Cultural Black Trauma

Recently, the deaths of Tamir Rice, Eric Gardener, and Mike Brown, all at the hands of police officers, have sparked national protests and conversations around state sanctioned violence and police brutality, particularly in Black communities. An underlying component in these discussions and protests has been that of mourning, with discussions and protests often acting as physical spaces of cultural Black trauma and collective memory. Cultural Black trauma relies on the historical violence that has affected Black people in the United States, and how it impacts Black people when this violence is continuously acted upon. Cultural Black trauma acts as a site of mourning and healing for Black individuals. Though there are not many anthropological
inquiries into these recent events as of late, the concept of cultural trauma, especially regarding Black lives, has been a concept examined and touched upon through anthropological work, both explicitly and implicitly.

In Ordinary Intersections: Speculations on Difference, Justice, and Utopia in Black Queer Life, The Sojourner Syndrome: An Interpretive Framework for Understanding Poor Black Women’s HIV Risk, and “We Are All Oscar Grant”: Police Brutality, Death, and the Work of Mourning, the concept of cultural Black trauma is touched upon in various ways. Using a postmodern theoretical basis, each author proposes a reworking of cultural Black trauma, calling for it to be situated within a new, more recent collective memory of state sanctioned violence. Cultural trauma and collective memory have been examined in a multitude of contexts.
Neil Smelser defines cultural trauma as “a memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is (a) laden with negative affect, (b) represented as indelible, and (c) regarded as threatening a society’s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions.”(Eyerman 2001: 2) Much of the work done related to cultural trauma and the Black American experience has been rooted in the days of slavery, which serves as a public memory for many Black Americans. While this public memory has rooted many Black American experiences, cultural trauma of Black Americans can be rooted in more current contexts. The three articles mentioned above find a way to root themselves in structures similar to that of slavery—state violence—while basing themselves in more recent forms it. In Black Queer Life, Shaka McGlotten focuses on how the different interpretations Black queerness, including violence, help define it. The Sojourner Syndrome looks at the lives of Black women in the Bluff, a poor black neighborhood in Atlanta, to try to understand how structural systems, not only individual choices, affect their HIV rates. We All Are Oscar Grant explores the ways that public mourning occurs within a system that supports state-sanctioned violence. These articles, though focusing on different things, incorporate the use of cultural
Black trauma.
Cultural trauma has a strong connection to collective memory. This implies that it must by diachronic by nature. If there were no collective memory to situate relations within the Black American experience as slavery does, the concept of cultural trauma could not exist. Though much work around cultural trauma has an emphasis on the past and mainly the collective memory, the articles that have been found related to cultural Black trauma have an explicit focus not only on the past and the present, but on the future as well. In examining French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s work on traumatism, Taylor provides a quote from Derrida’s work. “Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that is “over and done with”. (Taylor 2013: 193) This concept of speaking to not only the past and present but also to the future speaks volumes to the relevancy of cultural trauma. All three of the articles deal with a sense of what is to come next. The futurity that individuals within these articles feel plays a large role in their mental well-being and emotional states. These articles can be quantified as taking strong humanistic approaches. Though they are focusing on large subgroups of people within the Black American population, they focus on specific instances of violence or trauma. Because the realm of focus within these articles is cultural trauma, a strong humanistic in inherently established. Even within this realm of humanistic approaches, the question of how humanistic the approaches taken are is relevant. In Black Queer Life, McGlotten theorizes that many works of anthropology, though taking humanistic approaches to anthropology, do not attend to the realm of emotions and feelings as a primary source of focus. McGlotten writes, “…race has been focused squarely within the concerns of the real world and recent disciplinary trends that grapple with structuring structures (globalization, neoliberalism, and so on) and not in the generally less quantifiable realm of feeling.”(McGlotten 2012: 50) This ‘realm of feelings’, that is affected by a sense of what is to come and how individuals few their lives, is often a second area of focus in anthropological works that typically categorize them as “subjective experiences or desires”, making them seem detached or not as valid as the rest of the work. This focus on the realm of feelings is prevalent in all of the articles, whether it be on the emotional toll that poor Black women with high risks of HIV experience, looking at how everyday experiences and emotions shape Black queer life, or focusing on how public murals and paints of Black Americans who have been victims of state violence can act as public mourning spaces that can be haunting. These articles place emotionality and humanistic approaches hand in hand.
