Musings: On Being and Non-Being: The Impossibility of Black Polyamorous Existence (Part I)
I.
The question, “What does it mean to be Black and polyamorous,” is poorly framed.
As far as I can tell, no progress has been made on this question despite the increasing number of bloggers, academics, and influencers who confront it. Black polyamorists typically affirm polyamorous identity by negation; they try to make out what and who they are by appealing to what and who they are not.
In what is, perhaps, the most discussed scene in Fanon’s Black Skin, the scene on the train confronts the question of being through the lived experience of the Black man.
On the train with Fanon, we encounter questions of recognition and non-belonging; of being and non-being. Fanon’s longing to situate his soul “at the origin of the world” is frustrated by the discovery that he, “ ‘A negro’” is displaced as a mere “object among other objects”; a genuinely suffocating “dialectic between [his] body and the world.” He probes a landscape that fundamentally denies “being” for the negro because it fails to accommodate their lived experience. Crucially, Blacks are Black before they are ever human and the Black man is never man.
This dialectic creates an ontology for the negro lover that is all its own. The question of being, for the black polyamorist, is one and the same with the question of non-being.
II.
I worry that inquiry into Black love and what’s more, Black polyamorous being, has not been as serious as it should be. What we colloquially call “Black love” and “romantic love” must be ontologically distinct and any analysis that fails to take stock of this fact is misleading.
It is tempting to think about “black” and “polyamorous” categorically — as empty containers lying in wait to be filled with substance(s) that will create meaning and this is troubling.
First, Black feminisms teach us that social positions like being black and woman are non-aggregative. From the perspective of one’s lived experiences, we cannot isolate these categories; they always and already intersect. Thus, for the black polyamorist, “black and polyamorous” existence (what ever it might or might not be) is not an aggregation of “Black” and “Polyamorous” existence.
Societies fail to recognize Black people in ways that they do not necessarily fail to recognize polyamorous people. After all, Black bodies regularly lie dead on the asphalt from state sanctioned violence whether polyamorous or monogamous; whether single or married; whether gay or straight; whether man or woman.
There are also failures of recogonition that polyamrous people encounter that Black people do not. The sirens blare in our social discourse about declining marriage rates for Black folks and more specifically, for Black women. Black writers have zeroed in on the marriage decline for the better half of the past two decades. For instance, Ralph Banks asks “Is marriage for White people?” and Dianne Stewart highlights America’s war against Black love and African American marriage. But as Black polyamorists pay witness their to their monogamous counterparts walking down the aisle — all dressed in white — their polyamorous selves as such, could not marry if they wanted to. The United States still, by and large, forbids plural marriages with little exception.
We learn very little about Black polyamrous existence by attempting to combine the ways that Blacks and polyamorists confront interlocking systems of oppression. If Black polyamorists can exist, we should instead suppose that the world they face and the oppressive challenges contained therein, are unique.
The second problem runs deeper than thoughts surrounding combinations of allegedly distinct categories but involves our presuppositions nonetheless.
We cannot presuppose the existence of a Black subject — polyamorous or otherwise.
DuBois centrally questions the unification of a Black subject when he speaks of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk — “one ever feels his twoness.” The metaphysical mic check severs the negro from what we learn of “selves” to be.
Fanon provides the occasion, even if only for a moment, to consider the negro in a somewhat non-comparative way. Although conscious of “The white world” and the simultaneous denial of his participation in it, his question is about the very thing that would, on the DuBoisian picture, be either one or two. He painfully brings us to grips the presupposition of Black being. Far from a subject, the Black might well be, a mere “object among other objects.”
III.
In America, the distinction between whiteness and the Black has always been about sovereignty; freedom. When we begin from whiteness, using it as a default against which all others must measure up, we begin with a blind preoccupation with freedom. (Alas, some of the Declaration of Independence’s signatories were also slave holders.) This starting point grants white freedom primarily through relationship to property. Being born white at the birth of this nation meant both that you were not property and that you could own it.
