Black Feelings

Race and Affect in the Long Sixties

Lisa M. Corrigan

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496827968
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

Honorable Mention Recipient of the 2021 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Public Address by the National Communication Association In the 1969 issue of Negro Digest, a young Black Arts Movement poet then-named Ameer (Amiri) Baraka published "We Are Our Feeling: The Black Aesthetic." Baraka's emphasis on the importance of feelings in Black selfhood expressed a touchstone for how the Black liberation movement grappled with emotions in response to the politics and racial violence of the era. In her latest book, award-winning author Lisa M. Corrigan suggests that Black Power provided a significant repository for negative feelings, largely Black pessimism, to resist the constant physical violence against Black activists and the psychological strain of political disappointment. Corrigan asserts the emergence of Black Power as a discourse of Black emotional invention in opposition to Kennedy-era white hope. As integration became the prevailing discourse of racial liberalism shaping midcentury discursive structures, so too, did racial feelings mold the biopolitical order of postmodern life in America. By examining the discourses produced by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and other Black Power icons who were marshaling Black feelings in the service of Black political action, Corrigan traces how Black liberation activists mobilized new emotional repertoires

Chapter One

POSTWAR FEELINGS

Beyond Hope

From Birmingham to Watts, Detroit to Memphis, the 1960s had no shortage of domestic tumult. But the nation’s political upheaval was produced, in part, by competing feelings that defined the era. As the Eisenhower administration receded (along with postwar tension and euphoria) and gave way to the youth and optimism of the Kennedy administration, the cultural politics of the nation shifted. John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier signaled changes in America’s identity and role in the world as a Cold War superpower. In his acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention, Kennedy opined: “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats…. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”¹ Kennedy’s New Frontier was an innovative progressivist program that reoriented postwar American identity away from nuclear anxiety and toward social and economic welfare.² Among New Frontier legislation, Kennedy included bills to raise the minimum wage, decrease the age for Social Security eligibility, introduce fair housing, augment highway funds, introduce food stamps, expand farm subsidies, safeguard civil rights, encourage youth civic participation, and fund space exploration, reflecting “Kennedy’s affinity for heroic causes.”³

Kennedy’s fresh, new American political vision reshaped national expectations beyond the cloud of war.⁴ Central to this refashioning of the American imaginary was the deployment of a constellation of political feelings about Kennedy himself and Camelot (as his administration came to be known) that reinforced optimistic nationalism at the nadir of atomic anxiety. With Frank Sinatra crooning about Kennedy’s “High Hopes” during the campaign and a bevy of new, young politicos entering the White House after the election, hope reigned supreme as the new feeling of American politics. In fact, the word “most commonly associated with Kennedy’s leadership was hope.”⁵ Crafting the White House statements projecting this new mood was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., special assistant to President Kennedy, who occupied a singular space as the resident intellectual in the Kennedy administration. Schlesinger privately influenced the president’s articulation of policy, but publicly his essays framed the emotional purpose of the administration as a departure from the austerity of the 1950s. Kennedy’s speeches captured a deep cultural longing for a shift in public feelings, and they exhibited an “existential quality, the sense that he was in some way beyond conventional politics, that he could touch emotions and hopes thwarted by the bland and mechanized society.”⁶ And Schlesinger’s unrestrained public praise of Kennedy crafted a narrative of the man and the administration that was unflinchingly positive, rooted deeply in a distinctly American optimism, and central to the administration’s utopian longings.⁷ Schlesinger pronounced Kennedy “the first President since Franklin Roosevelt who had anything to say to men and women under the age of twenty-five, perhaps the only President with whom youth could thoroughly identify itself—and this at a time when there were more young people both in the population and in the colleges than ever before.”⁸ As Schlesinger notes, by 1966 (the birth of Black Power), more than half of the nation’s population was under the age of twenty-five.⁹

