Blackness as Ontological Borderland in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing: Plasticity and Culpability in the American Police State
Introduction
Just a few weeks separated the publications of Frank B. Wilderson’s book, Afropessimism, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s book, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, in the spring of 2020. Though these two texts were released to the public at virtually the same moment and engage many of the same themes that animate Black Studies, Wilderson and Jackson depart from one another on a critical point: the ontology of Blackness. This essay aims to conduct a comparative analysis of these scholars’ respective ontologies of Blackness through a reading of the police killing of Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do The Right Thing. I argue that understanding Radio Raheem through Jackson’s concept of the ontologized plasticity of Blackness– that is, Blackness transmogrified as sub/super/Human at once– rather than through Wilderson’s ontology of the non-Human Black– the Black as excluded from, denied, humanity as such– provides a more nuanced and comprehensive lens through which to grapple with his killing. In developing this argument, I propose that the criminal culpability ascribed to Radio Raheem in his killing is a Human capacity that therefore requires the recognition of Radio Raheem, the Black(ened)1 subject, as Human, while simultaneously configuring his humanity as abject and dispensable. I further maintain that there is an intuitive difference between the killing of Radio Raheem and the destruction of a non-Human object or the slaughtering of a non-Human animal, a difference I identify on the level of affect and find rooted in an ontological distinction between Radio Raheem (the Black) and the non-Human object and non-Human animal. I suggest that Jackson’s conception of the plasticized ontology of Blackness is equipped to develop these two crucial points concerning Radio Raheem’s killing and antiblack violence more generally, where an ontology of Blackness predicated on a total lack
of moral standing, of humanity as such, lacks the adequate conceptual resources to do so. The distinction is one of Blackness as ontological borderland rather than wasteland.
The essay will first outline Wilderson’s non-Human ontology of Blackness and Jackson’s conception of Blackness as ontologized plasticity. It will then briefly summarize the story of Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing before arguing that Jackson’s conception of Blackness as ontologized plasticity provides a more comprehensive framework for grappling with two aspects of Radio Raheem’s police killing: 1) the ascription of culpability to Radio Raheem, and 2) the affective import of his death as a spectacle of antiblack violence which, according to Wilderson, functions as “national therapy.” I conclude that Blackness as ontologized plasticity lies at the root of antiblack violence– grounding the invention of justifications for what is in fact gratuitous antiblack violence while constituting the foil against which the non-Black can know they are not Black because their humanity cannot be so plasticized.
Wilderson’s Non-Human Ontology of Blackness
Central to Wilderson’s ontology of the Black as non-Human is his equating of the Black with the Slave. For Wilderson, Blackness is inseparable from slavery as “there is no Black time that precedes the time of the Slave… The time of Blackness is the time of the paradigm.”2 So while “the social and political time of emancipation proclamations” exists within historical time which “marks stasis and change within a paradigm, it does not mark the time of the paradigm, the time of time itself, the time by which the Slave’s dramatic clock is set.”3 In other words, the violence that constitutes Slaveness/Blackness sets the ontological terms of the paradigm and is thus separate from and unaffected by historically contingent stasis and change (i.e. the abolition of slavery) within the paradigm. Gratuitous, totalizing violence against the Slave/Black sets the terms of order.
Wilderson further contends that one’s relationship to violence conditions one’s access to the variety of capacities required to be considered a Human being. Provocatively comparing the relationship of the Black to violence to the relationship of a water bottle, a non-Human object, to violence, he writes, “... one would never say to an individual seen crushing an empty water bottle, ‘Did that water bottle consent to the way you are treating it?’ What happens to the bottle of water is an extension of the prerogative of its owner.”4 Similarly, for Wilderson, the Black has no moral standing for redress, no capacity to demand justification or reasoning for the violence inflicted upon them– the Black is “a species of sentient beings that cannot be injured or murdered.”5 The binary divide between the Human and the Black/Slave is thus a binary between social life and social death, a binary between, on the one hand, the Human’s contingent experience of violence that has a beginning and an end, is justified or redressed, and on the other, the Black’s gratuitous experience of violence “that never goes into remission.”6 This subjection to gratuitous violence, rooted in a total lack of moral standing, does not merely degrade the Black in humanity. Rather, it precludes the Black from the category of the Human as such.