“Being born white at the birth of this nation meant both that you were not property and that you could own it.”
In the white imagination, the only one thought of as decent, the Black slave was an object; human property to be owned. Charles Mills is right to have had deep ideological criticism for liberal social traditions that take an ideally sovereign subject as its starting point. Those approaches simply aren’t fit to govern the Black American.
Slave standing further politicized its impossibility for being. The Black was not a citizen. As Trump’s bertherism directed toward former U.S. President Barack shows us, Black citizenship has also been questioned ever-after. Citizenship (and the rights therein) grants legitimate purchase of America’s promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
IV.
Today, when people think of happiness and a well lived life, they take intimate relationships to be a part of that pursuit. This is reasonable; human beings are not designed to endure loneliness and isolation. Black’s fraught standing of non-standing, however, has also compromised their pursuit of romantic love.
If romantic love requires freedom and sovereignty, it is clear that Black love and romantic love are not the same; the former is born from freedom, the latter, born of struggle. The instability of Black existence will always determine what is possible for Black love. bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins are both right to suggest that our understanding of Black love must reflect the social realities as experienced under the lived condition of Blackness. Our intimate relationships are anything but apolitical.
“If romantic love requires freedom and sovereignty, it is clear that Black love and romantic love are not the same; the former is born from freedom, the latter, born of struggle.”
We still associate the freedom to choose who we love with marriage today. For most of human history, however, love and marriage were at odds and love played little to no role in marriages. It’s not until the 17th and 18th centuries that we saw a push for marriages of love rather than marriages arranged on the basis of wealth or status. This shift occurred simultaneously as innovations in industry grew a middle class among men; changes that enabled lovers to select a spouse and fund weddings without the involvement of their families. In the 19th and 20th centuries, as the women’s rights movement gained more momentum, wives began positioning themselves as equal to their husbands rather than their property. Marriage became a personal contract between two free equals seeking love, stability, and happiness.
Its movement from patriarchy, slight; its relationship to the white sovereign subject, in tact.
V.
There is no point in American history where marriage is not wed with romantic love or free citizenship for Black folks. Under slavery, Blacks were forced to “marry” as a means of producing more capital assests. Exercising new “freedom”, the newly emancipated married — coercively — to access citizenship. Newly “freed” Black women and men were forced to marry as a precondition for obtaining labor contracts and money to sustain their already existing families.
Black love and Black marriage were less about choice than they were about void.
Marriage was particularly violent and pernicious to Black non-monogamous intimacies and their families as well. American Reconstruction’s possibility of marriage for Black folks turned out to be bogus as choice was constrained in other ways as well. For example, in this period some Black relationships deviated from the customs associated with monogamous marriage including plural marriages and alternative courtship and marital arrangements. Dianne Stewart writings come to mind here:
“One agent spoke for many federal authorities who, with no regard for the intricate polygamous unions slavery had designed for a great number of African Americans, insensitively imposed monogamous marriage upon former bondspersons and to the detriment of Black women. ‘Whenever a negro appears before me with 2 or 3 wives who have equal claim upon him,’ he explained, “I marry him to the woman who has the greatest number of helpless children who otherwise would become a charge on the bureau.” (BWBL, 64)
and;
“If such such man, thus living with more than one woman, or such woman living with more than one man, shall fail or refuse, to comply with the provisions of this section, he or she shall be prosecuted for the offense of fornication, or fornication or adultery, or, fornication and adultery, and punished accordingly.” (BWBL, 68)
Thus, as America reconstructed itself toward its future, Black non-monogamous intimacies were shattered and families were destroyed. Marriage as a pathway to recognition of both humanity and citizenship was foreclosed for Black non-monogamists. The expansion of the rights and promises of stability for “monogamous” blacks thereby constrained the possibility of being thus, for non-monogamous ones.
The question of what to do for those unrecognized Black non-monogamists has never been prioritized; and their histories are usually forgotten. Voided as non-being, marred in a process of becoming.
