The Borders of Blackness

Black oppression in the South, and arguably in America at large, has had many phases and manifestations: slavery, peonage and sharecropping, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. These share common elements and reflect the changing economic, social, and political needs of the dominant culture, white, economically elite men and their desire to manipulate black bodies in the fashion that benefits them the most. Powerful whites, eugenicists, colonists designed blackness as a justification for oppression, and built a border around this status that prevented social migration.
While reading George’s story in Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns I was intrigued by the simultaneous expendability of black bodies, but also the reliance whites had on those same people to ensure their own economic vitality. George was unwilling to be abused by white orchard owners, but because there was this inability to build a true solidarity between George and the other workers, George was singled out, and thus expendable. Even though the group he belonged to performed a necessary task, when he was isolated from the other black pickers, white businessmen attempted to kill him. George’s rebellion disqualified him in the narrow terms of Jim Crow understandings of black’s usefulness, which was defined by their willingness (however fear-driven) to do difficult jobs for little to no compensation. This capitalistic exploitation was the single division between expendable and necessary blacks. George crossed this border and the borders of acceptable blackness and was forced to leave or die.

Ahmed asserts in Uprooting/Regroundings “mobility often rests on the power of border controls and policing of who does and does not belong” (5), and this can be applied to George’s geographic journey from South to North, and the racism he still faced and the policing of the border to Americanness (or Whiteness or lack of oppression) he faced in the North and as a part of his job on the train and in general. However, I think this lens of “border control” would be interesting to apply to who survives in the Jim Crow South, and what if any crossing is allowed, what is the Jim Crow borders, who controls them, and how?

George is presented with the rules he is to play by, lower pay, mandatory and excessive respectfulness to whites, dehumanization, infantilization, and more. This is the border he is given between blackness and whiteness. He begins to attempt to cross or blur those lines when he organizes the strikes in the fruit orchards, where he is utilizing a system (though unofficial) unionization that has for the most part only been available for whites to improve conditions, and he is actively defying white authority while also asserting that his blackness does not mean he should not be compensated for his work. George pushes against this border that relegates blackness to poverty and exploitation, so the orchard owners and foreman confront him. They are as Ahmed presents the ones with power who control who crosses borders, in this case between white workers within capitalism and black workers. As George steps further and the initial policing is not enough his physical body is threatened and he is forced to physically migrate. But the border and walls around blackness in America follow him, and though Sheriff McCall was no longer the force policing, it did not mean no whites were. Many still sought to gain from relegating George and others within these constrained borders, and their movements to escape were in reality impossible, because even as Robert learned with his respectability politics and education racism did not end, and as the pickers who abandoned George would see their attempts to appease the white gatekeepers would not free them from white borders around blackness.

Borders exist in geographical terms, between continents, countries, and states, but for marginalized groups and in George’s case blacks in America their oppression and blackness has been confined by whites seeking to profit from their restrictions, thus attempting to break from exploitation is met with the power of white supremacy and privilege to keep you there. As George fails to create true solidarity with the pickers, he is forced to run to the north, but ends up both physically crossing back over the borders into the south on his train, but also never  being able to fully outwit the border controls on blackness that relegate him to lower pay, no upward mobility and constant suffocation by whiteness.