Ricks-James Baldwins Lean

Dance Chronicle
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ldnc20
James Baldwin’s Lean: Gratuitous Violence and

Black Performativity in Take This Hammer
Omar Benton Ricks
To cite this article: Omar Benton Ricks (05 Feb 2024): James Baldwin’s Lean: Gratuitous
Violence and Black Performativity in Take This Hammer, Dance Chronicle, DOI:
10.1080/01472526.2023.2297570
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2023.2297570
Published online: 05 Feb 2024.
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DANCE CHRONICLE
https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2023.2297570
James Baldwin’s Lean: Gratuitous Violence and Black

Performativity in Take This Hammer
Omar Benton Ricks
This article reads James Baldwin’s performative labor in the

1964 documentary film Take This Hammer as the staging of KEYWORDS
an engagement between Saidiya Hartman and Judith James Baldwin; Afro-
Butler’s contending approaches to Black performativity. As pessimism; queer studies;
the film’s host, Baldwin refused the ethnographic gaze and dance studies; Blackness;
the tendency of documentaries to approach Black people performativity; shade;
as problems. On the other hand, throughout the documen gratuitous violence;
documentary film
tary, Baldwin exposed and commented on the ubiquitous
anti-Black structure that rendered Black people structurally
powerless and available to what Frank B. Wilderson III,
Jared Sexton, and Steve Martinot have called gratuitous
violence. The article applies Kemi Adeyemi’s reading of the
queer performativity of shade and the concept of the lean
as ways to theorize the ambivalent position of Baldwin’s
performance.
On February 4, 1964, the documentary film Take This Hammer aired on

National Educational Television (a predecessor to public television in the
US imperial homeland).1 While the film opens with director Richard
Moore announcing the purpose of the film to “explore the existence of …
attitudes of … bitterness, demoralization, and despair”2 said to be increas
ing at the time among northern Black youths to see if such attitudes could
be found among Black youths in San Francisco, California, USA, it soon
becomes apparent that the film is really more interested in following its
host, renowned author James Baldwin, on a trip he made to the Black San
Francisco neighborhoods of Bayview-Hunters Point and Western Addition
in the spring of 1963.3
Throughout the film, we see Baldwin talking with Black youths and com
munity leaders about the ways that such forces as gentrification, employ
ment discrimination, and police harassment and violence converge to
fundamentally structure their life possibilities. Baldwin, of course, had a
longstanding interest in how Black youths were responding to the historical
moment of the Civil Rights movement, and, in this documentary, we get to
witness his conversations with the youths in the streets. While most of the
audio of Baldwin’s voice consists of a series of conversations he had with
� 2024 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

