Paul Gilroy's "The Black Atlantic" (Part 1/2)

Hey everyone, back again, today I'm going to start an investigation or presentation of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. Before jumping into it, if you want to follow me anywhere that I've been here, you can find me on Instagram @theory_and_philosophy or on Twitter @DavidGinio. If you're new here, welcome, I'm David. I try to explain philosophical text in a way that makes them accessible to you. So if you're new, like, share, subscribe. If you found this on YouTube, you'll be able to find it in podcast form pretty much anywhere where you get podcasts where there shouldn't be any ads or if you found this in podcast form, you'll be able to find me on YouTube for sometimes the earliest videos to accompany whatever it is I'm saying. So if you're into that, go find me there. If you want to help me out, obviously like, share, subscribe. If you're listening to this in podcast form, leave a review, leave five stars, that would help me out a lot. You can help me out monetarily, if you pay tree on your PayPal, but obviously no pressure. And yeah, don't waste any more of your time with that stuff. Let's jump into Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. Now I can't understate how difficult this text is because largely Paul Gilroy is dealing with a completely new topic and he really highlights this throughout the course of the text. So Paul Gilroy, just to put it quite simply before we jump into it, what he's trying to do here is to find a way to think about the experience of black people in the United States and Europe without thinking it in terms of either what he calls ethnic absolutism, which is the idea that black people just have a kind of pure essence, an essence that has been sequestered through slavery, through other oppressive mechanisms. And he doesn't want to think about it in a kind of purely particularist view that there is no such thing as a black identity or black authenticity. So instead, he's trying to find a middle ground to say that identity is something that is always changing, but that doesn't mean that it isn't real, that it doesn't have real effects that can be measured, located, even sought after. And one of the ways that he seeks to do this is to find the common thread not only within or between different black communities, but between marginalized communities more generally be they black people, be they Jewish people, be they indigenous people and so on, that all have a mutual disdain for vassism, for imperialism, if they've experienced the effects of those extremely harmful and violent institutions. So this book starts as with many with chapter one, the black Atlantic as a counter culture of modernity. So what does he mean by this from the title of the chapter? Well modernity plays a central role in this text, that is he regards the slave trade, what he calls here as well the black Atlantic, he regards that as modernities limit. It is a kind of a logical point on the progression on modernity's progression, on modernity's lifespan, because it abides by many of the racist violent assumptions that emerged within modernity. But it is also a point at which modernity began to reflect upon itself or to be presented with its own limits. So with modernity we began to see the emergence of various ideas pertaining to race as science began to develop, it sought to explain that race is perhaps biological and to some extent it is, but that that of course would mean that certain people of certain races have certain qualities that are unchanging. And we see this time and time again with various people saying that well different levels of ability can be measured between black and white people in terms of athleticism and so on. And these explanations are meant to stand in for kind of true, complete understandings about entire races. Now these ideas sprung up according to Gilroy by and large within modernity. Now the black Atlantic and the slave trade pose a challenge to these racist assumptions even though the slave trade was obviously something that racism very much benefited from. But it also challenged modernity in that it began to trouble the idea that black people are just one kind of way or white people just have one kind of identity. Because suddenly people began to be forcefully removed from their homes and put into new contexts and in these new contexts they were forced to if they had any opportunity to to form new communities to form new bonds which effectively changed who they were. And so this idea that people are just these racist assumptions that black people just act a certain way began to be usurped from the inside out. So these racist assumptions began to be questioned. And with that too some of the basic ideas about identity began to be questioned. So American identity began to be questioned. European identity began to be questioned because these spaces were suddenly being occupied not only by the assumed dominant white people but also by others that could live off the land that could engage with others and so on. Now I think that it's really important to say that Gilroy is in no way trying to find a silver lining in something like slavery. Absolutely not. He's very much opposed to it in every single way. What he is doing and I don't want this to be the definitive word necessarily on what he is doing but this is a part of it. What he is doing is trying to elaborate the effects of slavery upon black people and black communities within the United States and Europe without saying that slavery was purely a detriment to community building to black people's livelihoods because that is obviously the case. But black people persisted and black people made it through that made it through that kind of oppression for hundreds of years. And so he is widely dissatisfied with the explanation that slavery just did one thing to black people. Treating black people is this homogenous unit that were all equally affected in the same way by slavery. He wants to nuance these discussions to think about the different communities that formed and how today various different popular