[-empyre-] Liquid Blackness and Materiality

[Ken Rogers]

Sarah, I think your collaborative filmmaking ethnography about black farm cooperatives is compelling. I was particularly struck by how you described the fluidity of the concept "black farmer" as a, “blackness not of the body but produced through the body for a specific purpose, in this case that of collective identity formation.” This invitation for a social identity to become more fluid (or plastic) to meet the demands of a specific political reality is one that very much concurs with my own experience participating in the alliance of heterogeneous black communities living adjacent to the Inglewood Oil Field, where I found the plasticity of blackness became a tactical opposition to the immediate environmental threat of urban drilling. I should note that these are black communities with their own intersectional tensions produced by wide class disparity and cultural diversity, but that petroleum had effectively helped remediated these historical tensions around the periphery of an altogether different problem. Just in the way that “black farmer” develops a new kind of collective identity formation, a community shaped by oil was able to fluidly address a new eco-political reality by drawing on the effectiveness of blackness in earlier political struggles driven by social and civic equality, although the problem of oil is not nearly so oriented around the issue of individual rights. Here blackness flows through a body at biological risk in the domain of public health and helps form a continuity of political experience from equal rights to environmental justice that can be used to make an effective call for the equitable administration of civil law by a social alliance among black communities. Blackness, then, was reshaped to lend justification and rhetorical power to a civil lawsuit against the County of LA and the Houston-Based petroleum extraction firm PXP for the unregulated expansion of drilling in the area. It becomes even more interesting when thinking about how these historically black communities were made to be demographically black in the first place, which began after the Shelley v. Kraemer decision in 1948 deemed racially segregated housing covenants illegal and enabled black Los Angelenos to migrate west of Central Avenue in search of better schools and other public services. A migration that initially began to form communities of black inclusion only became majority black following the 1965 Watts Riots when egregious “blockbusting” real estate speculation spurred white flight to the San Fernando Valley. So this might be an example of what I meant when I said how blackness as technology of domination (redlining and blockbusting) can become an agent of radical transformation.

This brings me back to Alessandra’s original comment about the crude analogy of oil (although I confess I meant “crude” in a half-glib way to play on the crude/refined binary used to describe oil's standing-reserve as use value). I think it is a promising idea to refine the figure of black liquidty along the “diagnostic and the expansive” poles as types of available action performed by the term itself. This prevents liquid blackness from sinking into the bog of object-orientation (which I mostly find to be a grievous form of apolitical materialism), and begins from that most basic political question, “what is to be done?"  So maybe liquid blackness should similarly begin from the question “what does liquid blackness enable us to do?” This might permit an expansion beyond the flat diagnosis of a condition and align with how Sarah understands what it means to be a black farmer--a blackness not “of” but “through” the body.
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