“Why Did the White Woman Cross the Street?”: Cultural Countermeasures against Affective Forms of Racism

A Black student came to my office one day with a seemingly simple question about racism. He told me about an experience he had in front of a downtown restaurant in Ithaca, New York. It was daytime, and he and his friends (most of whom were Black men) were joking around. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a white woman approaching the group. Upon seeing them, her body visibly tensed up. She quickened her step and nervously crossed the street. My student intuited that the white woman had crossed the street because she was afraid to come into contact with the group of young Black men. Like many other Black people before him, my student went on to relay other instances of reflexive racial phobias and embodied aversions he had experienced: white women instinctively clutching their purses when they passed him; white men possessively pulling their girlfriends closer when approaching him; store clerks anxiously following him in the store; cab drivers refusing to stop for him, but picking up white people only steps away from where he waved.1

“Why did the white woman cross the street?” the young Black man asked me. He wanted to know how the woman had become reflexively afraid. How had the mere visual cue of his Black male body triggered fear in the white woman before she had time to consciously process her decision to cross the street? He wanted to know why her fear did not vanish when it became obvious that he and his friends posed no danger to her. Did she not see that there was no actual threat facing her? He wanted to know if he was justified in deeming her racist given that her actions seemed to take place before there was hardly any time for conscious deliberation. Most importantly, he wanted to know whether affective forms of racism— expressions of racial bias, aversion, and discrimination that are embodied, preconscious, automatic, and often unchanged by exposure to facts and evidence—can be countered and dismantled.

This essay attempts to offer some tentative answers to my student’s provocative questions. To do so, I outline how affective forms of racism that precede conscious deliberation are governed by logics that are distinct from explicit or intentional forms of racism. Next, I ask if there is any hope for the white woman to undo her reflexive racial phobia toward Black men. I show that the processes involved in changing implicit, automatic, and affective reflexes is not the same as changing consciously held ideas. Indeed, affective forms of racism can persist even when people are consciously committed to racial equity. I argue that any efforts to prevent or undo affective forms of racism must necessarily contend with our transactional relationships to culture and representation. Specifically, we must carefully examine popular culture’s role in forming and solidifying our implicit, automatic associations by repetitively exposing us to racist frames and stereotypes about Black people.2 As we will see, many of the countermeasures tested by social psychologists against implicit bias and affective racism involve finding effective ways to prevent the automatic activation of racist stereotypes and to reorganize the negative emotions (fears, anxieties, discomforts) that these preconscious associations tend to evoke.3

Though some of the most popular countermeasures proposed by social psychologists rely on activating “positive” counter-stereotypes of Black people, I caution that if such countermeasures were widely adopted in popular culture, they would amplify investments in racial exceptionalism, tokenism, and fetishism while leaving the epistemological and ontological frameworks of racism intact. Though positive counter-stereotypes are more likely to cultivate fetishistic embodied responses like adulation and desire, they ultimately strengthen cultural frames that prohibit Black people’s lived complexities to be widely represented in popular culture. Moreover, positive counter-stereotypes impose extraordinarily restrictive conditions of acceptability on Black people while relegating those who do not fit the bill as deserving of exclusion, violence, and discrimination.

In order to circumvent the entrapments created by countermeasures that rely on positive counter-stereotypes, I argue instead for the proliferation of Black creative processes and epistemologies that allow the complexities of Black ontology to thrive. Rather than accepting the inevitability of racist cultures and working to correct affective racism after people’s embodied habits have already formed, I argue that exposure to culturally rich and diverse depictions of Black people’s lived experiences that are irreducible to positive and negative stereotypes may help prevent affective racism from becoming deeply entrenched in the first place. Such cultural countermeasures have the potential to prevent and disrupt affective forms of racism precisely because they undermine hegemonic racial frames that reduce Black ontology to positive or negative classification.4

To ground my proposition, I consider Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) as a cultural exemplar that methodologically disrupts both fetishistic (positive) and phobic (negative) stereotypes. I read the album less for what it ideologically declares and more for the ways its methodological production and cultural praxis might prevent the formation and entrenchment of the automatically activated stereotypes that undergird affective racism. Though many other Black cultural producers and exemplars similarly undermine hegemonic racial frames that reduce Black people to positive or negative caricatures, I focus on Lamar’s album because of its remarkable influence among youth, particularly those engaged in the Black Lives Matter movement. As songs like “Alright” are organically taken up by youth in the Black Lives Matter movement, Lamar’s music is adapted into a broader praxis that resist hegemonic racial frames, proliferating methods that instead express the complexity of Black ontology.5 I also focus on Lamar because of the ways his performances have influenced a renewed commitment to Black cultural practices that refute and exceed Eurocentric frames and commodifying processes among young artists.

The Distinct Logics of Affective Racism

In his encounter with the white woman, my student ascertained a series of complex problems whose mechanisms and implications scholars are only beginning to understand in greater detail. Specifically, my student perceived that racism had penetrated the white woman’s bodily reflexes, and that these automatic reactions were expressed before there was time for conscious deliberation. Indeed, even if the white woman professed to be committed to antiracism and egalitarianism, by virtue of living in U.S. culture and society, it is likely that her embodied and emotional geography would exhibit preferences for white people and aversions toward Black people.