The baby boomer generation would come to redefine politics by challenging the Silent Generation’s passivity about political participation. Schlesinger wrote, “We no longer suppose that our national salvation depends on stopping history in its tracks and freezing the world in its present mold. Our national leadership is young, vigorous, intelligent, civilized, and experimental.”¹⁰ Preaching a gospel of innovation, idealism, pragmatism, irreverence, and skepticism, Schlesinger’s writings were critical of millennialism, self-congratulation, self-righteousness, hyperindividualism, and the ideologues of the past. Schlesinger’s prose helped set the emotional tone for the administration as a radical and progressive departure from the past and framed Kennedy as youthful and vigorous, which explains the appeal of “Camelot” to the liberal intelligentsia.

As Schlesinger characterized the youth politics of the administration, he noted the role that emotions played in the protracted generational struggle within liberalism: “Having seized power themselves from a resentful former generation, the Kennedys understood the emotions of the young crowding into a capricious and incomprehensible society.”¹¹ The Kennedy administration created the framing and the conditions for the youth revolution that would crescendo with organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Young Lords, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This emphasis on the potential of America’s untapped youth propelled students to sit in, be jailed, march, and protest to promote progressive values on issues ranging from civil rights to the war in Vietnam. In his inaugural address, Kennedy delivered the line that would define this generation: “And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”¹² Kennedy’s call to service evoked political feelings about the citizen’s civic duty to the nation and evoked a sense of responsibility for cultivating interdependent futures, particularly abroad. Particularly for young people, the call to service aroused fidelity to a vision of nationhood firmly rooted in futurity and notions of technological progress. Kennedy’s language articulated demands of the future on the present and prioritized futurist accountability for young people in a way that had not been part of the rhetorical corpus of the presidency before.

Kennedy’s focus on the nation’s youth helped to propel young people into politics in novel ways, leading to the creation of the Peace Corps, Youth Conservation Corps, the Mobilization for Youth programs, and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). The New Frontier was, at least in part, driven by an emotional appeal to young people to reorient themselves toward a progressive vision of international political participation in the aftermath of McCarthyism. While the notion of shared sacrifice was certainly promoted during the war years, Kennedy’s articulation of collective struggle centered youth through an emotional lens that encouraged them to shape the future as political agents. Given Kennedy’s own youth, the potential existed for this strategy to backfire, but as his presidential campaign closed, Kennedy championed the idea as an antidote to nuclear anxiety and political stagnation.¹³ Throughout his administration, public service formed the cornerstone of his managerial liberalism as he encouraged the nation’s youth toward political action.

While it makes sense that New Frontier programs would activate the political feelings of white Americans who saw Kennedy as a role model and leader, the mobilization of political hope spilled out beyond white communities, in part because the generational call to service was colorblind. As BPP minister of information Eldridge Cleaver recalled, “The accent on youth that had been key to the Kennedy Administration helped to define youth as a relevant political condition that was not to be despised—and that could be used.”¹⁴ Cleaver astutely describes Kennedy’s emphasis on youth culture as one that drove tremendous numbers of young people to embrace new modes of political engagement. Certainly this was true of the black freedom struggle, but over the course of the decade, black youth involvement was demonized, in ways that were distinct from disdain for the New Left. Kennedy’s colorblind hope propelled black and white youth to engage with political futurity, even if it was flawed and incomplete.

This chapter discusses the Kennedy administration’s emotional repertoire since it set the tone for youth dissent for the decade. Here I examine the co-constitutive nature of hope and despair in the postwar period to understand how these competing political feelings expressed generational and racialized disputes about the nature of the polis, the uses and abuses of power, the role of political institutions in guaranteeing social and political equality, and the role of dissent as an emotional sphere of public discourse. My guiding texts on discourses of hope include Kennedy’s speeches, Schlesinger’s writings on Kennedy, and Norman Mailer’s responses. While talking about white feelings first in a book titled Black Feelings may seem odd, I suggest that much of the black struggle in the United States has been aimed at producing new political feelings that worked both in tandem with and against feelings being cultivated by the white establishment. In this case, “hope” was not a background feeling or an incidental emotion. Instead it was what Agnes Heller has called “an orientational feeling” that is a priori and originates from institutions that want it to undergird cognitive processes.¹⁵ Hope reoriented Americans toward a different kind of racialized chronopolitics regarding their personal commitments, but also toward the way the administration wanted them to think about the nation’s futurity, since Kennedy himself was asking for a different kind of relationality to citizenship and problem solving.