cultural artifacts that we find within the black community and that we find among many different communities how they were influenced by these experiences. So he is neither interested in a completely homogenous look at the experiences of black people within the United States nor is he satisfied with a completely particular view that says something like, well, everyone is different. Everything is relative. Nothing matters. He's trying to find a kind of in between or as he writes, he's trying to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity. So identity for him, as I've already said, can be understood as something that is both real but also always changing, always mutating. And he takes the image of the black Atlantic to demonstrate that because like the black Atlantic, like the slave ships that were always moving, taking people from place to place, so too do black people constantly undergo mutations within their own community and within other communities as well. Now throughout the course of this book, he's going to present many different black writers, political figures, philosophers, including Frederick Douglass, WB Du Bois, Martin Delaney, including many others, Richard Wright, that all to some extent either demonstrate a submission to an idea about kind of black purity or the idea that there's a kind of black essence that can be redeemed with the right critical tools. Or he points to different thinkers that are a little bit wary about that possibility. And instead, who think about black identity is something that is much more complicated than a simple association with Africa in many cases. So he's going to be taking aim at Afro-centrism, the idea that black people, all black people need to do is just go back to Africa and that is going to solve the issues of racism. Or they need to at least redeem what was lost from Africa. Now he gets into this a little bit more through the course of the book and especially toward the end. But to give you an idea of how he approaches that issue, he says that Africa doesn't have one identity. Africa is comprised of millions of different identities. There is no possible one way to understand the African experience. Or what it means to be African. So people in South Africa are going to be very different from people in Egypt. People in Ethiopia are going to be very different from people in the Ivory Coast and so on. is very skeptical of these ideas about Afrocentrism because it depends upon the reduction of Africa to a single identity that he sees as being extremely problematic. Now he begins by looking at the work in life of Martin Delaney who he should look up because he had a pretty interesting life but he was, he lived from 1812 to 1885 I believe and he was a progenitor of what is also called in relation to Afrocentrism, Black nationalism in the United States. And he went to medical school he worked in the army I believe as well. He had a very fascinating life. He traveled quite a bit. He was very much, as I kind of implied, he was very much interested in medicine which is kind of ironic because medicine was, and the science of medicine was deployed against Black people. So for example, if a slave didn't want to be a slave anymore, there was a diagnosis, a clinical diagnosis for that called drapedomania that essentially said people who didn't want to be enslaved were going, were suffering from a mental illness which is one of the many ways in history that medical knowledge has been utilized to maintain power and to sort of crush the possibility of dissent. So Delaney wanted Black people, hence Black nationalism, to have their own nation to be autonomous. And Gil Roy is suspicious of this because Delaney also held some Eurocentric views like he was quite Christian and quite sexist in some ways and so he was worried about what this nation would look like. When we are discussing or when Black people are discussing the possibility of Black nationalism of Black autonomy, we must ask for which Black people, because in the United States, if we just take that one context at any point in history, you're going to be confronted with very different Black people with very different histories. You might have Caribbean Black people, you might have Black people that came from Africa, maybe some from Europe, other parts of Central and South America, and so on. And there is no one single Black identity. So to propose this idea is to say that all Black people are the same and it's just as easy as forming a new nation and putting them all there and all the issues will be resolved. What do you do about religion? What do you do about education? What do you do about health care? All of these questions need to be posed in order to understand or to properly deal with or to anticipate some issues that might arise by homogenizing an entire group and many entire groups of people. Now Gilroy wants to nuance his criticism of Delaney. So he is at first glance, he's like, this is problematic to propose this this Black nation because of all the reasons I just said. But he also thinks that there is some truth to be gleaned from it because in the way that these racist mechanisms work largely homogenously, that is they work against all Black people in similar ways, that is they do not discriminate between different kinds of Black people with different different heritages and different lineages. It seems like it makes total sense that the response to that should too be homogenous one. One that says, hey, we all have a mutual stake here. We are all experiencing widely similar things from the same oppressor. It makes sense then for there to be a unifying thread between us to oppose that system. And Gilroy is as far as I understand very much on board with this. Does it need to transpire into Black nationalism into the forming of a new country? Maybe, maybe not. But at the very least we can find a galvanizing thread that does not homogenize the entire group. What it says though is that people are similar in the way that they are similarly discriminated against. And so that can encourage certain political boothmans. But when this comes down to