A large body of scholarship has shown that circulating racist stereotypes in public cultures not only shapes explicitly professed ideologies but also what social psychologists call “implicit racial biases”: bodily responses that precede or bypass conscious deliberation and indicate which racial groups a person favors, disfavors, or fears.6 Implicit preferences are measured in a number of ways, but the “Implicit Association Test” (IAT) has become one of the most commonly used methods. Essentially, the IAT uses participants’ response speed to assess whether they positively or negatively evaluate the objects they are viewing.7 The IAT does not allow people time to consciously deliberate their responses. As such, the test measures reflexive or automatic responses rather than consciously held views. Importantly, scholars have established that people’s implicit racial biases are strongly correlated with racially discriminatory outcomes.8 Implicit racial biases contribute to racially discriminatory disparities in hiring, court trials, policing, and medical treatment, among other domains.9 In other words, our automatic, implicit responses to Black people are neither innocent nor inconsequential. Affective forms of racism can prove fatal to victims like Tamir Rice, who was killed while holding a toy gun only 1.7 seconds after police arrived,10 or to Amadou Diallo, who was shot 44 times for reaching for his wallet.

Implicit racial preferences also manifest in people who are themselves subject to racial stereotypes and discrimination. Although significantly less researched, studies have shown that Black people’s implicit, automatic preferences yield mixed results. While some Black people implicitly favor whites in their automatic responses (even if they consciously favor Black people), others show a pro-Black implicit bias.11 According to data compiled by Harvard University’s Project Implicit, “Although some Black participants show liking for White over Black, others show no preference, and yet others show a preference for Black over White.”12 This evidence renews questions about the cultural mechanisms that cultivate affective forms of internalized prejudice as well as how these might be countered.

Finally, people’s affective racial responses (e.g., phobias, aversions, fetishisms) tend to trump facts and reasonable arguments about racism. Telling the white woman that, factually speaking, she is more likely to confront danger from a white man because the majority of crimes and sexual assaults take place intraracially does little to unravel embodied racial fears she has learned over a lifetime. Indeed, people’s emotional and embodied responses—particularly those that activate fear, anxiety, or apprehension—cause them to dismiss, falsify, or skew factual evidence. This is especially true if the evidence threatens their positive self-concepts and emotionally charged beliefs.13 In other words, factual information that disrupts the idea that I am a “good” person or that challenges the “positive” characteristics of my group identity is likely to be dismissed or skewed by my emotional defenses.14 This is one of the main reasons white people tend to demonstrate little emotional receptivity for the sociological facts of systemic racism. Because innumerable empirical studies expose the ways white people actively and passively participate in and benefit from racially discriminatory practices, it is impossible to genuinely accept the facts of racism and continue to think of white people as overwhelmingly “good” and “positive.”15 Due to these emotional defenses, confronting systemic racism remains difficult and unlikely for many white people.16

Research on implicit racial bias suggests that people cannot simply wish themselves out of their reflexive responses to Black people, at least not without coupling such wishes with sustained commitments and repetitive practices. Thus, my student sensed what Frantz Fanon theorized long ago in Black Skins, White Masks: that the distinct operative logics of affective racism posit unique challenges to those committed to racial justice.

Was the white woman racist for reflexively crossing the street? Research shows that our bodies can perpetuate racism without our conscious intent. So, if our definition of “racist” includes forms of discrimination that lack conscious intent or deliberation, then yes, the white woman is racist. But perhaps more important than pronouncing the white woman racist is the question of what to do with reflexes and emotional responses that harm Black people without conscious intent. To this complex problem of affective racism, I attempt to offer a provisional answer in the sections that follow. If it is not enough to be consciously committed to racial justice because our bodies tend to continue to express implicit biases, is there any hope for those who experience the daily indignities, discriminatory outcomes, and potentially lethal consequences of white racial phobias and aversions? How do we counter affective forms of racism if merely exposing white people to the facts of racism is insufficient to change their embodied geographies?

Countermeasures against Affective Racism

Culture is a significant site for learning and solidifying affective forms of racism. Cultural narratives shape our conscious ideological commitments but also the unconsciously held prejudices, preferences, and predispositions of our bodies.17 Once formed, people’s affective logics are very resistant to change yet nonetheless malleable.18 Changing consciously held racist ideologies often depends on relearning commonly held assumptions about history, culture, and social relations. For example, scholars have extensively documented how antiracist narratives and representations critically rupture racist ideas, forcing the reformulation of dominant cultural discourses over time.19 But the malleability of racism at the level of affect, automaticity, and the pre-conscious body presents a relatively new terrain for antiracist countermeasures. Essentially, those who hope to undo affective forms of racism must unravel deeply held negative associations with blackness that have become reflexive and embodied.

To test the malleability of affective racism, a number of psychologists have turned to a seemingly logical remedy: exposing participants to positive counter-stereotypic representations of Black people. They wanted to see if offering affirmative cultural representations of Black people would diminish people’s implicit preferences for whites without their conscious knowledge. In an often-cited experiment conducted by Nilanjana Dasgupta and Anthony G. Greenwald, participants were exposed to ten admired Black individuals (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.) and ten disliked white individuals (e.g., Charles Manson) before taking the IAT. When compared to a control group, participants who viewed admired Black and disliked white individuals showed diminished implicit preference for white people compared to Black people. The effect persisted in a follow-up test 24 hours later.20

The experiment suggested that positive cultural representations (in a milieu that generally disseminates negative stereotypes of Black people) have the ability to change implicit racial preferences or biases. Because of its promise, this experiment was repeated by Jennifer Joy-Gaba and Brian A. Nosek using a much larger sample of participants (1,303, of which 1,060 identified as white).21 Joy-Gaba and Nosek found that exposing participants only to positive Black exemplars did not replicate Dasgupta and Greenwald’s original effect. In two subsequent experiments, Joy-Gaba and Nosek added the negative white exemplars to the positive Black ones and made participants cognizant that race was a category of analysis.22 In these subsequent experiments, they were able to show a decrease in implicit racial biases, but the effect was much weaker than Dasgupta and Greenwald’s original results.23 The experiment suggested that to reduce implicit preferences for whites, it is not enough to simply add positive representations of Black people; rather, processes that cultivate negative associations with white people must also be present.

