Clementine’s identity and personhood, as a black woman, are disrespected and ignored. I couldn’t help but reflect on my own story and how I was misnamed by my father, only seen as the “sissy” instead of Justin. From the first page, I appreciated how Baldwin shed light on the power of naming and how black folk, especially black women, have to negotiate their identities in a society that refuses to respect their existence. Naming has had a stifling effect on black communities. Nigger. Faggot. Jezebel. Ho. Boy. Gal. Uncle. Mammy. These names have demonized and dehumanized black folk as a means to reassert white power or dominance. As Ben L. Martin explains, ‘Until the 1960s, black was an insult. Black was starkly confrontational and militant.” Black folk were not only forced “to accept but to embrace theretofore undesirable racial qualities.” The Moynihan Report (1965), written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan on “The Negro Family,” describes black women as “reducing” a black male’s “role to that of errand boy to and from the relief office.” Lastly, for some black households, black LGBTQIA folk are portrayed as mere abominations or non-existent. Said sentiments voice how misnaming not only has divided black families and communities, but also interrupted healthy conceptions of self-identity for black folk, forcing onto us false truths of ourselves, such as blacks are lazy, unintelligent, and “prone to criminality.” Marking black bodies with these false truths has allowed white, patriarchal supremacy access to our power: our autonomy, self-governance, and self-identity. Police forces—the henchmen of the [white, patriarchal supremacy] state—have capitalized on these false truths through their consumption, violence, sexual exploitation, and slaughtering of black lives: Emmett Till. Fred Hampton. Harry and Harriette Moore. Sandra Bland. Tanisha Anderson. Maya Young. Korryn Gaines. Michael George Smith, Jr. Hortense Spillers writes, “[Names] are markers so loaded with mythical prepossession that there is no easy for the agents buried beneath them to com clean...I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made in excess over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.” I was not born “black” or “queer.” White, patriarchal supremacy has defined me accordingly. This naming was forced upon me the moment I escaped normativity—white, heterosexual, and hypermasculine. White, patriarchal supremacy has forced me to see blackness and queerness as “other.” I have had to come to terms with these names, because my humanity is questioned and deemed invisible. However, channeling Spillers and Baldwin’s “Freaks and the American Ideals of Manhood” where he writes, “once you have discerned the meaning of a label, it may seem to define you for others, but it does not have the power to define you to yourself,” I choose to (re)claim my blackness and queerness in search for my own “inventiveness.” Asserting my existence threatens white, patriarchal supremacy, a parasitic ideology that
48