largely Black intellectuals, people who live pretty good lives, comparative to the broader population at large, Gilroy is a little bit more suspicious as well. So he says you're kind of bimones intellectuals who speak of race, people or nation as though these are homogenous entities. And who place themselves rather than the people they supposedly represent like everyday Black folks in the United States of Europe. And instead focus primarily upon their own interests. What they say is best for the entire Black communities and homogenize those communities. So opposition to power, opposition to oppression doesn't necessarily need to assume a kind of political stance that homogenizes the entire community. It happens in more tacit, more surreptitious, more hidden forms to oppose that power. So here he considers briefly, and he jumps into this more in chapter 3, he considers briefly Black popular culture, specifically music, which is often stood outside of the dominant framework. So this includes musical genres like jazz, soul, blues, hip hop, R&B that Black people have used as a way to live their lives and to make these lives their lives more livable in relation to a system that is largely oppressive. Now I'm not an expert on jazz or anything like that, but I don't fully agree with this reading of it because I find that these types of readings that diagnose jazz. For example, or the blues or any other genre, as just being a response to racism, even though that is definitely part of it, that white washes or it kind of disavows the complexity in jazz and how it is absolutely pure brilliance. It seems like it extends beyond more than just a transgressive act, and it is also something that evades possible understanding in those terms as a genre that exists in itself for its own brilliance, not just in response to sites of power, even though that is definitely a part of it. And so he continues to say that musical genres like jazz and the blues that eventually gave way to the emergence of hip hop in the late 70s, I guess in the Bronx, in the United States. What that allowed for is the, I guess it allowed for many different things in for a broader understanding of the role of hip hop in the black community. I really recommend you read the text Black Noise by Trisha Rose, which I've covered on here if you're interested in that at all, or that whole slew of other texts that you can easily go find. But hip hop's emergence is obviously has a very complicated history, but but in any case, and for hip hop, it is transgressive to some extent as a discursive form in both its style and its substance because it reveals or it participates in what he calls a politics of transfiguration that strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable to present the un-presentable. That is, there are truths that emerge within Black Popular Culture, in this case, hip hop and the same could be said of jazz and the blues, that might otherwise have not gone seen or been not been noticed until it was brought into light by these discursive cultural forms, these cultural moments of these cultural exigencies, or the exigencies of Black people against a system of an impressive system. So he continues by saying that the politics of transfiguration offers a continuous commentary on the systematic and pervasive relations of domination that supply its conditions of existence. And so he is attributing value, transgressive value to these cultural modes of expression that are going to be different everywhere. Hip hop is by no means homogeneous, it is going to be different depending on where you are in the United States and the same can apply to jazz and the blues and so on. But there are also many other modes of cultural expression that emerged within the Black communities, including quilting by many enslaved women or other musical, musical products that emerge from enslaved people in the United States, also cuisine and so on. There are so many different examples and he attributes value to these cultural forms because they are irreducible to one kind of homogenous experience of Blackness. It is much more specific than that. And so he does this, I think, in order to avoid homogenizing the Black experience. If I can call it an experience, like that seems like a disavowal of the violence is inflicted. But the experiences of Black people from slavery onwards now these all present artistic forms of expression from cuisine to music to and so on that transcend the limits of modernity for Black people in that modernity was attached to certain kinds of of existence. You know, you have to act a certain way, be a certain Victorian heritage or have certain certain identity markers to then fit within that class. And so the presence of these examples of these cultural modes of life or ways of life posed a challenge to that. And it began to challenge the kind of rationality implied within modernity. But it also revealed and broadly plantation slavery revealed in his words that regimes or that revealed the complicity between rationality and the practice of racial terror. Now in writing this, Gilroy is trying to move away from people who think that slavery was an example of a kind of primitivism within modernity like as though logic as though rationality were not in themselves part of the project of slavery. Now he shows how these things are actually intertwined, how logic and rationality work very well to maintain racism and to maintain oppression. And that propels us here into chapter 2 titled Masters, Mr. Slave and the Antenimies of Modernity. Now against some popular understandings of by white so called postmodernists that postmodernity and many of the things that characterize it so to put it quite simply post modernity is the point where meta narratives come to an end where there's an emphasis on particularity instead of overall truths, homogenous truths, universals and so on, which is a very reductive way to put it. But he is saying that for these people who think that there was a movement from modernity to postmodernity and that this movement is marked by these shifts from essentialism to anti essentialism