2 O. B. RICKS
his guide, social worker Orville Luster, most of the B-roll footage is of
Black youths living in San Francisco, and in perhaps ten of the forty-three
minutes we get to witness Baldwin’s conversations with the Black youths.
When we see him talking to Black youths, his body posture and respectful
distance suggest a humble, fully engaged, and attentive listener. He talks to
them with great care and empathy, laughing with them at their jokes, tak
ing their anger, fear, and hurt seriously, and just generally seeming to really
see and believe them in ways the larger society likely did not. In this sense,
he appears every bit the Baldwin who was renowned for “creating a sense
of intimacy with the reader.”4
Image 1. In many moments in Take This Hammer, Baldwin challenges the white audience—and he
is quite clear about the audience’s whiteness—to examine the unconscious meanings they impose
on Black people, meanings that are key to understanding the gratuitous violence of structural
anti-Blackness.
Description: Black-and-white still of James Baldwin, with the camera framing his head, chest, and
shoulders, as he sits on a light brown couch. He is wearing a light-colored shirt with a collar and a
handkerchief around his neck. His torso is leaning slightly forward toward the camera. He is looking
off to the left. His head is tilted slightly up, his eyelids are narrow, and his chin is jutted forward and
his mouth is open because he is mid-sentence, challenging white people to understand the struc
tural manifestations of anti-Blackness by understanding their fear of Black people.
Screenshot from Take This Hammer. Reproduced by permission of The WNET Group.
When approaching the viewer in the film’s final moments, on the other
hand, Baldwin takes an approach that is radically critical in some direct and
indirect ways. He physically indicates and verbally indicts his viewers for cre
ating—and desperately needing—something called “the n��r.”1 He then
attempts to place that curse on the normatively white audience of such
1
Throughout, I elect not to spell out the so-called “n-word,” even when quoting others (like Baldwin) who did
use the word.
DANCE CHRONICLE 3
documentaries.2 This moment has obvious and striking resonances with the
famous scene on a train that Frantz Fanon recounts in Black Skin, White
Masks,5 except, of course, staged skillfully in reverse via embodied perform
ance and the television documentary form. In that book’s fifth chapter,
Fanon relates his experience riding a train and repeatedly hearing a white
child say to their mother, “Tiens, un n�egre!” 6 and that experience catalyzing a
kind of break in his psyche––one from which he only began to heal much
later, in part, by becoming a revolutionary freedom fighter and a leading the
orist of anti-colonial struggle. “Tiens, un n�egre!” is often translated as “Look,
a Negro!” but it might be better translated as the far more pejorative “Look, a
n��r!”7 That nuanced distinction is important because—as we will see, and
intentionally or not—Baldwin is saying something very similar to the norma
tively white viewer—“you’re the n��r”—that the white child on the train
said about Fanon. Baldwin’s reiteration functions as an attempted reversal of
that Fanonian gaze by way of excitable speech,8 a performative curse of the
normatively white audience that attempts to invert the label that has always
already been applied to Black people.
Baldwin’s performance in that final moment and in this documentary
overall works to direct the viewer’s attention to the “million forces which are
inevitably set in motion when a people are despised. And you can’t pretend
you’re not despised if you are.”9 He knows that being able to say “I know I’m
not a n��r” is no kind of liberation at all as long as everyone you care
about is positioned by the world as “the n��r”—in the neighborhoods
where they are allowed to live, in the jobs they are allowed to work, in the
schools they are allowed to attend, in the ways the state and civil society
deem them available for premature death,10 and the panoply of ways that we
see Baldwin highlighting in this very film. This ubiquity of the racist struc
ture—its situatedness in various nodal points distributed throughout the life-
world of the Black subject—is made apparent at multiple scales, a few of
which Baldwin bodily sites and cites during Take This Hammer. There is the
physical location of the film in a colonial society: the ghettos of a major U.S.
city, convergence points of multiple intersecting oppressions and modes of
I will use the term “normatively white audience” throughout. Baldwin would not have used the word “n��r”
2
against a largely Black audience. I believe that Baldwin thought the normative audience for this documentary,
the audience whom it hailed and to whose epistemological position it was accountable, was disproportionately
white. I think Baldwin knew that Black people knew and lived many of the realities on which he was reporting
in Take This Hammer and that nothing in the documentary would be particularly revelatory to Black audiences.
I also think Baldwin knew how insulting it would be to white people to say to them “you’re the n��r,” the
thing that every Black person is called every day, usually in deed but sometimes in word too. Saidiya
Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection contains a epigraph to this effect: “There are certain words which are so
universally considered injurious to a person in his social or business relations if spoken of him that the courts
have held that the speaker of such words is liable to an action for slander, and damages are recoverable–even
though the one of whom the words were spoken does not prove that he suffered any special damage from
the words having been spoken of him … . From early times, it has been held to be slander, actionable per se,
to say of a white man that he is a Negro or akin to a Negro.” Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, Race Distinctions in
American Law (1910), quoted in Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 164.
4 O. B. RICKS
violence. There is also the film itself and the topic the film covers—attitudes
toward poverty among Black youths, whom Baldwin and social worker
Orville Luster interview about their life narratives.
The knowledge produced, especially in the moments when the youths
speak, threatens to overwhelm the film’s ideological commitment to the pro
ject of “Reason,”11 a project that would render the youths as “problems” to
be “solved”—or eliminated. The ethical force of the Black youths’ know
ledge, read by some as “anger,”12 is amplified by the intentional performance
of Baldwin, an internationally renowned author, and derives from the youths
simply articulating the realities of their lives. These realities can only be
described as necropolitical,13 based, as they are, in an epistemic framework
that emerges from those whom the power structure has always already
marked as available for exposure to injury, illness, and premature death.14
Through Take This Hammer and with Baldwin’s assistance, the youths pro
duce knowledge that threatens, but also exposes, the default epistemic
framework of this documentary. And that threat, if not repressed, serves to
expose the contours of the genre as a whole and of an entire unethical social
order. Take This Hammer forces the viewer to decide whether or not she
believes what these youths are saying, even while seeing the youths’ stories
mediated through an accomplished author—who, soon enough, would him
self be subject to accusations of “bitterness”15 and his writing derided as
“polemic,”16 the work of a “has-been.”17 Baldwin states his own reading of
Black life and amplifies the ways that several Black San Franciscans read
their own lives. Baldwin’s initial statement in the film—his declaration that
most Americans think he is lying when he says that the conditions of life in
San Francisco are little better for Black people than they were when these
youths and/or their families lived in the Jim Crow South18—raises the prob
ability that an entire way of knowing has been silenced and might now be
afforded a brief moment to be heard. Baldwin spends the rest of the film
demonstrating that this San Francisco does in fact exist right under the
noses of the very white liberals (perhaps some of whom are among the film’s
viewers) who routinely express that they “haven’t got a Negro problem.”19
Part of the brilliance of Baldwin’s performance lies in how it constitutes
an embodied critique of racism that is very pointed and specific while also
being elastic enough to include geographic sites (the deep South as well as
San Francisco, “America’s favorite city”) and the documentary genre and
documentary viewers themselves. Baldwin’s direct indictment of the norma
tively white audience physically resignifies, or ruptures and destabilizes the
meaning available to, the “ideal Insider”20 role of the host-subject expected
of him in a documentary of this sort. He stages a battle for the meaning of
the documentary—bringing to mind the colonialist roots, both intellectual
and political, of this documentary, and, indeed, of documentary as a filmic
DANCE CHRONICLE 5
genre. Baldwin, through verbal and bodily gestures, attempts to subvert the
documentary gaze and create a “break” for other knowledge frameworks to
slip through. But, in doing so, he also reveals this ubiquitous structure that
labors to keep him, and all of us Black people, positioned as “the n��r,”
a structure that is not destabilized when those whom it positions as human
objects attempt performative acts of inversion and resignification, a struc
ture that might require quite forceful interventions from those whom it
exposes to premature death, starvation, and oppression.
In this article, I want to meditate on Baldwin’s final moment in Take This
Hammer for what it can teach, specifically how Baldwin uses both the new media
of the cin�ema v�erit�e documentary form and the verbal and physical gestures of
shade to co-articulate a radical analysis of structural anti-Blackness. Baldwin’s
performance in Take This Hammer might seem to be working at cross-purposes
with itself, at once signifying on the “companionably ego-reinforcing”21 per
formance that he knows the normative white audience expects him to give while
also exposing the “impossibility”22 of that reappropriated performance radically
changing the structure to something more ethical. But I see Baldwin’s verbal and
physical gestures interacting to do two things: (1) enact a transgressive departure
from hegemonic performances of the role of documentary host, verbally and
physically gesturing a critique of the project of Reason of which the documen
tary is part and of the normatively white audience the documentary and project
of Reason both hail as subjects; and (2) simultaneously gesture a critique and
problematization of the performativity of excitable speech23 as a mode of resist
ance that is available to Black subjects as such. In this way, it represents an inflec
tion point between different ideas about Black performativity.
Performativity and the Anti-Black Structure

