29 November 2007
I have been asked repeatedly to clarify what exactly it is I mean by hyphenation and so, I am taking this pause to discuss hyphenation - in potentiality and in critical relevance, especially as it relates to a rather ugly issue deeply buried in the American past and present.
Hyphenation already exists in the American vocabulary. It is generally understood culturally with regard to ethnicities (e.g., African-American, Asian-American). It is also used in popular culture to describe multi-media moguls and celebrities taking on multiple roles (e.g., singer-writer-producer, model-fashion designer-actor). I depart from these accepted usages by applying hyphenation in political, technological, economic, and racial contexts.
Hyphenation, the virtual sphere of in-between, is potentiality of potentiality necessitating a new language to structure that sphere of virtuality-reality that is our present. Juxtaposed against this present, hyphenation exposes and highlights actuality and casts a meaningful shadow back to virtuality. At its best, is hyphenation in the technological context, or what I call technological hyphenation. At its worst, is hyphenation in the racial context, or what I call racial hyphenation.
Hyphenation in the political sphere (political hyphenation) often overlaps with technological hyphenation when individuals utilize electronic technologies to mediate a virtual transition sphere between thought and action. Hyphenation in both contexts becomes this sphere, one where the potential of potential exists. It is this virtual place of transition, striving, and becoming that any individual can experience through multimedia internet terminals, wireless networks, cellular, and electronic text-messaging technologies. Although this notion may seem lofty and metaphysical, electronically mediated political hyphenation is an actual global phenomenon. Indeed, ‘smart mobs’ effect real and successful acts of civil disobedience by utilizing the virtual transition space of bandwidth to impact, influence, and execute political actions. This is hyphenation at its most empowering and illustrates the ideal of potentiality and virtuality in hyphenation.
Within an economic and racial context, hyphenation is the virtual equality linking African Americans with White Americans. Although more subtle today, this virtual equality is more pronounced during America’s post-Reconstruction past. In this manner, hyphenation is a construct reflecting the debilitating pathology of intolerance, fear, paranoia, jealousy, hatred, and violence manifest in lynching. Whereas political and technological hyphenation reflects an empowering sphere of potential the individual creates, economic and racial hyphenation exposes a pathology of the individual’s national circumstance, in which he lives in a virtual democracy where the dream of equality has yet to materialize. Although the political, technological, economic, and racial contexts of hyphenation are distinct, they are all linked by virtuality.
Above all, racial hyphenation exposes virtual duality. Virtual duality is distinct from duality proper by its implied virtual equality, virtual reflexivity, interdependence, transformation, and the simultaneous subject-object position of both entities involved. The entities of lynching - mob and victim – are represented most frequently by White Americans and African Americans, respectively. Because both share virtuality, I place them in a virtual duality – a hyphenation construct. I can best illustrate transformative virtuality through the trial and lynching of John Hughson, a white tavern owner in 1741 New York (Horsmanden, Daniel, "The Great Negro Plot of 1741," The New York Conspiracy, in Jackson, Kenneth T. and David S. Dunbar eds., Empire Ciy, p.65). He was lynched by a mob and hung next to a black slave named Caesar. Daniel Horsmanden, Justice of the New York Supreme Court during the trial, depicts the corpses of the two, noting that others also observed the same bizarre almost miraculous phenomenon of their transformations. Indeed, Hughson’s body took on "black" features and traits while Caesar’s took on "white" features and traits. Evocatively, Horsmanden comments that each seemed to transfer their distinct features to the other. From this virtual transformation and their equal fate as lynch victims, I find sufficient grounds to place them in a hyphenated relation of virtual duality.
