The Reconceptualization And Commodification Of Blackness In A Post-Eugenic Neoliberal Economical ModelOr Black, The Other Other White Meat

Despite the title, this week's post remains fairly simple. Having two main questions, I want to address Sexton's use of blackness as a means by which persons of color are existentially reconceptualized; and how this reconceptualization is used to further their value as commodified assets in capitalism.


Regarding "Hypodecent"

In what way does hypodescent contribute to commodification of persons of color, women of color in particular, within a neoliberal economy?

To preface my inquiry, I am framing this subject in the context of the Human Eugenics movement (mtDNA, phenotype as marketability, etc... further thoughts on which I reserve for discussion). Hypodescent is prevalent in mixed raced studies, and is the idea that your social classification is no higher than that of your least socially prominent parent. I chose the human Eugenics movement to briefly highlight the ethical perspective of hypodescent, and relate it to WOC feminism in capitalist society.


The Black body as the other Other

In what way is Sexton, through Fanon and Vasconcelos, reconceptualizing, and expanding Jean Paul Sartre's concept of "The Other" to not only address blackness, and the black gaze (I suppose in contrast to... or rather in its contact with whiteness, and the white gaze), but also the Black Body? ie. Is it possible that if the black is blind to self-realization through assisted reflection, that the black body is a conceptualized as a separate entity capable of returning not so much a "gaze" but perhaps realization through touch/feel/intimacy? (afterall, what is more intimate than dissection? and what is more self affirming than comparing of bodies?)

I take 3 sections to highlight this point:
First - "The sterilization of the black population, barring the reproduction of its ugliness and inferiority, is engineered for Vasconcelos through an aesthetic pedagogy promoting the dazzle of loving human beautification. The black simply has to be educated as to her unsightliness, an unambiguous point with which she will eventually agree, for her to refrain and "give way to the more handsome."

Second - "The very thing that grants whiteness its social existence, blackness, is the very thing that at the extreme, the edge, the verge of race-prevents it from enjoying a stable l ife, that "gives . . . its classification as seeming.""

Third - "Fanon goes on to speak of a desire to refuse this disassembling force of the white look, to avoid the mournful shroud of blackness, a conservative desire for repair or resolution. "I did not want this revision," he says. "All I wanted was to be a man among other men." That is, to participate in the honorable world of whiteness, to not be deemed animal, bad, mean, or ugly. A desire to not be slashed, dissected, cut to slices."