A comparative analysis of seventeen different interventions against affective racism conducted by Calvin K. Lai et al. found that some of the most effective measures for diminishing racial bias toward Black people involved inverting normative racial associations (such that white bad and Black good).24 While these experiments took place within the restrictive environments of psychology labs rather than people’s complex lived realities, they reflect common sense and well-founded assumptions that cultural representations have the power to shape not only consciously held beliefs about Black and white people but also automatic associations, biases, and preferences. Under this premise, correcting negative stereotypes of Black people by emphasizing positive counter-stereotypes and introducing more negative stereotypes of white people appears to be a logical countermeasure against affective forms of racism. To take this proposition further, we might imagine changing U.S. popular culture so that Black people would be positively represented and white people negatively represented over sustained periods of time.

But as soon as we make this proposition, we find ourselves confronting terribly complicated implications. In the next two sections, I caution that social psychologists who propose activating positive Black counter-stereotypes as countermeasures to implicit racial biases fail to consider two crucial issues. First, by myopically focusing on reversing implicit preferences in individual participants, social psychologists forget to consider that the broader U.S. cultural context situates counter-stereotypes about white and Black people in radically different ways. Second, by encouraging people to spread positive Black counter-stereotypes in order to reduce implicit bias, social psychologists are unwittingly replenishing cultural investments in racial exceptionalism, tokenism and restrictive conditions of acceptability for Black people.

The Limits of “Positive” Counter-Stereotypes in Undoing Affective Racism

The above-referenced psychology experiments take for granted that U.S. cultures generally teach people what Stuart Hall called “chains of equivalence” between “black ¼ African ¼ savage ¼ emotional ¼ inferior ¼ slave ¼ bad versus white ¼ European ¼ civilized ¼ rational ¼ superior ¼ free ¼ good.” Even if these equivalences are not as crudely expressed in post–civil rights popular cultures as their historical antecedents, they nonetheless continue to dominate U.S. popular cultures.

Launching from this premise, the psychology experiments also assume that when people practice associating whites with bad and Black with good they replace their existing stereotypical racial associations with new ones, in turn reducing implicit preferences for whites. But if we move beyond the limited environments of psychology experiments and examine the work that positive Black and negative white counter-stereotypes perform in actual cultural contexts we quickly realize that these proposed countermeasures to implicit bias inadvertently produce a new set of problems and paradoxes.

In U.S. culture, white people have the unique prerogative of being represented as individuals rather than grouped under the banner of a monolithic racial identity. Because of this, negative representations of individual white people generally fail to coalesce into hegemonic stereotypes of white people as a group. The circulation of figures like Charles Manson generally fails to result in stereotypes that associate all white people with neo-Nazi murderers. Scandals about sexually predatory figures like Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Dominique Strauss-Khan, and Harvey Weinstein do not congeal into widely shared reflexive racial phobias that are triggered by the mere presence of white men. White terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, Dylann Roof, and James A. Fields, Jr., as well as numerous white men who have committed mass shootings in the 21st century, have yet to convert into stereotypes that are automatically activated when white men enter a school or board a plane. Of course, this may not be equally true for Black people and other people of color. Since Black people and other people of color regularly experience instances of white violence (particularly at the hands of police officers), such associations may be more likely to be automatically activated in their embodied responses. Nonetheless, because racism exempts whiteness from what Albert Memmi called “the mark of the plural,” or the “anonymous collectivity” attached to oppressed people,26 negative representations of white people do not produce the same cultural reverberations and effects as Black ones.27

While negative white representations generally fail to convert into automatically activated stereotypes and affective responses, positive Black representations must work against negative ideational and affective associations that date back to the emergence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, if not before. Because of the cumulative strength of negative associations with blackness, positive counter-stereotypes tend to be classified as the exception to the rule, or small deviations from the norm. Though this is generally not their intention, Black positive counter-stereotypes tend to inadvertently reify investments in racial exceptionalism and tokenism. Furthermore, because the Black counter-stereotype is meant to undo pervasive negative associations with blackness in U.S. culture, it compels a level of positivity that necessarily falsifies Black ontological complexity. Put differently, the positive Black exemplar must uphold a level of perfectionism that is virtually impossible to fulfill in lived experience. Additionally, the conditions of acceptability are still defined by dominant white cultures. For who determines what and who qualifies as a positive Black exemplar? A cultural milieu structured by the Eurocentric racial regimes has not only defined the criteria of what counts as admirable or acceptable; it reserves for itself the prerogative to accept or reject what kind of Black people might fall into such categories, as well as the entitlement to extricate them back to the “bad” category.

To illustrate the radically disparate ways positive Black and negative white counter-stereotypes are received within actual U.S. cultural contexts, let us consider Bill Cosby as an example. Prior to the 2015 mainstream coverage of 59 women who publicly testified that he had drugged, raped, or sexually assaulted them, Cosby stood as the epitome of “positive” Black cultural representations on primetime television. When (predominantly white) women’s allegations became so numerous that U.S. publics could no longer ignore the issue, Black people explored their powerful emotional attachments to the legacy of positive Black representations that Cosby stood for as well as their ambivalences.

