Cannibalism

Pretending to be Black, Consuming Blackness

Influencers in blackface. White activists and academics passing themselves off as black. You may be shaking your head, wondering what it is all about. In a word — cannibalism. I will refer to the white body and black body, useful terms employed by Menakem (2017) to talk about the psychosocial cannibalism of blackness.

I won’t get into how the black body has been systemically used for material ends (see slavery, prison-industrial complex, and medical experiments on Henrietta Lacks, to start) nor will I get into well-documented studies of white people literally cannibalizing black bodies (the Arrogante slave ship and Vincent Woodward’s (2014) The Delectable Negro). Instead, this article explores how the white body eats the black body to become one with it as a psychosocial objective, not as the means to an end.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “incorporate” comes from the Latin verb corpus (the word for body), and means to unite with the body of another, to become part of it.

People often use the term “cultural appropriation” when white people grow dreadlocks, adopt “urban” clothing, listen to Hip Hop, “talk black” or in other ways take on aspects of the black body. You might say cultural appropriation is another form of cannibalism or incorporation of the black body. In her essay Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks (1992) says,

“The over-riding fear is that cultural, racial and ethnic differences will be continually commodified, served up as new dishes to satisfy the white palate — that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten” (p.39).

I argue that the consumer does not want to forget. You know the saying, “you can look, but you can’t touch,” but the white body not only wants to touch, the white body wants to possess and become the black body. Hence we see white people “passing” as black to unite with the black body.

You might ask, well, why is this happening? In the US psyche, the black body upholds a monster-while-superhero status. Menakem (2017) writes how white supremacy has branded the black body as, among other things, “impervious to pain, incredibly strong, and hypersexual” (p.75) and through cannibalism, these supposed superpowers can be acquired. Arguably, white people celebrating picnics (Pilgrim, 2004) and “Negro barbecues” (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 2004) and bringing home souvenirs of charred body parts of lynched black folks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries could be a chilling example of this insatiable drive to incorporate the black body.

The horror film Get Out (Peele, 2017) plays with a related idea of incorporating the black body. Rich white people absorb the physical and artistic gifts of black people by transplanting their white brains into these black bodies ultimately uniting the white body with the black body. Of course, the desire for the black body makes the cannibalistic acts no less sadistic, violent, or torturous (think lynching, corporal punishment, police brutality) nor make it innocent (Rachel Dolezal, Jessica Krug).

So we must look into both the psychosocial and sociopolitical factors of cannibalism. When the black body is treated as its own means to realize itself, when admiration of the black body exists while the white body remains separate and whole, then we can actualize true relationships. In true relationships, individuals stand in relation to the other, and you can only do this by maintaining a separate self.

Reference List

Autry, R. (2020, Sept. 7). Jessica Krug, Rachel Dolezal, and American white women who want to be black. NBCNews. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jessica-krug-rachel-dolezal-america-s-white-women-who-want-ncna1239418

hooks, b. (1992). Black looks, race and representation. South End Press.

Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands, racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press, LLC.

Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved February 11, 2021, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/incorporate

Peele, J. (Director). (2017). Get out [Film]. Universal Pictures.

Pilgrim, D. (2004, January). Blacks, picnics and lynchings. Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2004/january.htm

Thernstrom, S., & Thernstrom, A. (1997). America in black and white: One Nation, indivisible. Simon & Schuster.

Woodward, V. (2014) The delectable negro: Human consumption and homoeroticism within US slave culture. New York University Press.