ABSTRACT
There was the devalued African past, constructed such that narratives of recovered racial identity became crucial precisely because this element was most obscured, distorted, and elided. Linked to this, then, are narratives of self-esteem that are crucial to people whose denial was predicated on their supposed intellectual and personal inferiority, not simply as individuals, but collectively as blacks. The uncritical notion of blacks being evil, and inferior, and unintelligent informs personal perceptions and how people feel about themselves. The politics of racial essentialism arose as a defense mechanism against the ominous gaze of white authoritarian regulation of black being. That mechanism doesn't acknowledge the flexible, fluid boundaries of race, the socially constructed means by which race is reconstituted over space and time that is both a source not only of irreducible categories for social theorizing, but of the stakes of "personal" identity as well.
