https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0L5fciA6AU
As in, the terrible belongs to YOU (the oppressor), not to us. You are the one afraid of blackness, giving it all the bullshit qualities you believe it belongs to, but James Baldwin tells you to take it back, to own up to what you’ve created.
I find this is related to the small anecdote in the Noise article where the man has an encounter in which he feels alienated in his own body, and then displaces this feeling upon the people who he deems to have created it.
How often and when do we deem our emotions as products of our own creation? It is an easy deduction to say that it is unhealthy to blame a group of people for a fear that you feel. Then what, for example, of a fear that one feels when a friend acts a certain way? Is it their responsibility to change, or yours to simply feel what you feel and ground yourself?
My confusion arrives when it turns into questions of oppression. It seems to become the opposite responsibility, in that the roles reverse. It would not be appropriate for someone to practice owning their feelings of oppression, for oppression is something that lives within the multilayer systems of the economy, sociality, ideology, religion (etc) and cannot be placed somewhere per say. It seems to me that these practices of owning one’s emotions are better spoken about on an individual basis.
As in, the terrible belongs to YOU (the oppressor), not to us. You are the one afraid of blackness, giving it all the bullshit qualities you believe it belongs to, but James Baldwin tells you to take it back, to own up to what you’ve created.
I find this is related to the small anecdote in the Noise article where the man has an encounter in which he feels alienated in his own body, and then displaces this feeling upon the people who he deems to have created it.
How often and when do we deem our emotions as products of our own creation? It is an easy deduction to say that it is unhealthy to blame a group of people for a fear that you feel. Then what, for example, of a fear that one feels when a friend acts a certain way? Is it their responsibility to change, or yours to simply feel what you feel and ground yourself?
My confusion arrives when it turns into questions of oppression. It seems to become the opposite responsibility, in that the roles reverse. It would not be appropriate for someone to practice owning their feelings of oppression, for oppression is something that lives within the multilayer systems of the economy, sociality, ideology, religion (etc) and cannot be placed somewhere per say. It seems to me that these practices of owning one’s emotions are better spoken about on an individual basis.
I wonder whether Fred's work (and the work of reading him and the others we've heard, or watched, including Larry and Tracey and their account of how they are excluded from neurotypical experience) may give us techniques to think beyond the personal, and beyond the "ownership" the personal promises in the context of oppression. This is in no way to suggest that there is not responsibility for our actions. It is to find our way beyond the psychoanalytic body (enclosed, identifiable) toward the sounding of sound (Guattari's group subject, Fred's "in" the break) and to hear what reverberates there, to become sensitive to what grows in the cracks of subjectivity. If it weren't about us so much of the time (especially about the us who always seem to reposition ourselves as the center of experience, which is perhaps another way of speaking of whiteness or white privilege or neurotypicality) what else could we hear?
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