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Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, teach my students to think robustly about the black feminist argument that black lives don’t, or more precisely, can’t matter-save an epistemological crisis that rearranges how and what we know-it is Jay-Z who teaches them to see, think, and feel this theoretical argument practiced as culture, as the daily, quotidian operations of the world. While the critical black theorists I assign, like Frank B.
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His music video for the title track especially invites students to think about the movement of the body in song and to think about what identity and difference mean. Indeed, Jay-Z’s stylings invite a poetic correction to the antiblack grammar of this world. His music teaches us to read more closely for how the “criminal justice system stalks black people”-for example, in “Guilty Until Proven Innocent” Jay-Z “ the Latin phrase that is considered the bedrock principle of our criminal justice system, ei incumbit probatio qui dicit” in which “the burden of proof is on the one who declares, not on one who denies”-at the same time as his music teaches us to listen for the sound of black suffering, in beats that break and hold to reveal movements within movements that are “lived underground, in outer space”. No cultural producer has been so prolific in his responses to structural antiblackness, in song and in prose, as Jay-Z. It’s a both/and kind of theory, and Jay-Z is its most high-profile celebrity spokesperson. Afro-pessimism at once mourns the gratuitous suffering black people must endure and professes the gratuitous freedom they might enjoy. So, I asked my students to listen, closely.Īs a scholar and educator of Afro-pessimism-perhaps the greatest form of black optimism- I have found that Jay-Z’s music and politics offer me a useful pedagogical instrument for moving black radical thought through and beyond the classroom. Jay-Z has been telling us so for all of these years. Trump’s America exposes a fundamental truth-that black lives will be sacrificed to the alter of white supremacy even after the white supremacists retire their hoods.