally enter the Black ‘home.’ The public assistance check that is disbursed organizes and dictates household consumption. It is only given to the individuals of a household after regular veriications that the household composition constitutes an eligible AFDC family. Permeable black households stand in juxtaposition to largely autonomous and private white families. White families are constructed as private and impenetrable spaces that protect white people—speciically, white patriarchal domination—from the excesses of state power. However, black matriarchal households in The Report are porous spaces that the state enters obliterating any possibility of private space. In this way, Black households in The Report fall outside of liberal humanist discourses that posit humans (and human families) as self contained and inviolable, particularly from state abuses.28 In addition to the disciplinary power exercised by the Welfare state, The Moynihan Report and other technologies of surveillance like the Urban Institute founded in 1968—an outgrowth of The Report— were becoming the empirical tools used to invade Black life. Through social scientiic discourse, Black households are transformed into ‘families’ and thus objects of knowledge that can be abstracted, entered, King | Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism 77 measured, and surveilled through government-sponsored scientiic studies. Black radical and revolutionary responses to The Moynihan Report and its discourses of the family were also responses to the imperious epistemic violence of state sponsored scientiic research. Writing in the wake of The Report, and the boom in sociological studies on the family, speciically the ‘Black family,’ the contributors to the anthology The Black Woman found themselves writing back not only to Moynihan but also to academic industrial complex. They wrote speciically to non-black experts seeking to develop scholarship on and for Black people and Black women. In the preface to The Black Woman, Toni Cade Bambara indicts psychologists, biologists, biochemists, historians and white feminists who seek to make Black women objects of knowledge in ways that beneit themselves rather than Black women.29 An exasperated Cade Bambara laments that a partial reason for the anthology project’s emergence stemmed from an impatience on the part of Black women. Especially out of an impatience with all the “experts” zealously hustling us folks for their doctoral theses or government appointments. And out of an impatience with the fact that in the whole bibliography of feminist literarture, literature immediately and directly relevant to us, wouldn’t ill a page.30 In addition to exposing the limits of the will to knowledge, Cade Bambara also critiques the very terms and categories that experts use to study Black people and the social world. For example, Cade Bambara voices her suspicion of scientiic methods in the preface when she challenges multi-disciplinary science and the enterprise of sexual differentiation. Cade Bambara questions the static nature of scientiic investigation speciically the ways objects of knowledge are produced as “basic” traits or truths through language.31 For Cade Bambara, the very notion of turning life into inert things to observe, label and then base a science of the social order upon remains questionable. Cade Bambara’s observation of this method enables an interrogation of the very terms, concepts and categories used to name non-human and human forms as objects of study. I read Kay Lindsey’s interrogation of the very concept and idea of the family as harboring similar suspicions as Cade Bambara. What happens to Black life when categories like the family are imposed upon it? What happens to the lives of poor Black women in particular? While it was certainly necessary for poor Black women to represent and classify themselves as families that were eligible for public assistance from the AFDC program to survive, the objectiication of Black households and Black people through the social scientiic discourse of the family was also being contested. Lindsey’s rejection of the social category of the family as an organizing frame for Black life 78 Theory & Event could also represent a form of Black women’s refusal of Western social scientiic systems of representation. It is possible that the rejection of the discourse of the family also functioned as a way of rendering oneself unknowable, or unrepresentable and therefore impenetrable within dominant social scientiic discourses. Spillers introduces The Moynihan Report (1965) as a primary source very early in her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” Establishing the document as another text that adheres to dehumanizing discourses, Spillers argues that The Report rehearses the naming practices of slavery. The discursive work that the family performs within The Report replicates violences that are found in Black captivity. Under captivity, Black bodies are reduced to non-human lesh. Spillers assesses The Report’s depiction of the Negro family in the following way; Moynihan’s “Negro Family,” then borrows its narrative energies from the grid of associations, from the semantic and iconic folds buried deep in the collective past, that come to surround and signify the captive person. Though there is no absolute point of chronological initiation, we might repeat certain familiar impression points that lend shape to the business of dehumanized naming.32 The Moynihan Report does not salvage the Black family but renders it within the same discursive economy as