The Power of the Bama-Superhero Narrative

Rural Black Southerners inhabit a strange and contradictory place in the imaginations of most Americans, particularly in the realm of politics. When we think of the past, rural Black Southerners are situated among our collective heroes for their mighty efforts in confronting de jure segregation and white supremacy. When we think more currently, our collective imaginings of rural Black Southerners most often congeal around notions of the backwater and slavish ‘bama’ who lacks the mental facilities to engage in any sort of collective political process.
These one dimensional notions of Blackness, rurality, and the South are equally problematic. While the trope of the ‘bama’ is obviously corrosive, the trope of the fanciful superhero of the Civil Rights Era also has significantly detrimental effects on the paths along which living and breathing rural Black Southerners with real problems might engage in the collective politics. Although projected in contradictory directions, these one dimensional narratives weave themselves into a strange supra narrative about the political potentials and collective capacities of rural Black Southerners. I call this strange narrative the Bama-Superhero Narrative (BSN). As I demonstrate later, the hegemony of the BSN works to reshape or misshape the collective assertions of rural Black Southerners on political stages at all levels on which these communities engage by closing out particular forms of collective voice and collective assertion and by defining rural Black Southerners outside the realm of respectability and acceptability.
According to the first and most dramatically corrosive portion of the BSN, rural Black folks inhabit a sort of archaic no-man’s-land. In the timeless, rural South ‘ Uncle Tom,’ mammy, and the whole cast of timid, submissive, and hopelessly colloquial characters apparently avoid any sort of collective political action because they are afraid of how white folks might react. This timid cast of one-dimensional characters apparently shudders at the mere mention of conflict with white folks.
While this narrative litters popular culture, I have also found it ubiquitous in intellectual and activist/organizer circles. At my alma mater, I encountered graduate students from the Northeast in particular, who misinterpreted the uncomfortable gazes of many undergraduates as they and other graduate students rambled in platitudes about how ‘whitie’ and ‘the man’ had their boots on our collective neck, as confirmation of the slavish and unsophisticated docility of Black and rural Southerners. Notwithstanding the ways in which these graduate students’ deluded notions of the political misinformed their own sense of collective politics, these interpretations of other undergraduate students’ responses were at best, misguided. Not that I am any way representative of rural Black Southerners, but these sorts of incoherent ramblings and even coherent articulations of Black rage that I discovered for the first time in college in the spaces of classrooms and lectures, made me very uncomfortable at first. Not because I was some goofy buffoon, but because my family’s collective memory had precluded this particular sort of verbal confrontation with white folks. At home and in particular spaces, my family and neighbors articulated cogent and sometimes humorous collective narratives about the vileness of white supremacy and its propagators. And in the event of open confrontation with white folks in public spaces, these narratives about the evils of white supremacy found their way into arguments and fights. But generally, the collective memory of ‘just how crazy white folks can be sometimes’ and the daily necessity of finding more material ways of engaging white supremacy undercut such an open public discourse.
Additionally, in my work with other community and labor organizers inside and outside of the South, I have encountered the first portion of the BSN. In these spaces, the bama narrative is a little less obvious. Because these ‘conscious’ people, at least theoretically, hold in high esteem their fanciful notions of ‘folk,’ they are much more likely to sugar coat this portion of the BS narrative in flowery language. In one poignant case, I along with my co-organizers were chided by a supervisor for our ‘West Coast arrogance’ after we confronted another supervisor for taking up way too much space in a meeting with the workers we were helping to organize. The first supervisor told us that he never imagined that he would send a band of arrogant Californians to the South that would tell delicate and pitiful Southerners how we knew better than they about organizing. We were encouraged to remember ‘we’ had more resources for organizers in California or New York than there were in the poor South. I am from Virginia and the supervisor we had confronted was from Chicago, so how this all worked is beyond my comprehension. More importantly, inherent in this supervisor’s comments was the notion that Southerners in general and rural Black Southerners in particular (because this is who the supervisor seemed to have a real fetish for) were dumb, incapable, and sheepish in addition to delicate and pitiful. At the core of this supervisor’s ‘esteem’ for rural Black Southerners was the old trope of the slavish and unsophisticated bama fumbling and foolish as ever, and certainly unfit for collective political action, without the guiding hand of someone more cognizant of the problems of the world.
The second portion of the BS narrative is a bit trickier to navigate, because esteem for Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker and Medgar Evers and the unnamed thousands who confronted jim crow is well warranted. So from the outset, let me be clear that in no way do I want to downplay the power, courage, or important work of these, my foremothers and forefathers in the contracted struggle against the evils of white supremacy, and to differing degrees capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy.