Black feminist Brittney Cooper expressed a sense of collective mourning over losing the sense of hope and possibility Cosby had fostered in Black people’s imagination. The Cosby Show’s Huxtable family had stood in as “fictive kin” for many Black Americans, and their achievements as aspirational ideals and possibilities.28 Cooper critiques the aspirational ideals Cosby endorsed for the ways they reinforced fierce attachments to patriarchal Black family models and restrictive respectability politics. She debunks the illusion that “respectable comportment” has ever shielded Black people from racist discrimination and violence. At the same time, Cooper acknowledges that many Black Americans, to varying degrees, subscribe to the “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” ethic and respectability ideals Cosby pedaled. As a result, she argues that Black Americans had often internalized the shame and blame Cosby had dealt them for purportedly failing to “correct” and uplift themselves to the level of perfectionism portrayed on The Cosby Show. Ironically, it was Cosby who should have been ashamed all along. And yet, because racism insidiously associates the sins of any single prominent Black figure to all Black people, a sense of collective shame was imposed on many Black Americans once Cosby’s respectability was debunked. As Cooper painfully writes,

While too many Black folks have been busy trying to live up to the Huxtable ideal, Cosby terrorized countless women, drugging them, raping them, and sometimes trying to buy their silence. That he chose as victims the one group of women that Black men are warned away from almost from birth, because the trauma of lynchings past still haunt us, only added more shame and insult to the injury.
The thing that I am most angry about besides Cosby’s violent, predatory acts toward his female victims is the collective sense of shame and disappointment that rests on the sagging shoulders of black folks in this moment.29

Cooper astutely captures the double-edged paradoxes embedded in positive counter-stereotypes once epitomized by Black figures like Cosby. One the one hand, these representations offer emotional reprieve to Black Americans who are so regularly associated with negative stereotypes and emotions. Additionally, positive representations introduce alternative affective and cognitive associations in nonBlack Americans’ imaginaries, whose hyper-segregated lives makes it unlikely that they will be exposed to positive narratives about Black people through interpersonal relationships, friendships, or educational and religious communities. On the other hand, positive counter-stereotypes of Black Americans reproduce investments in racial exceptionality and tokenism (e.g., Pres. Barack Obama) that implicitly deem a majority of Black folks as not good enough. Moreover, these representations impose vehemently strict acceptability constraints on Black people’s behaviors and appearances.

It goes without saying that these acceptability constraints are inextricably tied to Black sexuality. As Patricia Hill Collins and numerous Black feminists have argued, because Black women’s and men’s sexuality has always been depicted as non-normative in U.S. cultures, conditions of acceptability are invariably tied to restricting Black sexual expression and to reinforcing hetero-patriarchal, nuclear Black family models. Under this frame, sexual forms of expression that are deemed improper, single-parent households, woman-centered households, families defined by non-biological kinship, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ), and gender non-conforming families are necessarily relegated to purportedly deviant, negative stereotypes that corroborate the white racist imagination.30

Indeed, in developing The Cosby Show, Bill Cosby explicitly aimed to counter the legacy of Black negative stereotypes on network television, many of which were tied to the purportedly non-normative structure of the Black family.31 To do so, the show could only represent the Huxtable family members in idealized ways. Any negative characteristics stereotypically associated with Black people (particularly during the Reagan era) would have reinforced the default negative associations with Black group identity (e.g., criminality, deviant sexuality, single-motherhood, absent fatherhood). It was particularly important that The Cosby Show represent idealized versions of Black manhood (married, provider, loving husband, good father) and Black motherhood (married, sexually proper but attractive, loving mother) in order to counter white fantasy constructions of Black men and women.

But these scrubbed depictions of blackness backfired in unexpected ways. As Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis show, most white viewers understood the Huxtables as exceptional, suggesting that they did not believe most Black Americans shared the positive qualities represented on The Cosby Show. At the same time, because the show overwhelmingly failed to address the realities of racial discrimination in Black lives, the show reinforced the idea that Black people could make it in America if they only worked as hard as the Huxtables. The show encouraged (false) beliefs in an equal opportunity structure where racial identity posed no obstacles to success so long as Black people conformed to “respectable” behaviors. By implication, Black people who failed to reach similar achievements had only themselves to blame for their failures.32 In short, The Cosby Show’s positive exemplars of blackness indirectly fortified negative stereotypes of Black cultural deviance, dysfunction, and deficiency as the norm.

If the revelations of Bill Cosby’s chronic sexual violence made the representational burdens that Black Americans already bore even heavier, Cosby’s behavior confirmed popular white fantasies that even the most exemplary Black Americans are secretly deviant, particularly in their sexual practices and violent tendencies. This “fall from grace” (similar to the ones suffered by once admired celebrities like O.J. Simpson) reveals the limits of using positive counter-stereotypes as a countermeasure against affective forms of racism. Indeed, one might argue that as soon as Bill Cosby exhibited negative traits commonly associated with Black men, he was quickly flipped from the realm that Bill Yousman defines as “Blackophilia” to the realm of “Blackophobia.”33 Because both Blackophilia and Blackophobia nullify the complexities and realities of Black ontology—indeed they reduce Black ontology to a white fantasy of blackness—they ultimately reinforce the cultural frames that undergird affective forms of racism. Blackophilic or fetishistic affects cultivated by positive images fail to challenge the epistemological frameworks that undergird racism. These frameworks take racial phobias and racial fetishisms as “natural orderings, inevitable creations of collective anxieties prompted by threatening encounters with difference.”34

My point here is to show that the Manichean epistemological frames of U.S. imaginaries rarely permit Black existence to be complexly “good” and “bad.” White people fetishize, enjoy, admire, and desire certain Black celebrities, musical forms, and styles; but as soon as the latter fail to conform to white people’s expectations of enjoyment, consumption, behavioral acceptability, political civility, and so on, phobic affects about blackness tend to quickly resurface. In other words, white people’s cognitive dissonance between Blackophilia and Blackophobia is often resolved in favor of what Laurie Rudman calls “self-partisanship.”35 Instead of disturbing the “goodness” and positive value of white self-concepts by acknowledging one’s complicity in holding racist frames and fantasies of blackness, most white people will (consciously or unconsciously) find ways to defend, rationalize, or justify both their Blackophobic/Blackophilic affective investments and ideas.