The large focus on emotionally within these three articles suggests that the authors are using an idealistic approach in their work. Studies in collective trauma ask the question of how does a large group of people that have systematically dealt with violence overcome and deal with it. Although this trauma can be manifested into physical objects, such as the posters and memorials created for Oscar Grant, the trauma itself is not material. This does not mean that the authors do not critically observe how material can play a role in emotionality and either enforcing or dismantling systems that contribute to cultural Black trauma. In examining the social context that poor Black women in the Bluff live in that contributes to their trauma, Davis notes that “residents of some public housing properties are not allowed to invited members of their families to come to their homes to help care for children or elderly relatives, or to visit with family at holidays or important gatherings. These banning policies tear families apart.” (Davis 2014: 127) Thus, the material—housing—has large implications on the individual’s emotionality. Because this is policy that has a detrimental effect on families and is not isolated to individual instances, this becomes a component of cultural Black trauma, which then become the main focus. The complexity in establishing the approaches taken in these articles, whether it be diachronic, humanistic, or idealistic, speaks to the complexity in theoretical approaches taken in the articles. Postmodernism gives room for this complexity to flourish and be fleshed out.
The concepts of cultural trauma and collective memory arise out of an extremely postmodernist moment in anthropology. Melford Spiro gives a succinct definition of postmodernism. “First, because of the subjectivity of the human object, anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth. Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics, third-world peoples.”(The University of Alabama Department of Anthropology) Post-modern work is thus extremely critical of claims of objectivity within anthropological studies and places a large emphasis on metanarratives and placing heavy value on the stories told by individuals that are being studied. This concept is essential to cultural Black trauma, especially the focus on metanarratives. For instance, the grand narrative of slavery is common to Black Americans. The title of Taylor’s article alone, We Are Oscar Grant, also speaks to this idea of using narrative of police brutality that is common to Black Americans. In Davis’ article, the grand narrative of communal violence is one that constructs another commonality for Black Americans. The move away from assumed objectivity and increased emphasis on metanarratives brings light into how these articles engage in discussions about cultural Black drama. A call to re-establishing theory also speaks to the postmodern approach they take.
In the articles discussed there is an underlying desire to restructure the frameworks in which cultural Black trauma is evaluated though. For example, in The Sojourner Syndrome, Davis notes that the primary focus of her work is to better “observe how history and multiple forms of oppression take shape in the lives of poor Black women at risk of HIV.”(Davis 2014: 123) This is in opposition to what she feels is the typical approach taken in work similar to this, where only the women’s individual choices are evaluated to explain and remedy health issues in Black communities. Davis is engaging in a form of reflexivity that is often referred to as affirmative postmodernity. “Affirmative postmodernists do not… feel that Theory needs to be abolished but merely transformed.”(The University of Alabama Department of Anthropology) This reflexivity offered by affirmative postmodernism is also seen in Taylor’s and McGlotten’s work. McGlotten, while situating his work within the realm of intersectionality, notes that he doesn’t feel that it is conclusive enough to understand the makings of everyday life that can contribute or help aid in cultural Black trauma. He instead uses the concept of assemblage, which he feels is “more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherence, and permanency.” (McGlotten 2012: 49) Taylor’s work offers a reworking that calls into question temporality, as mention earlier in the essay. By placing their notions of cultural Black trauma in the affirmative postmodern framework, McGlotten, Davis, and Taylor call for a new reworking of cultural Black trauma.
Much of the work that focuses on cultural Black trauma uses the collective memory of slavery. While valid as an older form of state-sanctioned violence, the articles discussed in this essay suggest that more recent incidents could serve as the collective memory that situates cultural Black trauma. Recent events suggests that another form of state sanctioned violence, police brutality, could serve as a new anchor for cultural Black trauma. Though not all of the articles addressed police brutality, they did provide context for exactly how the reworking of cultural memory could occur. These reworking would not only provide new insight into how cultural Black trauma is (re)created, but how it is manifested and how Black Americans cope with it on a daily basis.