Finally, for Wilderson, the category of the Human depends on the denial, the exclusion of the Black for its own existence and conceptual coherence. In this sense, the spectacle of antiblack violence “functions as national therapy.”7 The non-Human Black is the foil against which the non-Black Human understands its own ontological status as the being that can consent, that can fall from grace and be redeemed, that can know the violence they experience is contingent on some transgression, that can say “I am Human because I am not Black.”
Jackson’s Ontologized Plasticity
Jackson rejects Wilderson’s ontology of the Black as non-Human, and instead proposes a theory of the Black(ened) being’s ontologized plasticity. She reinterprets Enlightenment thought
“not as black ‘exclusion’ or ‘denied humanity’ but rather as the violent imposition and appropriation– inclusion and recognition– of black(ened) humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very humanity.”8 She goes on to define plasticity as “a mode of transmogrification whereby the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter, such that blackness is produced as sub/super/human at once, a form where form shall not hold: potentially ‘everything and nothing’ at the register of ontology.”9 Whereas for Wilderson, it is the ontology of the Black as non-Human that functions to confirm Human (i.e. non-Black) existence, for Jackson, it is the ontology of the Black as plastic, as humanity’s limit case, that functions to stabilize liberal humanism’s Eurocentric and heteropatriarchal system of hierarchy.
Demonstrating that “Eurocentric humanism needs blackness as a prop in order to erect whiteness: to define its own limits and to designate humanity as an achievement,” Jackson draws on the titans of Western philosophy– including Hume, Kant, Hegel, Jefferson, and Heidegger– to expose how “the black body’s fleshiness was aligned with that of animals and set in opposition to European spirit and mind.”10 The Black(ened) being, not excluded from humanity through such animalization, is rather subject to “bestialized humanization, because the African’s humanity is not denied but appropriated, inverted, and ultimately plasticized in the methodology of abjecting animality.”11 Indeed, for Jackson, it is the Black(ened) being’s selective incorporation into humanity as plastic, as infinitely mutable, that allows for the stabilization of the hegemony of whiteness in the liberal humanist hierarchical framework. Put differently, the Black(ened) subject is recognized as Human only to have their humanity constrained, expanded, and reshaped in order to be whatever it is that the whit(ened) subject is shaped around and against, such that the being of Blackness performs a “generative function rather than serving as
an identity.”12 The Black is thus positioned as the limit case in liberal humanists’ attempt to understand themselves and their ontological position in the natural world, an attempt better understood as a senseless rationalization of their (i.e. those white and male) self-proclaimed hegemonic position in a constructed antiblack heteropatriarchal hierarchy. Importantly, Jackson stresses that the selective incorporation of the Black(ened) being into the scheme of humanity is congruent with, and even the source of, antiblack violence. Jackson relies on Saidiya Hartman’s study, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America, to emphasize this point, affirming Hartman’s assertion that “the process of making the slave relied on the abjection and criminalization of the enslaved’s humanity rather than merely on the denial of it.”13 Antiblack violence relies not on dehumanization, but rather on a recognition of plasticized humanity in the Black(ened) subject “in an effort to demean blackness as ‘the animal within the human’ form.”14
Radio Raheem as Ontological Borderland
A. A Brief Summary of Radio Raheem’s Story in Do The Right Thing
Radio Raheem is a Black man living in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He perpetually carries a boombox on his shoulder which plays Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” The neighborhood pizza joint is owned and operated by Italian-Americans Sal Frangione and his two sons– Pino, a blatant racist, and Vito, a friend of Mookie, the delivery man for the pizzeria played by Spike Lee himself. Together with Buggin’ Out, another Black resident of Bed-Stuy, Radio Raheem boycotts Sal’s pizzeria for its failure to include Black celebrities on its “Wall of Fame,” which comprises photos of famous ItalianAmericans. Tensions come to a head when Sal demands Radio Raheem turn his boombox off and Radio Raheem refuses. Sal then smashes Radio Raheem’s boombox with a baseball bat, after
which Radio Raheem pulls Sal over the counter and begins choking him. The fight spills out into the street, where the NYPD shows up and breaks up the fight. After pulling Radio Raheem off of Sal, one of the officers puts him in a chokehold with a nightstick. Despite the other officer and the neighborhood onlookers pleading for him to stop, the officer maintains his chokehold on Radio Raheem, killing him. Radio Raheem’s lifeless body is put into the back of the squad car and driven away.
