Black Hysteria and the African American Equation, by Stanford Carpenter – My EthnoSurreal Life | @MDWorld

March 12, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments

Columbia University. New York City, NY, a very long time ago: a chilly day had given way to an even colder evening. A group of graduate students, mostly students of color, from various disciplines sat in the Anthropology lounge – coats, scarves, and sweaters strewn about– mesmerized by the words flowing from her mouth. It was a semi-private gathering. She was an African American Anthropology Professor sharing her stories with us. Story after story, morphing together into a continuous captivating melody … until the moment when she disrupted it with three words: “BLACK HYSTERIA MONTH.” Shock. It must have been a slip of the tongue. It wasn’t. She went on to describe how throughout most of her career, whether her current research was race related or not, she received more requests to speak during Black History Month than she could possibly accept and hardly any during the other eleven months out of the year. So she started calling February BLACK HYSTERIA MONTH. Eventually, she recounted, she started declining and or postponing to other months, most, if not all, of her February speaking engagements. She didn’t want to participate in the hysteria anymore. So she started taking the month off.

Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore, MD. A long time ago. At the time, Lester Spence and I were both teaching at Johns Hopkins in different departments, he in Political Science and I in Anthropology. Both of us identify as African American. As is the case with most colleges and universities, African American teachers were few and far between. When a mutual colleague introduced us, in part because we share the same skin, we both said the same thing, “I know you from somewhere.” We went back and forth for a few minutes before we gave up. A couple of weeks later I bumped into Lester off campus … at a comic shop that we both regularly frequented. That was when we realized where we had seen each other. Eventually, we would co-design and teach a class together called “Black Power Fantasies.” Lester Spence was cool one, always smooth in a suite and tie. I was the earnest one, the nerdy guy in sporting a tie and a vest or sport coat without a tie. Every class meeting was a riot. Lester and I would reliably stumble on a point of disagreement. The same stories, readings, and images, yet our training left us at friendly odds.

Political Scientist Dr. Lester Spence: “But how do you count that?”

Anthropologist Dr. Stanford Carpenter: “But what does it mean to the people?”

Still, we both loved comics. Sometimes referencing them in our conversations. During one of our exchanges about African American culture, identity, and politics and the n-word one of us, I don’t remember which, referenced the anti-life equation. On a lark, we started playing around with the idea of creating an African American Equation. It was challenge from the beginning. As we moved words around and tried to assign value we kept coming up against the same problem. Not only do the terms change over time but any given moment, the terms had different meanings and values to people regardless of their ethnic or racial identification, something we ended up reflecting in the different representations of the n-word. The deeper the conversation, the more surreal, the more EthnoSurreal it became.

The African American Equation would later be incorporated along with Brother-Story and the Headless Man into a larger piece titled Writing on Walls.

The Yerba Buena Gardens. San Francisco. Recently. I was invited to interview Joel Christian Gill, MFA, African American creator of Talented Tenth and Strange Fruit, graphic novels depicting African American histories and stories that many people aren’t aware of. Throughout the interview, he returned to a familiar reprise, “Black History Month should be every month.”

So in effort to resist being swept up in BLACK HYSTERIA MONTH and in keeping with Joel Christian Gill’s call to make every month Black History Month, I thought I would hold off sharing the Lester Spence’s and my African American Equation until February had passed.