Judith Butler developed the concept of performativity to argue that, although
the repetition (or iterability)24 of signs gives them a kind of material or
seeming force as if they are some natural essence or substance, in fact, these
signs can be recontextualized and certain (or all) aspects of their meaning
(say, the meaning of “girl”25) can be changed by that subject as they, by
those very recontextualizations, create themself as a subject. Butler’s theory
of performativity holds that gender is fundamentally iterable and citatio
nal—in other words, performative—having no intrinsic reality beyond its
repetition and citation of previous performances of gender, and, like all
signs, is available to being revised even as it is repeated. Performativity is an
essential part of how Butler argues subjects, as such, come into being.26
Butler insists that other power-with-language structures besides gender are
performative—including race—because they rely on the reiteration of their
signs in order to maintain power.27 The significance of the performativity of
6 O. B. RICKS
power structures,28 for Butler, is the idea that things like racist statements,
which typically are used to reiteratively reinforce racist power structures, can
be subjected to reappropriation via citational acts that break with the racist
conventions of which the racist power structure is made. For this, Butler offers
up the following example of a famous embodied act of resistance that quoted
and broke from the citational chain of expected signs (in the literal and figura
tive sense) of white supremacy:
When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she had no prior right to do so
guaranteed by any of the segregationist conventions of the South. And yet, in laying
claim to the right for which she had no prior authorization, she endowed a certain
authority on the act, and began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those
established codes of legitimacy.29
Interestingly, Butler, providing no citation for their claim about Rosa

