Whose ‘Post-Racial’ ‘Post-Black’ Is It?: USA, France, Italy, and England

Résumé 0

In the United States, France and Italy movements toward a ’post-racial’ and ‘post-black’ ways of being and thinking provide spaces for their citizens of color. Communalisms of the racial-religious-sexual singular identity formulations are challenged by what is becoming a Post-Negritude awareness that complicates monolithic selfhoods as they encounter plural forms of being and thinking. This article analyzes how Blacks in the U.S., France, and Italy undergo critical reassessments of their racial-religious-sexual identities to embrace a more plural concept that is catalyzed in national politics. Still, I argue there remains the residue of what the Martinique psychiatrist Frantz Fanon calls the ‘Blackness of Being’ as is evidenced in the recent arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin and the reception of Italy’s first Afro-Italian minister, Cecile Kyenge. All of which overshadows the optimism that followed of the election of President Barack Obama, the appointment of Harlem Désir as the first black to lead a major French political party. As Afro-Europeans move into positions of national importance like their post-Obama American counterparts, the leopard has not changed its spots—the residue of the Blackness of Being remains resilient. The western world is far from a post-racial, post-black, and postcolonial reality. Using articles and images culled from the press, I analyze the inconsistencies in ’post-racial’ and ‘post-black’ thinking when confronted with recent ‘everyday’ injustices.