Although I return to these themes throughout the book—especially in the conclusion, where I discuss President Obama’s discourses of exceptionalism and the birth of black nihilist scholarship—Black Feelings as a whole grapples with how hope is temporalized and racialized in political discourses that shape the materiality of American life as hope structures social movements and reconfigures power. But when the political future is always already foreclosed through antiblack structural violence, hope is a cruel attachment for black people and other people of color rather than a feeling that can fully emancipate, the way, say, Paul Ricoeur describes.¹⁶ Thus the following chapters aim to understand how feelings about civil rights and black activism “fit together” in political systems where rhetors, white and black, sought to label, define, and make social sense out of new assemblages of political emotions.¹⁷

Pedagogies of Feeling: Producing Postwar Hope

The 1960s were a swirl of many political emotions, but at the beginning of the decade, no emotion was more intentionally deployed by the state than hope. Why hope? As Casey Nelson Blake has noted, “Settlement houses, progressive schools, social-gospel churches, and cross-class advocacy groups once provided an extraordinary infrastructure for Progressive politics. Today’s pragmatists have almost nothing comparable to support their political and intellectual activity. No wonder then that the word ‘hope’ figures so prominently in their writing. Even as it recalls the social-gospel roots of Progressivism, the recourse to ‘hope’ reveals the distance traveled since that distant era of confident reform.”¹⁸ Absent these spaces for the cultivation of progressive politics, hope became a repository of longing in the second half of the twentieth century because it focused on the futurity of political action and because the confidence of New Deal progressivism had faded. Hope in the 1960s signaled a semantic shift in political language, demarcating a microcohort for whom feelings defined their youth in explicitly political terms. Because orientational feelings like hope create expectations, they are particularly useful in organizing new political moments.

As a corollary of democratic practice, political hope is an active emotional disposition that undercuts hopelessness through action and requires a certain level of engagement: thinking, speaking, dreaming, doing. Citizens “engage in politics because they hope for improvement in their lives, for cooperative relations with others, and for stable and just social structures in which to live.”¹⁹ In Paulo Freire’s estimation, “Hope is an ontological need,” one that exists in opposition to fatalism.²⁰ Freire makes the case for operationalizing and mobilizing political hope, particularly in the face of a crisis of feeling or an age of anxiety. In their repetition of feeling, Kennedy administration officials demonstrated how the performance of hope, as Gilles Deleuze has written, is certainly a “repetition of the category of the future.”²¹

The mobilization of hope was particularly salient for the Kennedy administration, which, as Ted Windt reminds us, was fundamentally “a crisis presidency” that needed to manage the fallout from overexposure to urgent emergencies.²² So the persistence of hope as an affective frame is interesting given how frequently Kennedy himself (or his surrogates like Schlesinger or speechwriter Ted Sorensen) characterized political encounters as crises. Windt notes that Sorensen accounts for no less than fifteen crises in just the first eight months of the administration, with the exception of civil rights. Kennedy spoke infrequently of civil rights, and when he did, Windt explains that he “strove to defuse the powerful emotions” aroused by desegregation.²³ Nonetheless hope and crisis were co-constitutive discourses that shaped an intense discursive period as the Cold War unfolded. Stan van Hooft makes the case that “political hope is motivated by felt needs or some degree of anxiety or concern as opposed to fantasy or desire,” and this dynamic encompasses much of the administration’s rhetoric, suggesting that hope was understood as a curative for anxiety or at least a political feeling that would help to shore up political support in a political moment characterized by extreme uncertainty.²⁴

