Struggle defines Vincent Lloyd's search for the meaning of Blackness in an anti-Black world in Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. Struggle conveys the practical register of dignity that resounds in the Black political tradition with roots in the scene of chattel slavery, which reverberates in the new movement for Black lives. The present work shows Lloyd takes seriously Black people seeking to live faithfully, humanely, and transcendently in a capricious, brutal, and banal white world.
Chapter 1 differentiates true dignity from dignity-as-status. The former belongs to those who wrest it from an anti-Black world, whereas the latter is a hollow respectability rendered by a dominant white supremacy. Lloyd argues that to discern between them is a task that requires imagination, in which the struggle to escape slavery is vital to envision Black dignity. Frederick Douglass's narrative shows true “ontological struggle” (10) concerns dignity in resistance to systemic domination. Lloyd says in purest form such narratives mirror the primal scene (14) of domination and aid in “attending” (62) to homologous contemporary scenes. #Blacklivesmatter interrupted Obama-era multicultural respectability politics with a new narrative of dignity in struggle for Black life against anti-Black racism and demanded accountability to social movements that opposed multivariate dominations.
In chapters 2 and 3, respectively, Lloyd parses Black rage as the cry accompanying Trayvon Martin's murde, and discerns between true and false Black love. The collective anger that swelled after Martin's death irrupted again in Ferguson with the murder of Michael Brown. Lloyd argues Black rage, whose wounds were opened in slavery, struggles against domination because it confronts structural evil with the truth of a Black dignity held fast in the soul. By routing one's reading through that “primal scene” of slavery, activists can perceive true from false, disordered from freeing, Black love. Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson realized Black love was distorted by white racism and capitalism; Audre Lorde and Assata Shakur prioritized the sensual, erotic, and enfleshed nature of Black love in the struggle for freedom.
In chapter 4, Lloyd proffers the Black family as the base community in which struggle for Black dignity is engaged. He draws on queer studies critiques of the nuclear family to interrogate the heteropatriarchal demonization of “absent” Black fathers, which subscribes to a white supremacist logic of legitimacy-as-inheritance, and ignores the edifices of domination in which Black bodies are caught in a carceral apparatus. Lloyd argues Black family should be defined by a mode of illegitimacy, represented by Lorde, whose mother, ancestors, and partners were “her Black family” (90).
In chapter 5, Lloyd argues the apocalyptic imagination of Black futures beyond white world of domination has replaced the multicultural discourse of hope. Domination curbs Black futures by making the present seem inescapable or the past nostalgic. Black futures must pass through that scene of slavery, which, contrarily (cf. 5), Lloyd says, “exists outside of history as its condition of possibility” (99). Attending to ontological domination allows one to reject false hope and creatively imagine life after the world's end. Martin Delany models this in apophatic terms of sexual freedom negotiated in the intimate spaces of encounter, contact zones as foretastes of freedom, futures of dignity that motivate one in the struggle to make them realities.
Chapter 6 argues Black magic harnesses individual power, healing, and the resilience of the soul in the spiritual struggle for sacred Blackness. Spirituality is only secondarily a tool for struggle; primarily, “it refuses the limited sets of possibilities for struggle” (115) by which domination distorts reality quantitatively and qualitatively. Aimé Césaire bares spirituality in this register, as he rejected colonial theologics and loved the ordinary in sacred Blackness. Black magic as spirituality enfleshes and attends to these (im)possibilities.
Chapter 7 affirms Black revolution in a framework of abolition. Lloyd echoes Lynice Pinkard's call for a revolutionary suicide that demands we extricate ourselves from systems that proffer safety and security, and instead join grassroots movements. Recent abolition discourse can provide a salient paradigm for revolution if it rightly understands organizing as a collective struggle against domination (142). This leaves revolutionary theorist-intellectuals, including Lloyd, in a tragic position, he says, whose critiques often serve institutions and condemn revolt.
Lloyd's work on Black dignity provides an incisive interpretation of Black Lives Matter. Readers who wish to understand the gravity of Black rage, love, family, futures, and magic for the revolutionary political moment will benefit from reading. His recognition of complex entanglements with domination is a salve against despair. However, his hermeneutic that insistently passes through “the” primal scene of slavery is stymied by an overvaluation of a vague, perhaps problematic logic of purity (6, 14, 27, 70, 150). Yet his call in the afterword to “attend” (159) to the lies of racism and “out-narrate” (163) them is a hard if necessary challenge to creatively struggle against anti-Blackness.