captivity. Within these naming practices the ‘Black family’ is not a human family. As The Report remains in this conceptual and discursive terrain of enslavement it also exists within what Spillers names as a “property/ kinless constellation.”33 Citing the work of anthropologist Meillassoux, Spillers agrees with the assessment of anthropologists like Meillassoux who assert that slaves lie outside of kinship systems. Because, if Black “kinship” were permitted “property relations would be undermined.”34 Under enslavement, particularly the unique property relations of slavery as they pertained to captive lesh, kinship loses meaning. The enslaved did not constitute human families or humans for that matter. Spillers questions E. Franklin Frazier’s hopefulness—or rather where his hope resides—as well as that of the scholars who earnestly try to recuperate the humanity of the enslaved through appropriating institutions like the family. Scholars devoted to studying Black life ind value in the family’s institutional structures that confer humanity onto a people denied it for so long. However, these efforts to restore the humanity of Black folks through traditions and colonial categories that emerge from the Enlightenment are insuficient for some. For example, Hortense Spillers (1987) inds the recuperative efforts of Black scholars who study the family like E. Franklin Frazier suspicious. While a number of Black feminist critiques have admonished the patriarchal violence and misogyny that resides within Frazier’s (1935, 1939) attempts to unearth King | Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism 79 the idyllic Black family that existed before slavery, Spillers troubles more than Frazier’s misogyny and pastoralization of Black family life. Spillers interrogates not only the kind of Black family that Frazier wants rescued from its pathology but also his fundamental belief in the existence of a Black family. The Black family is not an assumed given or entity for Spillers in the way that it is for Frazier. Relecting on the body of work produced by Frazier, Blassingame, and Genovese, Spillers observes them arguing that the ‘Black family’ is an achievement and resource to be celebrated given the horrifc conditions endured by Black people. While conceding that captive persons developed ties, bonds and connections with other captive persons, Spillers is skeptical that these relationships could be labeled familial. Spillers’ cynicism about applying human nomenclature is based on the following grounds: We might choose to call this connectedness “family,” or “support structure,” but that is a rather different case from the moves of a dominant symbolic order, pledged to maintain the supremacy of race. It is that order that forces “family” to modify itself when it does not mean family of the “master,” or dominant enclave. It is in this rhetorical and symbolic move that declares primacy over any other human and social claim, and in that political order of things, “kin,” just as gender formation, has no decisive legal or social eficacy.35 The modiier Negro in Moynihan’s “Negro Family,” constitutes the ‘Black family’ as a non-family. The family is not a grammatical structure through which Black people can annunciate their human existence. Spillers’ claim that there is no Black family or kinship structure under the conditions of captivity or for those who live in the legacy of slavery is a precursor to the kinds of claims that contemporary Afro-pessimists make. In 2007, Saidiya Hartman appropriates and radically reworks the notion of natal alientation from Orlando Patterson in order to consider the ways that the captive community of slaves was stripped of genealogy and kin. As a clan of people without or who have lost their mother and motherland, the enslaved exist in the world without family and its references to human subjectivity. Wilderson (2010) likewise has argued that human descriptors like gender, sexuality and family are forms of “borrowed institutionality.”36 Wilderson exhibits a similar kind of pessimism about Black attempts to excavate and reclaim Black ‘family’ formations. Though Spillers has been recently named a proto-Afro-pessimist, she does leave us with a subtle hopefulness that is often overlooked.37 There is possibility and futurity when one is rendered outside of human coordinates. When one is not afforded gender, kin and subjecthood one inds themselves in the unique position of having as Spillers 80 Theory & Event suggests “nothing to prove.”38 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” leaves a hopeful legacy in the range of possibilities existing (or yet to be made) for descendents of the enslaved who have been rendered outside of the symbolic economy and order of exclusionary humanisms. If Black captive communities could not constitute a family, they did and can constitute something else. For instance, Black female lesh in the form of the Black matriarch disigures the institution of the family and renders it a site of rebellion where the orders of property and space implode. Moynihan’s Matriarchs as Urban Rebellion Many historians and social scientists contextualize the drafting of The Report within the historical moment when the Civil Rights movement was taking up the tactics, politics and cultural features of Black Power.39 The drafting of The Report is bracketed by the 1964 rebellion in Harlem, NY that precedes it and the 1965 Watts rebellion that follows a month after its release. While The Report was being drafted, white civil society and its white families watched trepidaciously for rebellion