In this portion of the narrative, Southern and rural Black communities of the past were peppered with leaders who were born for that particular historical moment. According to the superhero narrative, these one-dimensional historical figures were natural leaders who mobilized their communities without dramatic effort. The supernatural power of these figures makes them otherworldly and inhuman. That this superhero narrative melts the historical drama of the Civil Rights movement almost seamlessly into the national myth of capitalist individualistic achievement is paramount. Conveniently, a sanitized, other-worldly, flawlessly articulate, and always respectable Dr. King is a part of ‘our’ American story rather than a concerned, at times fearful man who apologized to his congregation after a number of services for repeating sermons, and who was himself brought into the Movement by people already mobilizing to fight for access to the benefits of the New Deal state along with their dignity.
While many of my Black Studies professors thoroughly interrogated this portion of the BSN, with many other students and texts I encountered that the otherworldliness of these figures removed them from engagement. They were, in effect, gods. Particularly for those who easily swept Fannie Lou Hamer and the struggle for Mississippi to the side, this superhero narrative easily became a perfectly respectable and masculine narrative by which uncommon men were able to lead their communities to confront the jim crow order. To hell with the poor and sometimes illiterate folks from rural Virginia to rural Texas who risked life and limb to lay claims to their dignity and their portions of the New Deal state. For those actually involved in the strenuous work of community and labor organizing, the construction of the mythical Movement takes a different shape.
For many of the people I have encountered and me included, these mythical notions of the Civil Rights Era often lead to either fanciful nostalgia or hopeless despair. For many reasons, the work activists/organizers engage in currently is a very different from the Civil Rights Era, particularly in consideration of the mythic proportions that the Civil Rights epoch often inhabits in our collective memory. We get nostalgic when we think of the wins our ancestors labored so hard for. We then despair at how seemingly unproductive our current state of affairs is.[1]
Both the bama and the superhero narratives help to reshape or misshape the terms by which rural Black Southerners can engage on political stages. Again, the bama narrative has the most obvious effects on the shape and projection of political aspirations by rural Black communities. The timeless jumbling cast of characters that inhabits the American political imagination about current rural and Southern African American communities could never be a serious contestant on the political stage. They are inherently stupid and could never really speak for themselves, or so the hegemonic logic goes.
Recently in a fight against privatized probation in Americus, Georgia, the corrosive effects of this discourse were clear from the outset. When the newly formed community organization began to question the rights of the city and the company to profit from probation, the local media and the city council lampooned the political aspirants for their supposed lack of intellectual, social, and political sophistication. Between the lines of articles and inhabiting the words of the city council were the old tropes of the colloquial and bent Negro.
With a drastically different projection, the superhero narrative also misshapes the terms on which rural Black Southerners can engage on political stages. The sanitized and respectable image of the Civil Rights organizers and leaders works to discredit different articulations of political aspiration. Men, and particularly women, who cannot speak in ‘appropriate’ fashion or who are not formally educated or who do not own a suit are discouraged from voicing their collective concerns or articulating any alternatives. This vision of respectable legitimacy rears up in every tactic and campaign in rural locations. For example, when I asked my father to door knock with me in a recent campaign in my county, he was at first reluctant because as he said ‘I can’t talk good enough to knock on people’s doors.’ While I convinced him that the urgency of the situation required that he help knock doors, he flatly refused to knock doors in particular ‘bourgie’ neighborhoods and with other canvassers.
Although the projections of the bama and the superhero narratives are dramatically different, they connect to reinforce one another in a supra narrative that works to exclude rural Black communities from particular political projects on particular political stages. The superhero narrative reconstructs and propagates the notion that only particular manners and mannerisms are appropriate in politics and it leaves us to anticipate some great messiah to be born as experienced as Ella Baker. The bama narrative works simultaneously to exclude rural and Black Southerners from conceptions of respectability and acceptability. Thus the superhero narrative helps to set a particular respectability standard for the political stage while the bama narrative closes rural and Southern Black folks from respectability and legitimacy.
With all of this said, it is important to recall that ultimately rural Black Southern communities have had and have the agency to shed and recast narratives about appropriateness, respectability, and their collective ability. It is about exploiting the fleeting moments at which we can shed the common narrative about ourselves and our families and our neighbors in order to thrust ourselves unapologetically onto the political stage. While Barak Obama doesn’t represent a complete rupture with the politics of the past, I can attest to the fact that his ground campaign drew in many rural Southern Black folks to roles and onto stages that they may not have envisioned for themselves even a few months ago.

[1] The current state of affairs is very complicated, and I don’t have the space to properly articulate the many facets that shape the tensions between our memory of the Civil Rights Movement and the current state of affairs.