As Cooper acknowledges, the idea that more positive images of Black people will rectify negative perceptions of Black Americans continues to be a widely held assumption. The presumption is not only reflected among the aforementioned social psychologists who are seeking countermeasures to implicit bias, but also oft-repeated by Black audiences, who generally find that representations of blackness are either “distorted” (i.e., fail to approximate the realities of Black people) or “damaging” (i.e., the images may be accurate but are counterproductive to the project of countering negative stereotypes).36 The long history of Black misrepresentations, or the selective repetition of negative Black characteristics, produces an unmatched collective burden on cultural producers and Black audiences who seek to disrupt the chains of equivalence that shape affective forms of racism.

If cultural producers approximate the realities of a large majority of Black Americans (e.g., young Black men’s encounters with the criminal justice system), they may be accused of reinforcing negative stereotypes of Black people. If cultural producers evade race altogether in an attempt to escape the constrictive entrapments imposed by “the mark of the plural,” they may be criticized for portraying unrealistic, color-blind views. If cultural producers depict positive representations of Black middle/upper class success, educational achievement, or religious uplift, they may be accused of wanting to be “white” or conformist. Added to these creative burdens is the fact that Black writers, producers, and directors generally do not hold the power to produce and distribute mainstream media. Most media industries are predominantly run by white American men in multinational corporations who not only perpetuate caricatures of Black life but have little to no interest in challenging America’s legacy of racist representations.37 Given these historical burdens and creative and structural constrictions, how might cultural producers and audiences help create effective cultural countermeasures against affective racism? How do we rupture the Manichean epistemological frames that constrict, reduce, and foreclose the complexity of Black ontology? How do we escape the problems and entrapments presented by positive Black counter-stereotypes as we search for effective countermeasures against affective racism?

Changing Racial Frames

The problematic implications of using positive counter-stereotypes to diminish affective racism leads us to consider how we might rupture the ontological and epistemological frames of cultures that perpetuate racism, not merely their content. In other words, we must consider the ways culture teaches us to represent, interpret, and see. Scholars have argued that Eurocentric epistemological frames are now globally pervasive, and that their systems of (de)valuation based on race is therefore inescapable.38 Moreover, these frames reproduce blackness as the referent against which social value is measured. In other words, the construction of social life in Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies constitutively depends on positing blackness as abject and socially dead.39 Because of this constitutive dependence, Euro-American frames are structured to misrecognize Black ontology. Rather than seeing the rich complexity of Black lives and people, these frames necessarily reduce the latter to the white imagination’s fantasy-construction of blackness.40

Yet even if we concede this dominance, Eurocentric ontological and epistemological frames must also be viewed as tenuous, fragile, incomplete, and in need of constant reinforcement. Indeed, as Cedric Robinson reminds us, accepting the idea that Euro-American frames are all-encompassing in their reach implicitly strengthens the belief that they are immutable, natural, and inevitable. Instead, Robinson argues that racial regimes are actually “unstable truth systems. Like Ptolemaic astronomy, they may ‘collapse’ under the weight of their own artifices, practices, and apparatuses; they may fragment, desiccated by new realities, which discard some fragments wholly while appropriating others into newer regimes. Indeed, the possibilities are the stuff of history.”41 Though the aforementioned chains of equivalence for blackness and whiteness appear entrenched in our bodies and minds, in actuality “the production of race is chaotic. It is an alchemy of the intentional and the unintended, of known and unimagined fractures of cultural forms, of relations of power and the power of social and cultural relations.”42 Refusing to concede the inevitability of racial regimes’ reproductive power creates possibilities for new fractures, fissures, faiths, and formations.

The conceit that Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies are all-encompassing creates a useful byproduct to resistant cultures. Black epistemological frameworks, particularly those that do not seek hierarchal power relations and property-driven accumulation normative to Euro-American cultures, are often illegible to dominant frames. The experiences of oppression, misrecognition, and non-belonging engender frames of critical consciousness that are not easily accessible to those who are afforded positions of power and privilege. Building on W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of “second sight,” Imani Perry describes these frameworks as “the critical gaze provided by otherness, the greater sense of reality afforded by the epistemological advantages of otherness.”43 Clyde Woods describes how Black American people’s practices and cultures in New Orleans are structured by “blues epistemologies”: ways of being, seeing, and feeling whose purpose is to engender collective survival and inter-dependent systems of support rather than individualist self-aggrandizement.44 The frameworks and practices (both representational and material) of the Blues traditions in the Mississippi Delta privilege the intertextuality of cultural improvisation as a way to generate social and cultural vibrancy for people who are constantly confronted with forms of premature death. Engaging in rituals like “second lining” or collective resistance to public asset stripping in New Orleans generates psychic and affective value to people who otherwise have to confront the realities of police brutality, poverty, toxic waste, gun violence, and school-to-prison pipelines. Because blues epistemologies value collective well-being, inter-dependent kinship structures, sustainable ecologies, non-commodified creative expression, and ethical practices that value people more than property, they are generally illegible to the frames and value systems privileged by hetero-patriarchal racial capitalism. However, to those who find the stunted forms of recognition offered by Eurocentric epistemological and ontological frames offensive and life-diminishing (i.e., Blackophobia/Blackophilia), blues epistemologies allow Black ontology to be complexly expressed and lived.

[The Blues tradition’s] principal concern is not the creation of a new hierarchy, but working class leadership, social vision, sustainable communities, social justice, and the construction of a new commons. Many of the fundamental principles of the Blues tradition of social investigation and development are often derided, censored, and, consequently, hidden in daily life until they reemerge during times like the present.45

Woods describes inter-generationally developed idioms whose implicitly agreed-upon conventions aim to sustain and rejuvenate people who have faced remarkable levels of oppression. These Black American idioms, conventions, and frames privilege improvisation as their principal methodological modality. Here, improvisation should not be understood as uncontrolled spontaneous invention.