from universals to particulars. He asks, weren't these also true of modernity wasn't modernity also something that embraced particulars that embraced anti essentialism while also embracing essentialism while also embracing universals and for him it's a complete mischaracterization to say that there were these total agreements within modernity between people about what constituted proper political conduct or what it meant to be human or anything like that. So instead he doesn't want to just oppose modernity with a kind of post structuralist or postmodern lens that seeks to end all universals or call attention to them. Instead, he is more interested in the ways in which within modernity, which is already itself something that is kind of repeatedly undergoing mutations and at the time was certainly always undergoing mutations and never itself had this steady identity. He's curious about the ways that black people within modernity use the tools of modernity not by opposing modernity in its entirety, but the used tools given to them within modernity to oppose those logics of modernity. So in other words, Gilroy doesn't want to throw away all meaning and ethics or aesthetics or politics altogether and a kind of postmodern anti essentialism, but instead wants to look at black articulations of these sites of meaning to look at how they're taken up and therefore transformed by black and other marginalized people. So as he writes, the intellectual and cultural achievements of the black Atlantic populations exist partly inside and not always against the grand narrative of enlightenment. And so very much like modernities ambiguity so to is he trying to explain the way that were described the ways that black people are ambiguous. They actually use some of the tools of the oppressor against the oppressor. Now for philosophical inspiration, he draws heavily upon Hegel's work, Hegel's work on the dialectic to explain that these contradictions within modernity make total sense. There is no single identity that is not without its own contradictions. Now he adds almost a little footnote saying that until you get to pure like state run Christianity and then you get the resolution of all these conflicts at the end of the phenomenology. And he's not really concerned with that he's concerned instead with the fact that so long as we aren't at that point, which won't happen. So long as we are not at that point, we are going to be confronted with all of these antagonisms, these ambiguities, these hybrid identities that both borrow from negative aspects like oppression like racism and oppose those same mechanisms. Now he also has quite a few other issues with Hegel because he sees many issues with the so called master slave dialectic, even though it's the Lord bondsman in Hegel and there's a there is a great distinction to be made there. But the idea within Hegel is that the so called slave is opened up to possibility that the master is not because the master views themselves to be the kind of be all and all of the world to be the center of the world. And therefore they don't need to change. They don't need to develop. Whereas for the bondsman or the slave, they are opened up to possibility by the fact that they are not satisfied with themselves. Now in Gilroy's reading of this, this master slave dialectic, he says that that fails to account for the fact that many people, black people within the United States oppose slavery. They weren't existing in slavery and being saying like, oh, this is great. I'm opened up to new possibilities and that my owner is for close to them in this kind of metaphysically imminent capacity. And so therefore I should be happy with my condition. No, what we saw were continual revolts, oppositions to that to those structures, not a willing adoption of them or I don't know, just a submission to them. And this is really quite one of the fascinating things for Gilroy in that he wants to say that slavery in all a tour was not effective at doing away with the possibility of resistance. And it actually gave birth to something a kind of black subjectivity that could oppose it that could resist it. And there are just their innumerable innumerable examples of people opposing slavery that were born into it. Like Harriet Tubman, for example, a bonafide. Probably one of the bravest people to ever exist on planet earth that demonstrates an opportunity to move beyond through the emergence of a new subjectivity from the confines of the very system that they were born into. And for Gilroy, it would be a total reduction and a total slap in the face to say that slavery had one effect upon black people and that was it. Now, at the same time, I'm not entirely sure who he's writing against when he says this. I'm not sure who thinks that there was this kind of slavery had this homogenous effect upon people. I'm not saying they don't exist, but I'm not entirely sure who he's writing against. But in any case, it's a good point to make against people who might make that argument in that it disavows the different cultures identity subjectivities that emerged out of it. slavery that is in that puts us here into chapter three jewels brought from bondage. Black music and the politics of authenticity. So within slavery, many different art forms emerged many different cultural kind of hybrid forms emerged like through cuisine and music and so on. And he looks at kind of barely traces a history into the emergence of hip hop within many urban black communities. And within all of these cultural forms, he sees the possibility of transgression within what he calls their dramaturgy, their enunciation and gesture and how they oppose systems, not necessarily in their direct opposition to power, but in their existing for themselves outside of the eye of power. So for example, in the case of jazz, it essentially makes heavy use of improv for anyone who knows about jazz. It people are making stuff up on the spot, a lot of the time. And so the act of playing with with music, the act of playing with these notes opens up or presents the kind of loss of oneself. So when you're improvising