B. The Ascription of Culpability to Radio Raheem
The criminal culpability ascribed to Radio Raheem echoes Saidiya Hartman’s identification of the criminalization and abjection of the enslaved’s humanity, rather than the mere denial of it, in the process of making the slave. Indeed, culpability, to use Wilderson’s terminology, is a Human capacity, requiring the recognition of humanity in the being it is ascribed to. Consider an alteration of Wilderson’s water bottle example. Just as one would never ask if a water bottle consented to being crushed, it also seems clear that one would never ask what a water bottle did to deserve being crushed. Though certainly less obvious considering the work of animal rights activists, I would also suggest a similar line of reasoning applies to the slaughtering of cattle on a meat farm– it would be strange, even redundant, for a person to ask a farmer slaughtering a cow born and raised for its meat, “What did that cow do to deserve being slaughtered?”
By stark contrast, the killing of Radio Raheem, the killing of Black people by the police generally, is met by an influx of speculation as to what was done to deserve, to warrant, the killing: Radio Raheem deserved to be killed because he fought Sal, Radio Raheem deserved to be killed because he joined Buggin Out’s boycott, Radio Raheem deserved to be killed because he played his music too loud. Culpability circumscribes the violence, making it legible and
digestible. But what grounds Black culpability when the concept of culpability appears incoherent, even absurd, when applied to a non-Human object like a water bottle or a nonHuman animal like a cow? It becomes clear that the ontology of the non-Human to describe Blackness does not quite provide the conceptual resources to account for the criminal culpability assigned to Radio Raheem that ostensibly prescribed and justified his death.
Confirming that the Black(ened) being is Human– selectively incorporated into humanity only to be abject through this humanization– Jackson sets the conceptual foundation on which Black culpability can be erected. Indeed, it is Radio Raheem’s ontologized plasticity, the transmogrification of his humanity that is at once identifiable and abject, that both prescribes and justifies his brutalization. Notably, the plasticity that defines the ontology of Radio Raheem, of the Black(ened) being that can be produced as “sub/super/human at once,” is undergirded by a fundamental uncertainty– an uncertainty that evades the ontology of the non-Human which remains concrete, and therefore predictable, in its formulation as unalterably non-Human.
This uncertainty, this malleable borderland of being, is conspicuous in the case of Radio Raheem’s killing, and in Do The Right Thing more generally through its commentary on Black encounters with police. Take, for example, when Charlie, a white man, had his antique car sprayed down by Punchy and Cee, two Black kids from the neighborhood. This incident resulted in a minor warning by the police– no arrests were made, and Charlie was told to go home. However, just a few hours later, Radio Raheem’s encounter with the police resulted in his death. The uncertainty of the plasticized ontology of the Black(ened) being creates the circumstances through which an encounter with the police can just as easily result in a warning as it can in a killing. Clearly, there was a difference in the degree to which violence had been escalated in these two cases, but this does not defeat the point. One only has to consider the widely
acknowledged sense of endangerment experienced by a Black driver being pulled over by police to appreciate the generalized precariousness of Black people’s encounters with law enforcement–will this “routine” traffic stop result in a warning, a ticket, or death?
It is thus plasticity, rather than non-humanity, that provides the conceptual resources with which to make sense of both the culpability ascribed to Radio Raheem and the uncertainty that pervades the ascription of such Human capacities. Existing in the liminal space of ontological borderland, Radio Raheem is at once culpable Human and abject animality, an embodiment of the Black(ened) being who may be recognized as Human to fuller and lesser extents, degraded as animal/subHuman to fuller and lesser extents, given warnings or killed.
Importantly, this understanding of Radio Raheem’s ontology as plasticized humanity does not discount Wilderson’s notion of Black death functioning as a salve for non-Black (particularly white) anxiety, nor his notion that the violence experienced by the Black is gratuitous. The ontologized plasticity of the Black(ened) being, who is incorporated into humanity in order to be found culpable, confirms both of these findings. In fact, the deluge of excuses that recognize the humanity of the Black in order to ascribe culpability serve to mystify what is at the core of Black culpability: that is, Blackness itself. In this sense, Radio Raheem was not merely killed because he fought Sal, or joined a boycott, or played his music too loud. Rather, Radio Raheem was killed because he was Black. Plasticized Blackness, at once culpable and abject, grounds the very telos of gratuitous violence, constituting a tightly wound and deeply rooted antiblack order.