Rather, improvisation (whether in Black American music-making or ontology) is the art of recreating, remixing, rebuilding, and reconstituting established Black American cultural forms and social practices in order to address immediate social and affective needs.46 Put differently, the core methodological objective of improvisation is to evade objectification and death, whether that death chases Black American life through the hopelessness, brutality, and despair of systemic racism, or through the commodification of Black expressive culture. As music critic and writer Albert Murray writes,

the improvisation that is the ancestral imperative of blues procedure is completely consistent with and appropriate to those of the frontiersman, the fugitive slave, and the picaresque hero. The survival of each of whom depended largely on the ability to operate on dynamics equivalent to those of the vamp, the riff, and most certainly the break, which jazz musicians regard as The Moment of Truth, or that disjuncture that should bring out your personal best.47

Notably, Black American improvisation is fundamentally an anti-individualist endeavor. It is a collective process, one that acknowledges existing conventions, idioms, and foundations at the same time as it engages in “call and response,” or what Sam Floyd and Perry describe as the black musical tradition’s master trope.48 Call and response is not simply the practice of featuring dialogue and dialogic methods in Black American music and ontology; it is a commitment to inter-textual creations that feature communication and communion with past ancestors, ideas, samples, and genres all while striving to create something new and relevant.

This is not to say that Black American idioms, epistemologies, world views, and frames are entirely autonomous from Eurocentric ones. Indeed, this would be impossible given the latter’s hegemony over cultural production and distribution. Rather, it is to show that the very process of improvising Black people’s flight from the reductive entrapments of Eurocentric frames generates something novel, something life-giving. Black American frames and idioms use improvisational methodologies that juxtapose seemingly unrelated ideas and objects in order to evade, escape, and elide what Fanon described as the “crushing objecthood” of racial fantasies and stereotypical chains of equivalence. Engaging what Robin D.G. Kelley calls “the Marvelous”49 offers imaginative and spiritual lines of flight out of stifling representational constraints and impositions. Such epistemologies engender new terms, new methods, and new sociocultural practices for self-definition—ones that are often illegible to and misread by the frameworks of hetero-patriarchal racial capitalism. In stark contrast to hegemonic definitions of blackness, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten argue that “blackness operates as the modality of life’s constant escape, and takes the form, the held and errant pattern, of flight.”50 A modality of being centered on flight is inextricably entangled with the violence imposed on blackness. The liberation sought in the lines of flight, as many scholars and revolutionaries have argued, engenders possibilities for both psychological and organized resistance to the entrapments of racism. Thus, the value of Black American epistemologies lies in the fact that they offer methodological practices that evade being pinned down, objectified, predicted, or fixed.

Effective Countermeasures against Affective Racism: To Pimp a Butterfly as Cultural Exemplar

Black Americans’ engagement with creative life forces, improvisation, and reinvention (due to both necessity and genealogical inheritance) offers a critical antidote to Eurocentric cultural frames. These frames not only undergird affective forms of racism by teaching us to think in binary oppositions that objectify and flatten the experiences and complexity of Black people. These frames also inform the ways many social psychologists methodologically seek countermeasures to implicit bias. As I have shown above, inverting associations such that Black good and white bad does little to dislodge Eurocentric frames that reproduce the exceptionality of whiteness and the phobic and/or fetishistic otherness of blackness.

Rather than reinforcing the Eurocentric frames encouraged by positive and negative stereotypes, Black American epistemological frames and improvisational ontologies offer an instructive method that may prevent stereotypical associations from becoming activated in the first place. The very methodological structure of Black American frames, idioms, and epistemologies resists stereotypical reproduction by encouraging, generating, and proliferating new and diverse associations with blackness.51 Proliferating complex and diverse cultural associations with blackness has the ability to create new associative pathways through which to understand Black people. The more a person diversifies their associations with Black people, the less likely they are to revert to simplistic and reductive negative stereotypes. Such a method would not exclude positive representations of blackness. Rather, it would mean that positivity would not be defined through Eurocentric frames and conditions of acceptability and that positive images would not be the only type of representations to be created and disseminated.

Indeed, diverse association-making is critical to other countermeasures that have proven effective in reducing explicit and implicit forms of racism outside the confines of psychology labs. As Patricia Devine et al. show, developing cross-racial relationships, consciously individuating the characteristics of people who belong to a marginalized group, considering the perspective of a marginalized person in the first person, becoming conscious of one’s stereotypic responses and repeatedly working to create new associations are effective ways to undo implicit racial biases.52 If sustained over time, all of these practices unravel entrenched racist associations by consciously working to create new and diverse associations with Black people, which, in turn, help counter affective racism.

Similarly, a few social psychologists have shown that activating creativity inhibits stereotype activation. A social psychology experiment performed by Kai Sassenberg and Gordon B. Moskowitz found that encouraging participants to “think differently” by priming creativity diminished the activation of automatic preferences generally. The authors argue that “Being creative implies, by definition, the attempt to avoid the conventional routes of thinking and, therefore, the avoidance of the activation of typical associations.”53 Importantly, Sassenberg and Moskowitz note that intentionally trying to think differently has a tendency to backfire. The more I attempt to intentionally think differently about Black people, the more I activate existing stereotypes and associations about them.54 By contrast, “being primed with creativity allows for generating original ideas because one is able to think differently without the unwanted side effects of suppressing thoughts triggered by the intention to suppress them.”55 In the experiment, asking participants to think of three instances when they acted creatively had the effect of slowing the rate at which participants made automatic associations between African American faces and stereotypical characteristics. Although this experiment did not explicitly measure implicit associations, research has shown that there is a correlation between stereotype activation and implicit bias.56 In other words, the stronger one’s stereotypical associations about race, the more likely he or she is to exhibit implicit or affective forms of racism.