smoke to rise on the horizon and consume the landscape in lames. In the introduction to The Report, Moynihan cautions the nation that if the results of racial liberalism do not lead to “equality of results” then “there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.”40 The Moynihan Report was as much a response to Black radicalism, urban rebellions and white fear as it was a liberal response to Black poverty. Black radical feminists like Lindsey and others were not unreasonable in imagining that The Report and social scientiic work conducted in Black communities functioned as a form of surveillance to control the Black urban population that was imagined as unruly and dangerous. Read in the context of white civil societies’ anxieties during the period of Black urban unrest, Black matriarchy has the potential to undo structures of property that undergird the integrity of the nuclear family and the nation. In addition to the threat they posed to the nuclear family as a unifying American ideal structured through property relations, the Black matriarch was imagined as a threat to the physical property of the urban landscape. The Kerner Commission (1967) speciically draws links between poor parenting in Black female headed households to the kinds of juvenile delinquency that caused Black urban rebellion.41 The rebellion has been posited by social scientists, particularly those contributing to the Kerner Commission, as a result of the disorganized home of the Black matriarch. In the way that the rebellion haunts and frames the drafting of The Moynihan Report (1965), Moynihan’s Black matriarch is one of the specters that haunts the 1968 Kerner Commission and other analyses of Black rebellion. The Black matriarch has been directly linked to the scourge of urban rebellions that devastated the landscape of the American city. King | Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism 81 However, what has been overlooked are the ways that the Black matriarch as a trope for disorganization also threatens heternormative gender, sexuality, family and property formations. The Black matriarch is imagined as causing chaos both at the level of the household and on the actual landscape of the city. While Black urban rebellions are often imagined as events that occurred in the public; I reframe and respatialize the urban rebellion as an enactment of socio-spatial disorganization that happened at mulitple scales in Black communities in the 1960s and 70s. The Kerner Commission’s analysis which linked the delinquency of Black juveniles who participated in rebellions to failed parenting by single Black mothers functions to extend the space of the rebellion into the home and ‘domestic space’ of the Black matriarch. The trope of disorganization used by Moynihan in 1965 is a spatialized discourse and metaphor that depicts the Black matriarch’s gender, sexuality, reproduction, children, and household as unruly. And the matriarch’s domestic space extends into the ghetto and produces the rebellion space that her children set on ire. The Black matriarch upsets the order of property relations in the household and on the landscape. What the Black Matriarch frustrates are the logics of property and the kinds of gendered, sexual and assumed spatial arrangements that accompany property as an organizing principle of the US. In many ways the Black matriarch unhinges property relations from the categories of gender, sexuality, progeny and space. The Black matriarch— female lesh ungendered—becomes a threat to the social order. In fact, during the late 1960’s, particularly during urban rebellions, the Black matriarch’s fatherless children represent the antithesis of proper gender formation and normative relations to property. The children of Black matriarchs who are also the children of the Black Power era represent an anti-property ethos that threatens the values and real estate of civil society. Black youth as offspring of the Black matriarch burned real estate to the ground. During urban rebellions, Black women’s sexuality and reproduction are viewed as functioning outside of the normative linear progression of the social and spatial orders that are oriented toward producing property. The Moynihan Report and Kerner Commission construe Black female sexuality as non-normative and anti-property. Black matriarchal households do not contain fathers or patriarchs who act as proprietors who can claim women and children as their possession and therefore responsibility. The biopolitical management of Black populations in the Americas has been organized around the possibility of producing accumulable Black commodity forms since slavery. The Black Matriarch as a trope of disorganization in The Report functions as a body that offers the possibility of an alternatively gendered, sexual, and anti-property mode of life. Moynihan’s Matriarchs enact an undoing of the property relations that help undergird the Western 82 Theory & Event nuclear family. The Black Matriarchy as an anti-property mode of existence undoes the conceptual framework of the family that is ordered by private possession. With property ripped from its core the family implodes upon itself. Beyond Redemption I am compelled by the way that Susana Morris (2014) persuades us to rethink our engagement with the character Precious and her mother in the novel Push (1996).42 Rather than avert our eyes, or look away shamed by images of Black pathology depicted by a sadist of Mother (a Moynihanesque Matriarch)—their family’s story of poverty, incest, and HIV—Morris encourages readers to redirect our attention to the kinds of community of support and kinship that Precious was forced to create due to her mother’s, father’s and family’s failure to love her. Morris’ rereading of Push enables a reconsideration of the character Precious as an agent and subject of change that is able to work on and heal herself through reworking notions of kinship and community. Further, Precious crafts a Black subjectivity partly through relinquishing her investments in and claims to the ‘Black family.’ The author of Push, Sapphire creates a motherly or maternal failure so totalizing that it precludes the possibility of redeeming the Black matriarch or investing the Black family with any moral authority. Because Precious cannot rely on her biological parents to see her and care for her; she cannot turn to the family as an afirming institution or recourse in the face of a rapine and cruel world. Precious has no option but to give up on the notion of the ‘Black family’ and envision and create something new for herself and her children. Throughout the novel as Precious comes into literacy and engages various communities committed to healing, she is also enacting a process of unnaming and renaming. Over the course of her arc, Precious also enacts a series of purgings and divestments from attachments to heteronormativity (and homophobia). Precious rethinks her own investments in Black nationalist notions of real ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ which also adhere themselves to fatherhood and motherhood, and the seductions of romantic and ilial love. Having relinquished and unnamed these models as stable, natural and always true, Precious must insert something else in their place. Toward the end of the novel while having coffee in the city and in the company of other women from her incest support group, Precious slowly sips her hot chocolate and receives the revelation that, I’m alive inside. A bird is my heart. Mama and Daddy is not win. I’m winning. I’m drinking hot chocolate in the Village wif girls— all kind who love me. How that is so I don’t know. How Mama King | Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism 83 and Daddy know me sixteen years and hate me, how a stranger meet me and love me. Must be what they already had in they pocket.43 I see Precious as a possible subject that Spillers (1987) is calling forth in her community of those who have “nothing to prove.”44 Precious is a part of this community of descendants of the captive—a community of subjects who craft the self through jettisoning violent and exclusive humanistic categories of intelligibility and coherence such as the heteronormative family, mother, father and [Black] nation. Precious and other descendants of the enslaved with no recourse to normative categories of iliation are free to envision and create more afirming relationships. Precious as a literary igure represents the lives and experiences of a number of Black girls for whom the promise of safety within the conines of a respectable and heteronormative family has failed to materialize. The courage to create something new through unnaming something as true and universal in order to call forth another mode of living and thriving is the story that Precious and other survivors embody. Precious and the girls she makes kin with in the Village over hot chocolate represent their own community of fugitives that transform themselves from strangers—motherless incest survivors without loving families—to loved ones. Precious and her girls who meet each other as strangers and become something more than that to one another, resemble Hartman’s fugitives in light who cultivated relationships in another kind of symbolic economy. During Saidiya Hartman’s journey to into the interior of Ghana in search of the slave, Hartman stops in the village of Gwolu. Gwolu is a village established by fugitives of the African slave trade. At some point during her day-long visit in the village, she relects upon the way that the villagers narrate their history of making community. Hartman’s practice of critical fabulation enables her to create a scene for the reader of Lose Your Mother that depicts how fugitives might have attempted to weave relations on the run. All they shared was the rift and the danger that had driven them. To remember what they had lost and what they became, what had been torn apart and what had come together, the fugitives and the refugees and multitudes in light were called the Sisala, which means “to come together, to become together, to weave together […] They had led slave raiders, predatory states, drought, and exhausted land, and they desired never to know any of it again in this sequestered niche of the savannah.[…]For all of this, they were willing to begin anew. Knowing that you don’t ever regain what you’ve lost, they embraced becoming something other than who they had been and naming themselves again. Newcomers were welcome. It did not matter that they weren’t kin or that they 84 Theory & Event spoke a different language, because genealogy did not matter (most of them could not go back more than three or four generations, anyway), building community did. ‘We’ was the collectivity they built from the ground up, not one they had inherited, not one that others had imposed.45 Like Precious and the Sisala, the Black fugitive evading capture must become something other than what lineage, kin and genealogy beget. To be willing to name oneself again and again to avoid capture, discursive or otherwise, is nothing short of an of fugitivity. Flight, becoming and renaming are the “language” and ritual acts of the fugitive. Family as an everyday mode of understanding and organizing the way that Black people envision human social relations is not self-evident or transhistorical. After ifty years of relecting on the meaning of The Moynihan Report (1965) for the ‘Black family,’ another look at the episteme of the ‘family’ is required. While scholars in Black Studies, Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies ponder what is next for the Black family in its multiple forms, they might also ask what kind of violence the notion of the ‘family’ can inlict. Critical and innovative world-making traditions of Black life must envision life outside of the current categories that blunt efforts to re-craft what it means to be human. There are other ways to name each other as our relations. Notes 1. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Ofice of Policy Planning and Research (United States Department of Labor, 1965). 2. The Moynihan Report, if understood as a form of Foucauldian productive power, sought to make Black families visible and produce them as objects of knowledge. In 1965, sociologist and Assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan with the assistance of a committee of scholars and policy makers released their study The Negro Family: A Case for National Action popularly known as The Moynihan Report. Many historians and social scientists contextualize the drafting of this document within the historical moment when the Civil Rights movement was taking up the tactics, politics and cultural features of Black Power. Black Power had developed a distinct cultural, visual, embodied, erotic, sensorial and physical landscape of its own which created anxiety in the white population. The drafting of the report is bracketed by the 1964 rebellion in Harlem, NY that precedes it and the 1965 Watts rebellion that follows a month after the release of The Report. Black urban rebellion was a threat to white civil society and the built landscape of the settler nation throughout the 1960’s. When the report was released, Moynihan and white families were living in fear of the social and spatial practice of ghetto rebellions. In the last sentence of the introduction to the report, Moynihan cautions the nation that if the results of racial liberalism do not lead to “equality of results” then “there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.” The Moynihan Report was as much a King | Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism 85 response to Black radicalism, urban rebellions and white fear as it was a liberal response to Black poverty. While the report was being drafted, white civil society and its white families watched trepidaciously for rebellion smoke to rise in the horizon and consume the settler landscape in lames. Later we will explore how the Black matriarch came to embody the spatial chaos of the burning ghetto. 3. Moynihan, “The Negro Family,” (United States Department of Labor 1965). 4. ‘Feminists’ is off set in quotation marks to indicate Black political and intellectual thought often produced by, but not exclusively, Black cis gendered, trans, non-gender conforming, hetero and non heterosexual people who are feminine or ‘femme’ identiied. As this special issue and this article take up an Afro-pessimist frame, the political ontology and structural critique of patriarchy articulated by feminists as a “grammar of suffering” fails to incorporate the grammar of suffering of Black women. This article and issue uses it as a short hand and offsets it in quotations as a way of marking its contested meaning and insuficiency. It is a position that critiques and address hieriarchy and intersectioning modes of domination including and exceeding heteropatriarchy, misogyny, homophobia and ableism. 5. See Mignon Moore, Invisible families: Gay identities, relationships, and motherhood among Black women (University of California Press, 2011). In Moore’s book, an ethnography of Black gay and lesbian family structures, child rearing patterns and gender relations is conducted. Moore and her lesbian partner were featured in the April 5, 2013 article by Carolyn M. Brown entitled, “Marriage and Financial Inequality: Why Gay and Lesbian Couples Pay Moore,” that appeared in Black Enterprise magazine, available at http://www.blackenterprise.com/money/why-gay-lesbian-couples-paymore-marriage-inequality-laws/ [n.d.]. The article interviewed two Black lesbian couples—Moore and her partner Haley are interviewed, as well as two Black gay couples—in order to chronicle their struggles with accessing the same legal rights, inancial beneits and legibility offered heterosexual couples by the state. The article illustrates the ways that Black lesbian and gay couples and their families still struggle to become legal subjects of the state through the category of family. Black alternative, LGBTQIA and queer family formations often seek and advocate for their right to access the tax beneits, healthcare, custody and other legal rights of married couples in order to self-actualize in the capitalist system in the United States. 6. Hartman, Saidiya V., and Frank B. Wilderson. “The position of the unthought.” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 183–201. 