In this manner, the two lynching entities exist in perpetual virtuality with relation to each other. This shared virtuality is more volatile than the actuality of their embodied reality because it catalyzes the tension, conflict, change, and perpetual revision mediated by the hyphen. To explain this better, I provide the following model:
African Americans ______*_______ White Americans
* = The equal position of both sides under the law as American citizens. When White Americans enforce inequality through subjugation, exploitation, and violence against African Americans, they upset this equilibrium and create a tension between law and practice. At its present state, this model represents the inner tension and struggle between races symbolized by the hyphen. It is this hyphen that seeks perpetually to mediate an actual rather than virtual equality. This mediation is orchestrated through the virtual sliding between races, in which the acts of one side ultimately reverberate back onto the other. It comes to a heightened extreme when White Americans literally try to erase African Americans by lynching them. Thus, lynching in this construct is the attempt to eliminate the other and the virtual hyphen that connects the two subject-objects as equal citizens. By eliminating the ‘other’, the White Americans’ directed actions have no other place to slide except right back onto themselves. This is depicted in many of the articles about black mobs lynching whites in retaliation of white mobs lynching one of their black family members. The shameful hypocrisy festers further in light of the valiant patriotism African Americans displayed in the First World War, only to find themselves returning home to become lynch victims.
Both the hyphen paradox and the deceptive hyphen of hypocrisy are pathological phenomena of mob violence and mass lynching, forever staining the pages of American history.
With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 abolishing slavery, the disparity between law and practice became America’s national hypocrisy, simultaneously establishing the hyphen paradox. Indeed, a legal illusory freedom and illegal real enslavement arises with the abolition of slavery. Through the very extension of freedom to its slaves, America established a legally contractual hyphen between its black citizens and all of its other citizens. Although obligated to legalize the emancipation of its slaves, it did not ensure its practical realization. America by its Constitutional Amendment entered a legal contract with its former slaves and thus cemented a legal connection – a hyphen. The emancipated slaves reciprocated this hyphen by accepting the expectation of that freedom. Here, both sides of the hyphen are established: freed slaves expecting to enjoy their legalized freedom on one side and White Americans to acknowledge that freedom on the other side. Unfortunately, their acknowledgment was pathological – exhibited through reactionary manifestations of lynching, mob violence, and mass homicide.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866, "an act to protect all persons in the United States in their Civil Rights and furnish means of their vindication," declaring all persons born in America and not subject to foreign power as citizens, this expectation solidified. Again, the contradiction between law and its directed practice – between ideology and praxis – became even more salient through the passage of these two legal acts precisely because they expose the hyphen paradox. Indeed, the contrast between black expectation and their reality, between America’s legal obligation and failure to ensure practices of equality by condoning lynching and mob violence, became common practice carrying to the present.
Closely linked to the hyphen paradox is the deceptive hyphen of hypocrisy. Although the deceptive hyphen may seem similar to the hyphen paradox, there is a nuance of extremes emphasized in the former lacking in the latter. The paradox arises with the passage of two acts: the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. As soon as slaves were declared free and legal citizens – making the legal transition from blacks to African Americans and thus legally equal to their former masters – their most basic right to life was continually threatened and savagely taken away. Here then, the paradox arises in the deception that legal empowerment and equality of slaves became simultaneously their further enslavement, confining them within the four walls of terror, violence, lynching, and death. From being treated as property to being objects of perpetual and violent terror, African Americans as newly declared citizens became victims of the deceptive hyphen of hypocrisy – an American hypocrisy injected into the marrow of the nation – the Constitution of the United States of America. The deception is mediated by virtuality – virtual equality, virtual freedom, and a virtual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this manner, from the hyphenated relation between master and slave, they transitioned into a hyphenated relation of hypocrisy between White Americans and victims of terrorized violence. This deceptive hyphen of hypocrisy thus exposes a salient transition experienced by America’s former slaves from bad to worse - from enslavement and obedience to illusory freedom and barbaric terrorization defying the parameters of cruelty.
The deceptive hyphen of hypocrisy becomes even more pronounced and shameful during and immediately following the First World War. Indeed, numerous press releases throughout the War disclose America’s hypocritical stance towards African Americans – calling them to serve their country abroad to fight for the fundamental common rights of man while they were savagely deprived of those same rights at home (1 June 1918, "Numerous Lynching Alarm the Race in National Capital," Cleveland Advocate, Vol. 5, No. 4, p.5; 24 May 1919, "America's Lynching," Cleveland Advocate, Vol. 3, No. 3, p.1; 13 September 1919, "Louisiana Adds to Lynching Score," Cleveland Advocate, Vol. 6, No. 19, p.1). As a nuance to the deceptive hyphen of hypocrisy is the subversive hyphen that hides under exposure and by so doing, undermines the entelechy of the individual and his community. This notion underlies much of the ‘morality’ anti-lynch debates of the early twentieth century.