My point is that the lessons we have learned in the field of Black cultural studies might prove instructive to social psychologists who are exploring effective countermeasures against implicit racial bias. Cultural studies scholars have long argued that Black American creativity is crucial to Black people’s survival and resistance (as well as the cultural regeneration of American society generally speaking).57 But the creative processes privileged by Black American idioms, epistemologies, and methodologies might also prove deeply instructive to those who seek effective, practical cultural countermeasures to affective racism. Rather than thinking about creativity and new association-making as peripheral countermeasures to affective racism, social psychologists should extensively test the hypothesis that long-term exposure to complex and diverse cultural representations of Black people would both prevent and reduce affective racism. This hypothesis might be particularly important to test in early education programs, when children are in the process of forming their embodied, automatic, and affective geographies by unconsciously adopting dominant cultural associations about race, gender, and sexuality.

By way of concluding, allow me to briefly turn to Kendrick Lamar and his 2015 album, To Pimp a Butterfly in order to offer an example of someone who uses Black epistemological frames and methods to produce rich, complex, and diverse associations with blackness. If such Black cultural production were widely encouraged and disseminated, my contention is that affective racism would diminish because stereotypical thinking and Eurocentric frames of interpretation would be replaced by complex, new associations with blackness and fundamentally different ways of seeing. Though there are numerous other artists that perform this kind of work (e.g., Janelle Monae, Solange Knowles, SZA), I focus on To Pimp a Butterfly because it consciously grapples with the stifling impositions of racial and gender stereotyping. The album seeks to generate complex associations with blackness even as, at other times, it paradoxically reinforces normative gender frames. At both an ideological and methodological level, Lamar engages in a creative process that seeks to evade the spiritual and ontological death ushered by racial commodification, consumerism, and objectification. Though the album privileges a Black male perspective and at times reifies gendered binaries and norms that undergird sexism, To Pimp a Butterfly expresses Lamar’s relentless and complex pursuit of Black self-definition amidst the crushing trappings of racial phobias, misrecognitions, fetishisms, and appropriations favored by Eurocentric frames. I am interested in the ways Lamar’s way of creating and producing the album, as much as the music itself, performs a particular kind of affective and representational work. This work dislodges Eurocentric frames that replenish both negative and positive stereotypes of blackness; thus, it holds the potential to counter affective forms of racism. Additionally, because some songs from To Pimp a Butterfly have been widely adapted by youth involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, Lamar’s music has generated more creative processes: improvisations and riffs that change Lamar’s music to answer the needs and emotions of Black Lives Matter youth. Such improvisations refuse to accept closure, or the objectification of Black ontology, instead proliferating new and diverse associations with Black people and lives, and therefore reorganizing affective and embodied geographies.

Lamar has described his relationship to music as a relationship to leadership (to be used for ill or good) and a spiritually based calling (that he can abide by or ignore). He articulates an anti-individualist worldview insofar as he sees his talents and power to influence as gifts that come with responsibilities. Lamar’s first responsibility is to abide by what he defines as “God’s calling” and the vision that evolves in relation to this calling. Though he never defines exactly what this means, he contrasts the calling and vision he feels inside himself with the normative conventions of making commercially pleasing music. Adhering to his calling and vision with integrity may mean saying things people do not want to hear, or defying conventions that mainstream producers see as commercially viable. If Lamar’s first responsibility is to adhere to God’s calling and his internally defined vision, his second responsibility seems to be to his community: the one that raised and influenced his development, and the one he’s discovering globally.58

In interviews, as much as his music, Lamar returns again and again to his development in and evolution beyond the Black geographies of Compton, California. He is honest about the contradictions, ills, and beauty of his community, rarely feeling the need to flatten or reduce these complexities for the sake of reifying ideological polemics. He unabashedly articulates the cultural and institutional oppressions that impact Black life, but he is equally frank about the varying ways Black people respond to these oppressions intracommunally and internally. Lamar’s unflinching commitment to an ethics of co-creation involves both internal and external critique, growth, and responsibility. He literally and figuratively returns to the sites and sounds of his local and global community to find a way toward personal and collective autonomy, survival, empowerment, dignity, and integrity. Fifteen years after Lamar witnessed Tupac Shakur’s filming of “California Love” at the Compton Swap Meet as a child, he found himself in the same location, surrounded by community children as he was filming the video for “King Kunta.” In this scene, Lamar saw the gifts and burdens attached to Black leadership, representation, and growth.59

Considering mainstream hip-hop’s extremely narrow representations of Black masculinity as physically and psychologically infallible, Lamar’s open self reflectiveness about his contradictory desires, emotional states, and inconsistent behaviors is an unprecedented shift. Lamar admits violating members of his own community, and his struggles to remedy his past actions in order to disrupt cycles of violence that left him and his peers deeply scarred.60 Virtually all the tracks on To Pimp a Butterfly express pain, loss, struggle, depression, self-negation, redemption, and evolution related to personal and collective struggles with anti-Black racism, police violence, commercial pressures, and the powerful lures of fame, money and sex. As Greg Tate wrote in his review of the album,

But Lamar’s own fears of assuming a messiah position are upfront and personal. “I been wrote off before, I got abandonment issues,” he says on “Mortal Man.” “How many leaders you said you needed then left ‘em for dead?/Is it Moses, is it Huey Newton, or Detroit Red?” You can imagine Chuck D or Dead Prez going in as hard and witty against white supremacy as Lamar does on “The Blacker the Berry” and “King Kunta”—but you can’t picture them exposing the vulnerability, doubt and self-loathing swag heard on ‘‘Complexion (A Zulu Love),” “u,” “For Sale?” and “i.” What makes Lamar’s bully pulpit more akin to Curtis Mayfield’s or Gil Scott Heron’s than any protest MC before him is the heart worn on his hoodie’s sleeves.61