C. Plasticized Blackness as “National Therapy”
Understanding Radio Raheem as ontologically plastic, as opposed to ontologically nonHuman, also better explains the intuitive distinction of his death, and antiblack violence
generally, from violence against a non-Human object or a non-Human animal. Wilderson asserts that the gratuitous violence experienced by the Black is analogous to that experienced by a crushed water bottle, as both the Black and the water bottle lack the Human capacity to consent and/or claim redress for their experienced violence. I took this analogy a step further, suggesting that the slaughtering of a cow on a meat farm would have similar implications: the cow does not have the capacity to consent and/or claim redress for its slaughtering. For Wilderson, the water bottle, the cow, and the Black are all subjected to such gratuitous violence because they are all ontologically non-Human, and as such, have no capacity to adduce normative considerations against the way they are treated.
Wilderson also makes the case that the non-Human Black gives existence and conceptual coherence to the non-Black Human, that the gratuitous violence experienced by the Black eases the anxiety of the non-Black Human who knows they are not Black, and that therefore they are Human, because “when and if (they) experience the kind of violence Blacks experience there is a reason, some contingent transgression.”15 Yet, like the Black, the water bottle and the cow are denied moral standing, “cannot be injured or murdered,” as they cannot access Human capacities of consent and redemption. In this sense, the water bottle, the cow, and the Black are all on the same side of Wilderson’s binaristic divide: they are the socially dead non-Human in contrast to the socially alive Human. Why, then, is it that specifically Black death/antiblack violence functions as “national therapy?” Why can’t something like a daily broadcasting of water bottle crushings or cattle slaughterings provide the national therapy, the easing of Human anxiety, that Wilderson asserts antiblack violence does?
There is an intuitive distinction between Radio Raheem’s police killing– an archetypal example of gratuitous antiblack violence– and the crushing of a water bottle or the slaughtering
of a cow, an intuitive distinction that resides on the level of affect. Radio Raheem’s death, and antiblack violence more generally, carries a unique affective import allowing for its provision of “national therapy” that the crushing of a water bottle or the slaughtering of a cow does not and cannot provide. This is a distinction Wilderson would likely concede, but one that the ontology of the non-Human seems to lack the conceptual resources to further explain. As with the possibility of ascribing to the Black(ened) being a capacity for culpability that is impossible, even absurd, to ascribe to a water bottle or a cow, this affective distinction between Black death and the destruction of a non-Human object or non-Human animal becomes intelligible when understood to be rooted in ontology. Put differently, the affective import of the killing of Radio Raheem, the Black(ened) being, becomes intelligible when grounded in his ontological distinction from the water bottle or the cow. Once again, I suggest that Jackson’s ontologized plasticity supplies a more nuanced and comprehensive framework through which such a distinction can be made.
Jackson’s notion of the ontologically plastic Black(ened) being finds the locus of antiblack violence not in the denial of or exclusion from humanity– the same dehumanization can be said of the water bottle and the cow, and thus cannot provide an explanation for the affective distinction between antiblack violence and violence against a non-Human object or non-Human animal. Rather, Jackson finds the unique locus of antiblack violence in the act of transmogrification which follows from the ontologized plasticity of the Black(ened) being. Once again, this selective incorporation of the Black(ened) being into the scheme of humanity only to be refigured as abject is undergirded by uncertainty, such that solidity in ontological form is refused to the Black(ened) being. From this follows a more nuanced explanation for the affective import of Radio Raheem’s killing and antiblack violence in general. Namely, gratuitous
antiblack violence provides a national therapy for non-Black persons not because it delimits their membership in the general Human category, but rather because it affirms the certainty with which the non-Black possesses their Human capacities of culpability, of consent, of redemption.
The affective import of antiblack violence depends on the Black(ened) being’s selective incorporation into humanity through which Human capacities are precariously granted and withdrawn. It is thus the ontological plasticity of the Black(ened) being, and not non-Human ontology, that creates the conditions of Black precarity from which non-Black “national therapy” is derived.
The water bottle and the cow, definitively positioned in their ontological non-humanity, are certain, fixed, in the impossibility of their accessing Human capacities, and therefore any gratuitous violence they experience cannot serve to reassure non-Black beings of the certainty of their access to Human capacities. The non-Black Human, wanting desperately to maintain their hegemonic position in the liberal humanist order, requires a barrier between them and nonhumanity to maintain the certainty of their status– a barrier effectively furnished by the ontologically plastic Black(ened) being as humanity’s limit case, a limit case forged through antiblack violence. This function of antiblack violence– the provision of non-Black certainty of access to their Human capacities against the precarious transmogrification of Blackness–explains the unique affective value of Radio Raheem’s death and antiblack violence overall.