This brings me to a second definition of hyphenation - structuring hyphenation - that I equally apply: a marginalization, a sense of ‘phasing-out’ and yet, a shadowed foothold still perceptibly existent so it is not entirely extinguished. Here, it is a peripheral - a slighted, unaccepted, unacknowledged - form of action, existence, and mode of expression appropriating for itself its own change, its own world, its own relation to the world and effectiveness in it. Above all, it is a new hermeneutics and language structuring the current reality while simultaneously accounting for the inconsistencies, hypocrisy, injustice, and paradox in that present reality. This is what African Americans must carve out for their survival, their future generations, and is a task that continues as their legacy.
I have focused a great number of prior weblogs on structuring hyphenation and this is also where I find James Cone's contribution. In an interview with William Hordern (15 September 1971, "Dialogue on Black Theology, The Christian Century), James Cone states:
"If the oppressed are to attain their freedom, they must begin to create a new style of communication which is consistent with their struggle for liberation. In part they must deny the accepted canons of logic, allowing the liberation struggle alone to be the logical test for meaningful discourse. Logical consistency, as defined by the oppressors, is irrelevant."
In a recent interview with Bill Moyers (23 November 2007, Bill Moyers Journal, PBS), he reiterates this same sentiment:
"...when you can express and articulate what's happening to you, you have a measure of transcendence over it. It gives you speech. It gives you self-definition. And when you have self-definition, and not defined by the world, then you transcend what is happening to you. [...] Anytime you can see and articulate your reality --including your loss, tragedy, that's the terrible beauty.[...]...the beauty is you not being defined by it. [...] It is claiming a sense of yourself, even in the midst of misery."
This is in large part what I have been calling for (although not to one specific race, but rather to all individuals today), a new style of communication - a new language that structures the present reality accurately and one that can refresh the doxa and force it back into critical relevance. This is the functionality of hyphenation, and one of the principal reasons hyphenation is a paramount necessity.
Rather than being a metaphorical notion or lofty enterprise, hyphenation is an integral concept to the relevant existence and transcending progress of this and every succeeding generation...
In a world facing greatness and experiencing transcendence, no longer should the below statistics ever be a present reality or a tolerable occurrence:
Table 1 - From the Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive (http://faculty.berea.edu/browners/chesnutt/classroom/lynchingtat.html)
U.S. Lynching Statistics (1882-1968)
4743 incidents reported:
3446 against blacks
1297 against whites
Top Three States:
Mississippi - 581
Georgia - 531
Texas - 493
By Region:
79% - South
21% - North & West
States that did NOT report any lynching :
Arizona
Idaho
Maine
Nevada
South Dakota
Vermont
Wisconsin
States lynching more whites than blacks:
California
Colorado
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Michigan
Minnesota
Montana
Nebraska
New Mexico
North Dakota
Oklahoma
Oregon
Utah
Washington
Wyoming
Table 2 - From Jana Evans Braziel, "History of Lynching in the United States" (http://www.umass.edu/complit/aclanet/ACLAText/USLynch/html)
Black Victims of White Lynch Mobs by State (1882-1930)
State/Number of Victims
Deep South
Mississippi/462
Georgia/423
Louisiana/283
Alabama/262
South Carolina/143
Border South
Florida/212
Tennessee/174
Arkansas/162
Kentucky/118
North Carolina/75
Black Victims of Lynching per 100,000 Blacks by State (1882-1930)
State/Number of Victims per 100,000
Deep South
Mississippi/52.8
Georgia/41.8
Louisiana/43.7
Alabama/32.4
South Carolina/18.8
Border South
Florida/79.8
Tennessee/38.4
Arkansas/42.6
Kentucky/45.7
North Carolina/11.0