playing jazz music, you're giving up partly what you've learned in the past to explore newness to become new. In the moment, but this newness is only made possible by some basic understandings, so not just anyone can play jazz despite what some critics at the time for many from a century ago would say, like a door now, even though it's more complicated like than that with the door. So disregard that. But some people would say that jazz doesn't make sense. It's just random notes being hit. When in fact, there is an entire calculus behind it that is irreducible to I guess traditional ways of music, understanding music theory. And so the possibility of finding a new self within improvisation, dependent upon having a base, you know, you have to learn some before you can actually do that. And here we are, we are presented again with the kind of ambiguity of identity, both an identity that is fleeting in this improvisation and an identity that kind of retains its existence, but that opens up. I guess the player, the musical player up to newness. So here again, we're getting this idea that identity is both fixed and unfixed. It exists, but it's always mutating and developing. Now this, I don't mean at all to homogenize what black musical expression looks like because it is widely different, like within jazz between different geographical locations with hip hop and different geographical locations and so on. And so it's important to look at how each group, however these groups might define themselves, engage in that music. Perhaps there is a history that can be traced back. Perhaps there is not. There might be spontaneity behind it that doesn't lend it to a kind of history and so on. So in the face of this, what Gilroy wants to do in his own terms is to embrace the idea of a diaspora composed of communities that are both similar and different. Now when we acknowledge the difficulty in finding a kind of true identity or kind of true black musical expression or artistic expression, we run into the difficulty that or the difficulty of reconciling any kind of steady identity category from which to then understand black culture more generally. Now he doesn't think that there is this thing called black culture because it's different within the United States between groups, you know, between Caribbean, black people between European black people, black people in Ethiopia, black people in Uganda and so on. And so any calls or criticisms of black artists for failing to be authentically black is something that kind of draws Gilroy's eye or in that he has a lot of trouble with people saying that a certain black artist is not acting right or not being the right way for the black community. So for example, some people took aim at Jimmy Hendrix for not embracing black art enough pandering too much to white people to which Gilroy says what is this thing called black authenticity? How should Hendrix have played the guitar to properly fit within the black mold? Could that not could himself not be an example of his own expression of blackness and these debates go on as well within hip hop circles where there are arguments about which brand of hip hop is the most authentic is it East Coast hip hop is it West Coast hip hop is it knowledge hip hop is it more gangster rap like how do we possibly understand which one is more authentic than any other and I guess the short answer is that there is no authentic form even though there are some discernible characteristics about it that can be given some value and we can't necessarily fully understand them but there's the experience that like hearing hip hop within certain settings let's say out in the country somewhere it feels off like it feels like that is not a place for hip hop when of course it can exist there like absolutely but there's just a kind of experience that one has with it that doesn't doesn't feel right or won't feel right for being there and so Gilroy is interested more in that those possibilities these kind of inexplicable understandings about identity that don't crystallize into complete hatred of anything that is different that doesn't submit to so-called authenticity and so on and in the case of Hendrix in so far as black a blackness is something that is always being negotiated always hybrid always developing like any other identity he sees Hendrix's own hybridity is being a perfect resemblance of that or resembling that perfectly so in that way he says that Jimmy Hendrix is being perfectly authentic and it's totally absurd to say that he is not and that puts us here into chapter 4 cheer the weary traveler w e b zupoice germany and the politics of displacement so the desire for roots as I've kind of already intimated the desire for roots can be understood as a good response to racism because racism is something that uprooted black people from their homes and brought them somewhere else so it makes sense that setting roots could be a kind of political opposition to that and as I've already said Gilroy has some issues with that possibility or that they should be handled critically not naively just taken up so to think about this a little bit more he turns to the work of w e b de boi sues prolific writer academic went to harvard and has a just an amazing life despite the types of discrimination that he experienced now w e b de boi sues exemplifies many elements of the black Atlantic that is ambiguity travel is kind of a rise of maddick identity and despite you know the racist belief that black people are unintelligent or less intelligent than white people to voice just through that completely back in its face he was one of the most intelligent people to grace the united states which embarrassed many of these institutions for thinking that they reserved only for white people now it's important to note though that zu boi's had a very different history than a lot of black people in the united states and that he was not born into slavery which doesn't mean that he was wasn't still opposed to it in every single way and opposed to all the laws that would follow so after slavery ended zu boi spent a lot of time traveling the