3 - (Further) Figures of Violence: The Street in the U. S. Landscape

Summary

The enduring paradox of the concomitantly valueless and valuable status of African Americans in the dominant cultural imagination of the United States is well presented in the opening pages of The Wages of Whiteness by the historian David R. Roediger, who describes the efficacy and ubiquity of African American communities as present absences. Even as African Americans are taken as exemplary signs of the absence of a variety of human attributes and social proprieties (not to mention being enforced as physically absent from certain sociopolitical spheres), African American communities remain centrally present to and for the identity that dismisses them. The acknowledgment of such supplementarity is, of course, by now a commonplace of poststructuralist understanding – however, a commonplace inadequately pursued in relation to the dynamics of race (a matter taken up in Chapter V). Thus, what Roediger's statements manage to do is to render unmistakable the connections between economies of race and the academic commonplace of the deconstructive supplement. The second paragraph of The Wages of Whiteness reads as follows:

Even in an all-white town, race was never absent. I learned absolutely no lore of my German ancestry and no more than a few meaningless snatches of Irish songs, but missed little of racist folklore. Kids came to know the exigencies of chance by chanting “Eeny, meany, miney, mo / Catch a nigger by the toe” to decide teams and first batters in sport. […]