Understanding Whiteness Part 22: Horror, Hiphop and the innocence of Youth
“Horror is a genre where death isn’t necessarily the worst thing that can happen to you.”
I can’t remember who exactly said the quote above. All I can tell you is that they are a screenwriter within the ‘Horror’ genre, and that their words ring true, because horror is all about fear through everything up to and only eventually including death.
When you think, even for a moment, about what white supremacy has done to the world, and the trauma it has inflicted upon people racialised as black, ‘horrible’ becomes a swiftly appropriate adjective. I’ve said it before: the modern age, since the dawn of white supremacy, has been a dystopia. It’s a waking nightmare in which racial hierarchies have been wholly responsible for some the worst things that can happen to communities and nations of people.
Blackness understands that death is not the ultimate fear because blackness has repeatedly been forced to stare death in the face. Blackness and people racialised as black have endured horrors, plural, at every level of dominant white society. Physical pain and trauma, the psychological torture that comes with constant degradation, emotional trauma, families ripped apart, last names lost at a slave owner’s whim, economic violence, structural poverty, enforced proximity to crime and lack of opportunity, precariousness and despair at having to work harder than whiteness to achieve less. Blackness has been through the horrors and come out the other end.
And even now, this deep into the 21st century, the horrors continue, as black identity remains victimised by white supremacist ideology. It leads me to a question: is blackness, in its victimisation, presented as an innocent in the ongoing story of racism? Is it’s character youthful by default?
Forever young?
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