world going all over Europe and africa until finally having been completely done with the united states and the horrors committed there settling down in gana i believe in his in his 90s now one of the two boi's is most um powerful points or one of the things that he brought to light in the most extreme form or the most clearly was just how violent and just how evil modernity was and in the many of the tenets of enlightenment that that emerged that kind of existed within it and that is because despite the claim to humanism despite the claim to superiority ethical superiority modernity was probably one of the most violent institutions to ever come about or most violent cultural instances to ever emerge even though it has tried again and again to hide this fact so many of the violence is inflicted upon black people upon indigenous people all across the world these facts were widely hidden they weren't there were no records kept or very few records kept of how many people were killed in the slave trade or how many indigenous people were massacred in the united states in in Canada in all across the world and so it required going into very different places to find out the truths of these events now what interests Gilroy about to boi's is that he did not submit to boi's did not submit to the idea of a kind of racial essentialism that black people act a certain way or are treated or were homogeneously treated under through racism instead he is much more interested in the kind of peculiarities the particular the particulars between different groups while still acknowledging there to be the common thread of blackness and oppression operated against black bodies so building from the boy skillroy suggests that we think about the issue of racial commonality outside of constructing binary frameworks like black white different black people from other black people and so on and zu boi's also wasn't totally hostile to all of the institutions of modernity like higher education that clearly is a co-conspirator with modernity and revealing in in promoting many of the violent events that took place du boi saw value to education in those ways in higher education even though it was part of this enterprise of racism and oppression and this just further reveals his ambiguous position his own contradictory position that Gilroy is trying to really hammer home but this really comes to the fore with zu boi's idea of double consciousness that to be black in the united states meant that you occupied two different bodies you were on the one hand black and on the other hand you were an american and both had different expectations and so you were kind of split in two you were doubled in that way and so there's another in the work of france fennel who suspiciously doesn't come up in this text at all i may have missed it but fennel does not come up in this text at all which isn't to say that he needed to because that would be stupid to be like oh in order to be to mount a proper criticism of racism you have to talk about fennel i'm not saying that but i think a lot of the there are a lot of overlaps and i'd be curious as to why Gilroy didn't include some of that work here but there's a moment in fennel when he's sitting on a train i believe or a bus and a white boy says uh points to his mother and says that there's a black man there and in that moment he feels fennel feels like he's occupying more than one body like he's taking up too much space like he there he's been tripled almost like there's too much of him and he just wants to curl up in a ball and just just hide now we see a similar thing occurring here with zu voice's idea of double consciousness where it is a matter of occupying more than one body by virtue of being marked by both americans and blackness now through this splitting Gilroy says that we are we black people are denied the possibility for self-consciousness as hegel writes about it so in hegel to put it kind of simply in order to attain self-consciousness you need to have a consciousness so you need to be able to think and look around and see things in the world you only attain self-consciousness when you are among others who are also conscious conscious that have their own consciousness is and they are looking at you so when they look at you and you think that they are employing their faculties of consciousness on you so they're thinking about you then you say oh can I do that to myself can I think about myself? And here is emerged the possibility for self-consciousness. Now this possibility is denied for people, for black people in the United States as Du Bois writes about it here, and that Gilroy picks up on because they do not have that first initial consciousness because their identity is fractured by these structures. Now again, Gilroy is hesitant to say that this is just a, had this homogenous effect because new forms of subjectivity emerge that are worthy of celebrating. But at the same time, there's no denying that there are these kind of structures that were imposed to inhibit the formation, the crystallization of a subjectivity that could be self-conscious. Now for the rest of the chapter, Gilroy performs a close reading of Du Bois's some of his books, including the Dark Princess and the Souls of Black Folk, Black folks, Black folk. And I'm not going to be able to give huge plot summaries of them because that would just take way too much time. And again, or to really get the full experience here, you have to go and read those texts and then go and read Gilroy. But Du Bois simply, these are texts that depict traveling, that depict mutation, that depict development on the part of Black people, and that don't submit to the idea of a kind of Black essentialism, kind of pure authenticity that can be embraced. And that closes up here with chapter 4, and I think on that note, I'll close it up here and in the next episode we'll finish the next half of the text. If you like what I did, like, share, subscribe. If you didn't, you know, you can yell at me. If there's anything I excluded, I'd love to hear about it. And yeah, get you next time. Take care. [BLANK_AUDIO]