7. Treva Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson argue that even in attempts to critique Moynihan’s pathologization of the Black family, scholars such as John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Deborah Gray White, Ira Berlin and others worked to prove the “central role that family played in slave life” (177). Further, many of these historians and scholars remained attached to the “underlying assumption behind Moynihan’s thesis: that family stability required family structures to be comprised of two parent (male-female) households headed by men.” See “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Frredom” in Meridians Volume 12, Number 2 (2014) 169–195. 86 Theory & Event 8. I have added this note to for clariication and an expression of my commitment to the ongoing life of the Black intramural. I attempt here to situate the stakes of my critique of the white Western notion of family and Black attempts to revise it. As a person devoted to Black sociality and an active member of the Cohen Family Reunion’s planning committee (my maternal kin), I thoroughly enjoy, beneit from and work within the very narrow constraints of the symbolics, material resources and afirming affective structures of my own extended Black diasporic family. While, I exist blissfully and sometimes uneasily within a formation that must constantly be reshaped—and eventually even abolished—in order to be capacious and loving enough to address its own violence and continue to invite in all of those that desire its embrace, it may be necessary to go ‘beyond’ it. While I critique the family and am committed to addressing its limitations—even its elimination—I celebrate the creative ways that Black descendants of captive communities continue to reinvent and conceptualize relationships. To this Black endeavor, I will always be committed. 9. See Mignon Moore, Invisible families: Gay identities, relationships, and motherhood among Black women (University of California Press, 2011) 10. see Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “We can learn to mother ourselves: The queer survival of Black feminism 1968–1996.” PhD diss.,Duke University, 2010 and Ross, Loretta. Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. PM Press, 2016. 11. Susana Morris, Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014) 12. 12. Ibid. 18. 13. Brown, “Marriage and Financial Inequality.” 14. Kay Lindsey, “The Black Woman as a Woman” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, Toni Cade Bambara ed. (New York: Signet, 1970) 103–108; Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” in Diactrics Volume 17, Number (1987) 58–81. 15. Here it is productive to think about modes of surveillance of Black life as operating on a continnuum that extends from slavery through the present moment or slavery’s afterlife. See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997). 16. Charles Dawin, On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or, the preservation of ravoured races in the struggle for life (London: J. Murray, 1859); Walter Allen, “Black Family Research in the United State: A Review, Assessment and Extension” in Journal of Comparative Family Studies Volume 9, Number 2 (1978) 167–189. 17. Lindsey, “The Black Woman as a Woman” 104. 18. Ibid. 105. 19. Ibid. 108. 20. Ibid. 108. 21. Ibid. 105–106. 22. AFDC references Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a federal assistance program in effect from 1935 to 1996. King | Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism 87 23. Patricia Hill Collins, “A Comparison of Two Works on Black Family Life” in Signs: Common Grounds and Crossroads: Race, Ethnicity and Class in Women’s Lives Volume 14, Number 4 (1989) 875–884. 24. Frank Wilderson, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) 127. 25. Ibid. 127. 26. Ibid. 127. 27. Ibid. 127 28. Wilderson argues that the Black home or Black domesticity is “absolutely vulnerable” and cannot constitute a family—or private domesticity (Ibid. 127). 29. Toni Cade Bambara, “Preface” in The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: Signet, 1970) 1–7. 30. Ibid. 5. 31. Ibid. 3. 32. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” 69. 33. Ibid. 74. 34. Ibid. 75. 35. Ibid. 75. 36. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black 127. 37. I use the term proto-Afro-pessimist due to the ways that contemporary scholarship deveoloped in the mid- to late-2000s in what is now termed Afro-pessimism has appropriated and claimed the work of Hortense Spillers as a part of the tradition. Spillers did not name herself as an Afropessimist. 38. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” 74. 39. I do not want to suggest here that civil rights movement transformed into the Black power movement. I situate Black power and the civil rights movements as part of the continuum of the Black Freedom struggle. Black Power did create a particular kind of anxiety in the white population and was developing a distinct cultural, visual, embodied, erotic, sensorial and physical landscape of its own. 40. Lee Rainwater and William Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (The MIT Press, 1967) 3. 41. US Kerner Commission, Report of the national advisory commission on civil disorders (US Government Printing Ofice, 1968). The Kerner Commission named for Illinois Governor Otto Kerner was convened in 1967 to study the phenomenon of Black urban unrest in the mid-late 1960s. One of the theses that emerged from the report was that poor parenting skills on the part of single Black mothers was a factor to consider when trying to understand why Black youth resorted to rebellions as a form of politics in the 1960s. 42. Sapphire, Push: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 1996). 43. Ibid. 131. 44. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” 74. 45. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) 225.