Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
Despite the historical erasure through several mediums ranging in their measurable violent practices, Black individuals continue to exist, create, reimagine, and reshape queer spaces. The lack of representation, safety, and care provided to Black individuals within queer communities is not to be attributed to a lack of participation from Black queer organizers, intellectuals, advocates, and individuals; rather, part of the issues stem from a lack of active acknowledgment of intersectionality in queer spaces and how race contributes to experiences revolving one’s queerness. Adding to the Black scholars that have engendered a framework that demands the recognition of the two categories, then, C. Riley Snorton connects both Blackness and Transness “as distinct categories of social evaluation,” (pg. 7). Highlighting the importance as single categories that are interconnected with each other, Snorton posits the argument that if one is to understand the contemporary Black and trans social movements, understanding the history of Blackness and Transness in the United States is crucial. Black on Both Sides engages with what Spillers describes as “the historical moment[s] when language causes to speak, the historical moment[s] at which hierarchies of power … simply run out of terms,” (pg. 11) Thus, in engaging with the concept of terms and their importance about how society then understands the terms, and what exactly are the consequences of that, Black on Both Sides engages with understanding how the history of both Blackness and Transness, in multiple aspects, can assist the navigation of the contemporary understanding of the terms and the communities who are affected by these terms. Snorton posits the following question: What does it mean to have a body that has been made into a grammar for the whole world’s meaning?” (pg. 11) Further, how are Black queer individuals navigating this discourse on grammar, and how are they responding to their positioning from the lens of someone outside of the Black and Trans experience?
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity utilizes multiple archives from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries to highlight moments in history where Black individuals engaged in transitivity and transversality through their posited fungibility and active fugitivity. Engaging with Spillers’ work and their conception of flesh and body, Hartman’s work on fungibility, and Morten’s work on fugitivity to discuss the conditions of enslaved people in the United States, Snorton argues that understanding the concepts of transitivity and transversality necessitate the understanding of the mattes of fungibility and fugitivity. Through the use of archives, journalism, and literature, Snorton narrates a historical account that centers on the lives of multiple individuals throughout the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Choosing to focus on specific individuals, Snorton engages with the concepts of fungibility and fugitivity to explain how Black people navigated their spaces and how the understanding of that might allow for the further understanding of Transness, as well as the contemporary issues associated with both categories. Focusing then, on what it means “to have a body that has been made into a grammar for the whole world meaning,” Snorton highlights the lives of particular individuals who were practicing the actions, behaviors, etc., that these terms hold within their definition (and extension of it) before the formulation of the terms themselves. To propose the notion of practice before terminology, one of the ways that Snorton centers his argument is by providing historical archives that detail the lives of Black fugitives, who, understanding their fugitivity as Black subjects, and, in the eyes of their white counterparts, objects, used their fugitivity, moving through fugitivity, to escape their enslavement.
For Snorton, transitive is “fungible passing into fugitive,” and transversal is “fugitivity intersecting fungibility,” (pg. 57). Snorton utilizes these terms to further explore the fugitive, which is also at once fungible, “narratives of black people — born free or into captivity — in the era of slavery’s formal transition,” (57). Fungibility, as the posited notion that Black people are commodities, objects for profit, strips Black people of their particularities. Throughout their book, Snorton provides multiple examples in which Black individuals use their fungibility to their advantage, and even use it in ways that allow them to navigate spaces in their fugitive state undetected. Fungibility being coupled with gendered sexual terror in the sense that the flesh is a being for the capture, Snorton also presents the readers with examples in which cross-dressing allows Black individuals to navigate their fungibility through fugitivity. The flesh, then, as ungendered, which Spillers notes is a process that occurs through the trauma of the middle passage, can also be noted as a possibility. Since the flesh is genderless, there are possibilities to discuss gender queerness, because it creates new possibilities for racial/gender/sexual selves. In a way, it is also a possibility of creating a process of disidentification. This process of misidentification that Snorton argues is what allowed enslaved people to navigate spaces undetected and even, allowing for enslaved people to navigate towards freedom, is a way in which the notion of possibility is articulated in this book.
Connecting the concept of fungibility with fugitivity, Snorton delicately and purposely emphasizes how Black people were acutely aware of their fungibility. So much so, that they used it to their advantage while being fugitives. An example in this book is that of Harriet Jacobs, a Black woman who, while being a fugitive, was assumed to be identifying or “passing” as a white woman. Understanding that this was the perception her white counterparts had, and this is who they would be looking for, Harriet Jacobs opted to darken her skin tone, and, in turn, was able to navigate the spaces undetected even though she was being actively searched for (pg. 70). Snorton highlights, and even emphasizes very thoroughly throughout this book that Black people were thoroughly aware of their fungible state in the eyes of their white counterparts. Even more importantly, Snorton highlights that Black people’s understanding of their situation when engaging with their white counterparts, did not mean they viewed each other as fungible or as objects. Questions that readers should ask themselves when engaging with the example that is provided by Snorton when they reference Anarcha, Betsy, Lucy, and unnamed others who were subjected to a doctor’s abuse are: what are the ways that these women, in understanding their situation, acted towards and with one another to ensure the pain from the doctor’s abuse was less severe? How did they communicate with each other without speaking while in the presence of their captors? (pg. 19) Snorton invites readers to engage with these questions and others throughout this book.
Snorton takes Anarcha, Lucy, Betsy, and the unnamed others who were tortured by the doctor to “explore how transness became capable, that is, differently conceivable as a kind of being in the world where gender — though biologized — was not fixed but fungible, which is to say, revisable within blackness, as a condition of possibility,” (59). Snorton takes fungibility and fugitivity and argues that since it is the case that Black people understood their positionally and the circumstances of their conditions, they understood that white people did not see Black bodies but Black flesh, that there was no difference in their ungendered flesh because those calling themselves Masters saw only their flesh, only viewed them as commodities. Using this to their advantage, they were able to create situations that provided them with moments of “passing” as well as transitivity and transversality for freedom.
Snorton’s book provides readers with a historical understanding of Blackness and Transness that allows readers to be able to understand the contemporary issues these categories share. Emphasizing, perhaps, that there is no way to understand anti-trans violence without also engaging in the project of understanding anti-black violence. In a different way of critically analyzing Transness, Snorton challenges readers’ preconceived notions of what the grammatical usage of certain terms entails, the consequences they might have, as well as the historical beginning of them. Perhaps even, the possibility that these terms provide.