To Pimp a Butterfly offers a much-needed incisive commentary on contemporary conditions of anti-Black racism; but the album accomplishes this without a masculinist posture that denies the contradictions, vulnerabilities, and (internal and communal) conflicts embedded in Black men’s experience. Certainly, specific songs reinforce patriarchal lenses, gendered stereotypes of Black women and riff off of recognizable stereotypes of Black men. For example, in the song “For Free?” Lamar critiques America’s legacy of exploiting Black labor and creativity. America is personified as a “gold-digger,” but because the gold-digger is performed by a Black woman’s voice, the song cannot avoid reproducing the Black stereotype to some degree. Even if Lamar re-signifies exploitative traits stereotypically associated with Black women to America, “For Free?” potentially reinforces patriarchal lenses that feminize land/nations in order to establish their masculine conquest. Several songs on To Pimp a Butterfly reproduce similar paradoxes. But if one reads the album as a narrative, its most significant contribution lies in its ability to represent and perform Black ontological complexity lyrically and sonically. The album’s sonic montages of genres, intense word movements, puns, and commentary model a strategy, a method, that shows that “freedom is (in) the invention of escape, stealing away in the confines, in the form, of a break.”62 The album uses linguistic and sonic strategies that methodologically resist reduction to caricatures, most of all the caricature of a Black male leader who is unwilling to admit to his own contradictions, fears, and shortcomings. As such, Lamar’s collective crew of producers, instrumentalists, vocalists, rappers, and engineers create something that model the core principles of Black American idioms and improvisational tactics in today’s context.

To Pimp a Butterfly performs the ideological and affective work of unhinging the Eurocentric cultural frames that entrap blackness into either a phobic or phallic white fantasy construction. It exercises a politics of refusal to reduce Black lived experience to the stereotypical trappings of positive or negative representations.

The album openly criticizes dominant representational associations with blackness and problematically reinforces patriarchal lenses at times; but it does not supplant these with simplistic positive counterparts or with the expected conventions of “conscious hip hop.” Instead, Lamar’s verbal montages and unexpected conceptual fusions proliferate new associations, interpretive possibilities, and affective reorganization. Screams, grunts, instrumental bridges, verses that vary in length within the same song, voice overlays and interruptions by other people, slow-downs and speed-ups in Lamar’s speech evoke affective experiences that do not easily cohere into conclusive, singular feelings. A listener might feel affectively attacked, distraught, confused, elated and fragmented within the same track. To Pimp a Butterfly’s linguistic and sonic fractures, montages, and transitions unravel the binary representational polemics of Blackophobia and Blackophilia and the simplistic affective corollaries they sustain. In short, the album busts the frames and methodologies that undergird affective forms of racism.

To further demonstrate this last point, consider the ways the song “Alright” has become the anthem of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. While Lamar has sometimes gone head to head with BLM activists by asking them to also examine intracommunal tensions and divisions, the song’s refrain, “We gonna be alright,” has become an improvisation way to affectively experience the joys of communal solidarity and to cement an expressive politics that challenges racist police violence. First performed at the Movement for Black Lives conference in Cleveland, Ohio, the refrain has since been used in numerous protest sites.63 At an affective level, the refrain’s performance creates something unexpected. It orients Black protest toward communal self-affirmation rather than adopting a posture that seeks recognition from Eurocentric frames and people. The shift to self-given affirmation is implicitly adopting what Sarah Haley describes as “Black radical feminist refusal” in the context of Black women’s punishment under Jim Crow modernity.64 In the context Haley addresses, Black women under correctional supervision refuse to tell their stories to a legal system that is set up to misrecognize or misuse their complex lived experiences and suffering. In this context, BLM activists refuse to define their value and worth through frames that are necessarily set up to devalue and misrecognize them. Indeed, the BLM youth know all too well how racist frames and stereotypes are connected to Black fatalities. But rather than pleading to be seen and affirmed by Eurocentric frames, BLM activists perform a complex and self-affirming Black ontology through the creative practice of song and protest.

Conclusion

In briefly examining the methodology of To Pimp a Butterfly, I am suggesting that we have much to learn from Black improvisational idioms, social practices, and ethics if we want to reduce automatic stereotype activation and affective forms of racism. I have suggested that diminishing affective racism would require significant changes in contemporary U.S. cultural practices. Because dominant U.S. culture produces simplistic, dualistic, reductive, and stereotypical associations with blackness, it creates and sustains embodied racial phobias and fetishisms that manifest in people’s reflexive responses without conscious intent. Thus, to decrease affective racism, we must do more than change people’s conscious intentions and views. We must proliferate new, diverse, and complex cultural associations with blackness in order to reorganize automatic affective and embodied responses to Black people. These complex associations would encourage creative thinking, reduce stereotype activation, and in turn, diminish implicit biases and affective forms of racism.

I have cautioned that those who rely on activating and proliferating positive Black and negative white counter-stereotypes as a way to reduce affective racism will invariably replenish investments in Black exceptionalism and tokenism all while imposing Eurocentric constraints of acceptability on Black people. Moreover, I have shown that due to long-established cultural frames, the reception of positive Black stereotypes and negative white stereotypes in broader contexts varies significantly, in effect strengthening Eurocentric epistemological frames of interpretation.

The method used to proliferate complex, rich associations with blackness is as important as the content used to represent blackness. In other words, employing Black creative processes that methodologically resist closure and objectification helps challenge Eurocentric frames and appropriative practices whose goal is to fix the meaning of blackness in order to justify Black people’s oppression. Thus, developing cultural countermeasures against the white woman’s automatic, embodied responses upon encountering my Black male student would necessitate adopting the epistemological frames, methods, creativity, and complexity already existing in Black ontology.