5 - White Rain and the Black Atlantic

Summary

The justification for risking the annihilation of the human race was always expressed in terms of America's willingness to go to any lengths to preserve freedom […] that readiness for heroic measures in the defense of liberty disappeared […] when the threat was within our own borders and was concerned with the Negro's liberty.

Martin Luther King Jr

a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black.

Simone de Beauvoir

In asking how the cultural production of the black Atlantic has used the symbol of nuclear weapons to critique the supposed technological and moral superiority of the Western nations developing them, I draw upon the ideas posed by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Seeing the capital generated by slave labour on New World plantations as a necessary component of the economic motor of modernity, Gilroy argues slavery was ‘internal to western civilisation’. Yet members of the African diaspora were historically denied full citizenship of the West, with scientific racism implicated in that refusal. Central to the cultures of the black Atlantic is ‘the idea of doubleness […] often argued to be the constitutive force giving rise to black experience in the modern world’; the peoples of the black Atlantic were viewed as ‘in but not necessarily of the modern, western world’, relegated to a limbo of primitive stasis. For Gilroy, this ambivalence has constituted the black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, pointing out where its promises have gone unfulfilled for those on the wrong side of the colour line, and where the very terms of modernity's development, such as the application of rationality and scientific discovery for often irrational and racially encoded ends, must be transcended.

This chapter explores the image of nuclear war in the context of the black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity. It asks how racial oppression and nuclear weapons have been considered concurrently by black Atlantic thinkers, writers and performers to emphasize the structures of racial oppression within Western societies, and the questionable morality and desirability of the West's technological progress.