“In Racial Indigestion, the black mouth speaks, laughs, and eats in the face of the violent desires of white supremacy; in fact, speech, laughter, and eating are conjoined as tropes of black cultural presence and resistance.” (9).
“it is quite within the employer’s purview to enter the cook’s mouth in order to discipline her tongue. In a more abstract sense orality gives the cook her access to power as well; while her mouth may be subject to middle-class discipline, she has access to her employers’ mouths as well. In fact the cook’s entire worth hinges on her mouth: it metonymizes her essential value as a cook.” (49).
Relevant quotes from U.S. News article ‘America Has a Big Race Problem’:
“We need a new, national conversation about race – about what it means when nearly every white person in America carries around an implicit racial bias that subconsciously prefers white people over black people in social, professional and educational settings. It’s black and white. It’s that stark. And we need to start on that conversation as soon as possible.”
“Dozens of national polls in America during the past two decades consistently show more than three-quarters of us don’t believe we have a problem with racial tension in America. Fewer and fewer Americans openly admit that they’re racist, these polls have shown for years. But a more nuanced study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that many Americans still do, in fact, harbor beliefs about racial and ethnic minorities that are based on racist stereotypes.”
Response:
While white Americans used to quite literally commodify African Americans by trading them and keeping them as slaves, our society clearly still tends to think of them as edible objects. Tompkins identifies that to make a group of people ‘edible’, they must first become socially degraded. Social degradation of the black community is more evident today than it has been since the time of slavery, with our country’s choice this past year to elect a racist bigot into office. The support that this offensive, prejudice man has received, along with his followers actions, provide plenty of evidence that we are nowhere close to equality between white and black cultures. Active discrimination in the workplace, criminal justice system, and field of education is running rampant. Institutions of every kind in America continue to have either conscious or subconscious biases against people of color. African Americans are suffering every day under the ever present looming idea that has progressed through the years, that they are somehow deemed of less value than white Americans. On a more terrifying level, people of color are now beginning to face violence and fear hate crimes from extremists. It is because of these severe pressures and incidents that I believe African Americans are not simply at a stage of social degradation, they are now at a stage where actual consumption of their culture is being attempted.
It is concerning because many people in today’s America do not see how trapped the black population is under these demeaning forces because the distinctions are not as defined as they were in times of slavery. An alarming amount of society’s members believe we live in a world that has moved past our old tendency towards racial tensions, yet it is clear that racist ideas still lie in the minds of plenty. The line between conscious and subconscious are beginning to become less and less blurred with current events as graphic slogans and images are spreading across the nation. Even those who have believed for a long while that we live in a post-racial time are awakening to reality and beginning to see how false that concept is.
Fortunately, the protests against racism are growing in size as the black lives matter movement persists on and demonstrations against racism are breaking out everywhere. Tompkins powerfully describes the past and current state of the strong voice that the black community holds as she states that “the black mouth is a site of political intensity itself, as it consistently occupies and preempts the domination of white desire, from the kitchen, from the back of the house an below the stairs, and then ultimately in the sphere of urban commodity culture.” (9). The mouths belonging to people of color as well as their white allies are speaking louder now than they have since the days of slavery. Anti-racist movements are doing their best to get white supremacists to choke on their ideas, begging them to spit out their hate. The resistance against the dominant-white culture is too vigorous to ignore.
While African Americans are well-adept at entering the mouths of the white extremists they feel subordinate too, it’s time for the chauvinistic supremacists to take a deeper look through the lips of black culture, and step inside the mouths that are speaking loudly to really feel the pain and eniquity that sits on their tongues. We can only hope that one day, more of these right-wing radicals will finally feel an uncomfortable churning in their gut and decide to vomit out their repulsive, cannabilistic desires to violently devour other beings with hostility.