Resisting what Schlesinger called the “conformism and homogenization” of the 1950s,²⁵ the emotional field of the Kennedy administration addressed the fears and anxieties of the postwar milieu and harnessed the economic boom that Tom Kemp has called the “climax of capitalism,” by proposing new ways of imagining American political possibility.²⁶ These administration discourses were pedagogical exercises in political hope, teaching Americans how to think about their futures in soaring language that sought to inspire populism. While hope here retains a bit of its religious connotation, it is firmly secured in the political arena. As Ricoeur writes, this sense of “hope, in spite of the secular character that it shares with utopia, is intended to provide a clear alternative to utopia.”²⁷ While I take up this point in Chapter Five, Ricoeur delineates between hope and utopia in the political idiom:

Whereas utopia tends to elude the constraints of efficient and durable action and the hard paradoxes of institution, authority, sovereignty, law and coercion, hope is addressed to the very possibility of dealing responsibly with these constraints and paradoxes. Religious hope and utopia seem to share a common presupposition, namely that a complete resolution of historical contradictions is possible above or beyond history. The politics of hope relies on the opposite presupposition, i.e., the recognition of the ultimate incompleteness of discourse and action.²⁸

The incompleteness of both political discourse and action is managed, in part, by political emotions like hope, which help to institutionalize political feelings as a way of making any political change gradual and stable. As a specific political emotion and practical alternative to utopia, hope represents the possibility of managing political conflict through historical debate (rather than, say, faith). Ricoeur underscores how “hope is not a statement but an interpretation” of possible solutions and outcomes.²⁹ “Applied specifically to political action, hope implies the confidence that a responsible political action can be conducted in spite of the perversions, the dangers, and the paradoxes of political action, and as a plausible alternative to some other interpretations which compete with hope on the basis of the same recognition of the incompleteness of political action.”³⁰ Thus does political hope function to short-circuit radical social change in the name of incrementalism. Hope habituates a preference for gradual change, demonstrating its relationship to futurity in terms of pace and scope.

On the one hand, Kennedy’s use of hope as an emotional and political frame was prefigured by Eisenhower’s attack on the New Englander’s youth and inexperience in a world defined by atomic insecurity. However, given its religious connotations, hope also resonated with Catholics who supported Kennedy’s narrow win. Still, the use of hope as an emotional frame had origins before his presidential campaign. Consider Kennedy’s speech nominating Adlai Stevenson at the 1956 Democratic National Convention: “The time is ripe. The hour has struck. The man is here; and he is ready. Let the word go forth [a phrase that would reappear in his inaugural address] that we have fulfilled our responsibility to the nation.”³¹ The emphasis here on new beginnings demonstrates the temporality of hope as a construct, which Kennedy develops in later speeches and which amplifies the heroic frame that Kennedy honed in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Profiles in Courage (1956). For example, when he accepted his party’s nomination in 1960, Kennedy introduced the New Frontier: “It is time for a new generation of leadership—new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities…. We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.”³² This call for new men signaled a generational shift in power that sought to reimagine US leadership in the mold of young, vigorous masculinity rather than the tired and worn masculinity of earlier generatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racial Feelings in Black and White
• Chapter One: Postwar Feelings: Beyond Hope
• Chapter Two: Contouring Black Hope and Despair
• Chapter Three: American Negritude: Black Rage and the Restoration of Pride
• Chapter Four: Feeling Riots: The Emotional Language of Urban Rebellion
• Chapter Five: Mourning King: Memory, Affect, and the Shaping of Black Power
• Chapter Six: Revolutionary Suicide: Necromimesis, Radical Agency, and Black Ontology
• Conclusion: The Obama Coalition: Reinvigorating Liberal Hope
• Notes
• About the Author