It’s kind of hard to believe this was our last Blackstack Salon for 2025, but damn, what a powerful way to close out the calendar year. As the world has confirmed its anti-blackness, my personal mission has been focused on preserving our history that is constantly trying to be erased. It doesn’t look like hoarding literature either; the preservation takes place in the mind after we’ve freed up space from the decolonization first.
The conversation with Gary F. Green II, PhD for the Blackstack Salon was refreshing to say the least. We discussed topics around how writing his book, Playing the Game, healed parts of him, his comedic nature playing a major role in the creative process of writing his book, and then we touched on a couple of topics from the first two chapters.
Preface: Act I
I grew up watching BET’s Comic View. This was a cutthroat stand-up comedy show akin to Showtime at the Apollo that featured some of the most brilliant up-and-coming Black comedians before they became household names. It was like the PG-13 version of Def Comedy Jam, which was the reason it aired on BET, rather than HBO, every Tuesday and Friday night at 9 p.m. EST, 8 p.m. Central. I grew up in Central time, and I remember every detail about the show because that is how much I loved it. That was the only show I looked forward to watching more than BET’s Uncut, because what can I say? I was a young Black teenager who was just starting to feel himself (out) while trying to cultivate an identity called “man,” which was even more overdetermined by hypermasculine sexuality then than it is now. Oh, how I would watch intently as these young Black stand-up comedians told jokes that ranged from sexuality to spirituality, back when I assumed the two were opposites. I was enamored with the different ways these brilliant minds embodied comedic sensibilities, and how they created worlds of alternative meaning that gave me a break from the reality I was living.
Journal Prompt: When was the last time you felt the creative flow when writing?
Chapter One: The Myth of Level Playing Fields
The legibility of Black male inhumanity
Tropes like “beast” register as normal because there is already a legibility to Black male inhumanity, and it plays out whether Black men are being criminalized or fetishized for their athletic prowess. This is not to suggest that Black men are not human, at least not in a way that takes that category—”human”—at its word. To the contrary, this project explores the ways Black being transcends the (political) category of “human” altogether. It reveals anthropological insights and anti-racist implications that come as a result of learning to recognize the brilliance of Black embodiment. What is important to note at this point is how racist depictions of Black athletes vis-à-vis “beast” contribute to a broader cultural incapacity to see Black men as human, which materializes suffering in ways that are largely mundane. This ongoing incapacity is born from the feedback loop of performing the assumptions of this trope as if they were true—a productive ritual which makes them real.
Journal Prompt: Define your legibility as a Black person.
Gary F. Green II, PhD encouraged everyone to share in the comments. Below you will find his response to the prompt.
Chapter Two: Marshawn Lynch
Bracketing “human” with Butler
In Black Transhuman Liberation Theology, Butler invites (Black) people to unsubscribe from the use of “human” because of the extent to which it is politically fraught and continually caught by European epistemologies that preclude Black existence from the safety it provides. And this happens whether one is adopting predominant worldviews or resisting them. In this sense, Butler’s critique of the category “human” connects with the zero point previously noted. If whiteness has been constructed as the organizing center of all (colonized) existence, then its linguistic codes have also been imposed and normalized. Such codes have Eurocentric cosmologies embedded within them, which means any relation to them—whether collusion or resistance—reifies them as normal, as “real.” This suggests that even revolutionary movements that employ “human” as a foundation from which to resist or pursue more rights is, in a deeper way, reinscribing the worldviews of white supremacy.
We will be diving more into this during the Blackstack Book Club study sesh on Sunday, January 18th at 10am PT/12pm CT/1pm EST. Please read through Chapter Three for our January study sesh, we will finish the last two chapters for February’s study sesh.
Zoom RSVP: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/lGj7EK1BTiygCPYfUcrFyA
Purchase Playing the Game: https://www.greenideasconsulting.com/book