In his killing, Radio Raheem was ascribed culpability while simultaneously stripped of consent or redemption– a violent transmogrification in service of the reigning order of hegemonic whiteness that is potently visible in the lack of ramifications following his killing. Sure, Sal’s Famous Pizzeria was burned down in the riot that broke out after Radio Raheem’s killing, but as Mookie said, Sal would get insurance money for it. Regarding Radio Raheem’s
death, however, no redress appeared forthcoming: the next morning, the heat broke, children once more played in the streets, we can assume no cops were charged– Bed-Stuy was back to business as usual. Radio Raheem was recognized as Human enough to be found culpable, but access to Human capacities like consent, that could be violated and restored, and redemption, through which one can fall from and regain grace, were withheld.
In a transmogrification of his plasticized ontology that escapes rationality, Radio Raheem is granted moral standing to the extent that he is found culpable in his killing but is simultaneously denied moral standing to the extent that redress for his death is nullified. Illogically, he has fallen from grace without being given a grace to fall from. The precarious transmogrification of Radio Raheem is precisely what differentiates his death from a water bottle crushing or a cow slaughtering, what differentiates antiblack violence from violence against nonHuman objects and non-Human animals, on the level of affect. The non-Black(ened) being, seeing Radio Raheem’s death, knows that their moral standing for redress is certain, that there would be consequences following their own killing, as their access to Human capacities such as consent and redemption would not, could not, be stripped from them. These capacities are definite and fixed by virtue of their non-Blackness. The non-Black(ened) being, seeing gratuitous antiblack violence, is provided the “national therapy” of knowing that their experience with violence is contingent on a transgression precisely because their access to Human capacities, by virtue of their non-Blackness, is necessary.
Conclusion
This essay argues that an ontological framework conceptualizing Blackness as borderland– as ontologized plasticity in accordance with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human– offers the conceptual resources and nuance with which to confront antiblack violence,
especially that which is inflicted by the American police state. I take Radio Raheem of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing as an embodiment of the ontology of Blackness as borderland. His humanity is malleable, transmogrified to find him at once possessor of Human culpability– that is, criminalized– and abject subHuman denied redress, denied recognition of the consequences of his killing, that his killing had consequences at all. Radio Raheem was deemed Human enough for his killing to warrant a justification, but not Human enough for it to have made a difference. The legibility of Radio Raheem’s police killing, of antiblack violence at the hands of the American police state, resides at this borderland of humanity.
Radio Raheem’s Blackness as ontological borderland is further supported by an affective distinction between Black death and the destruction of beings, of things, which lack humanity as such. It is an ontological distinction which helps explain why, according to Wilderson, antiblack violence functions as a sort of “national therapy.” Blackness as ontologized plasticity lies at the root of antiblack violence– allowing non-Blacks to recognize Black subjects’ Human capacities to the extent that it permits the invention of justifications for what is in fact gratuitous antiblack violence, while providing the existential salve that the non-Black knows they are not Black because their humanity, their claim to Human capacities, cannot be so plasticized. As a result, we can say Radio Raheem– emblematic of ontologized plasticity, of Blackness as borderland being– was killed because he fought Sal, because he joined Buggin Out’s boycott, because he played his music too loud. Which is all to say Radio Raheem was killed because he was Black.
Bibliography
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York University Press, 2020.
Lee, Spike, dir. Do The Right Thing. Universal Pictures, 1989. DVD.
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 1982.
Wilderson, Frank B. III. Afropessimism. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020.
1 I use the term “Black(ened)” to denote the marginalization and subjugation of the non-White being by and within hegemonic whiteness.
2 Frank B. Wilderson, Afropessimism (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020), 217.
3 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 218, 227.
4 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 191-92.
5 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 199.
6 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 224; for the original analysis of the concept of “social death,” see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982).
7 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 224.
8 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York University Press, 2020), 3.
9 Jackson, Becoming Human, 3.
10 Jackson, Becoming Human, 4, 6.
11 Jackson, Becoming Human, 23.
12 Jackson, Becoming Human, 69.
13 Jackson, Becoming Human, 46; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997).
14 Jackson, Becoming Human, 20.
15 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 225.