Parks, here assumes that Parks’ activism against segregation was primarily
a resignification of the signifying order of segregation (“the segregationist
conventions”), as opposed to, say, a labor calling attention to the asignifying
violence at the heart of an anti-Black social order. The assumption here
seems to be that inverting, or Blackening, an act that only white people
were authorized to do constitutes a usurpation of authority and legitimacy
and that such usurpation, in itself, initiates a break in the racist structure
(“began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes
of legitimacy”). If true, such a claim would have significant implications for
the capacity of people like Baldwin to invert the concept of “the n��r”
and make its application to white people have sticking power.
Without citation, however, it is difficult to know the precise provenance of
Butler’s reading of Parks’ activism, and, on closer look, their reading is similar,
if not identical, to a common and erroneous reading of Parks’ work as a singu
lar powerful performative iteration rather than acknowledging that it was irre
ducibly part of a larger, more variegated, and sometimes armed movement
against a structure of non-performative violence.30 Butler’s example suffers
from several shortcomings. In the first place, it assumes the efficacy of Parks’
act of civil disobedience derives from its resignification of a powerful sign, seg
regationist conventions, thereby utterly invisibilizing the long traditions and
perilous labor of armed resistance among Black people in the South that made
civil rights actions, like that of Parks, possible at all, let alone powerful.31 At a
more fundamental level, however, Butler is ignoring the ways that segregation
was way more, at its core, than a mere set of performative conventions that
refer back infinitely to prior signs and available to change in the process of
reiteration. The formation of the subject who would performatively seek to
resignify those conventions must be located prior to Parks’ performative reiter
ation, a priori of other positionalizing modalities. The signs that say “whites
only” were conventions of the structure and thus available to resignification,
DANCE CHRONICLE 7
but they were not the essence of the structure of white supremacist segregation.
Structurally the social order of segregation essentially consisted of raw terror,
slavery shifted into a different modality, a special kind of violence that we must
call gratuitous violence, violence that requires no transgression such as inver
sion. As Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton said of the structure of white suprem
acy, “it is, in fact, nothing but its very practices:”32
The gratuitousness of its repetition bestows upon white supremacy an inherent
discontinuity. It stops and starts self-referentially, at whim. To theorise some
political, economic, or psychological necessity for its repetition, its unending return
to violence, its need to kill is to lose a grasp on that gratuitousness by thinking its
performance is representable. And therein it hides.33
Hence, the gratuitousness of violence under slavery and Jim Crow is appar
ent even in the example Butler provides of the performativity of that same vio
lence. After all, over a decade prior to her defiant iteration against the spatially
segregationist conventions on the bus, Parks had already been radicalized
against an aspect of the Jim Crow structure that was more deeply rooted than
any prohibition against interracial proximity: the routineness of sexual violence
against Black women, focusing particularly on the kidnapping, torture, and
rape of Recy Taylor (among many others) at the hands of white men.34 The
routineness of such violence was an outgrowth of the structure of chattel slav
ery that has “defined and confined”35 Black people for at least five hundred
years. Parks’ labor on the bus was a continuation of her (and many others’)
activism within a movement against the gratuitous violence of slavery, not the
attempt to “[endow] a certain authority on the act, and [begin] the insurrec
tionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy.”
As a system, Jim Crow had no “legitimacy” to begin with in the face of
the Black subject. Many Black subjects may have performatively consented
to Jim Crow, but, regardless of whether they did so or not, their consent
was utterly inessential to that system. Jim Crow was systematized terror,
tout court. And that terror formed all Black subjectivities, just as, contrapo
sitively, its absence formed all non-Black subjectivities. The “political, eco
nomic, or psychological necessity for [the] repetition”36 of being arrested
for violating segregationist conventions cannot be accounted for as Butler
theorizes it any more than the necessity of sexual violence against Black
people can be accounted for according to such theorization.
The anti-Black structure is violent against Black people because it can be,
not because it needs to be.
Martinot and Sexton remind us that capitalist exploitation, while obviously
necessary to explain the subjugation of Black people, is not sufficient to explain
the truth of the anti-Black paradigm. That is because there is an excess to
forms of violence such as rape and torture—not to mention segregation,
lynching and murder. They have not simply happened to Black people since
8 O. B. RICKS
the time of slavery (in the ways they have happened to many non-Black groups
of people as such); rather, they are the core elements of what positionalizes
Black people as Black ab initio. Sexual violence against Black people, indeed,
has been a form of white enjoyment37—not merely a means of capitalist
exploitation such as social control (forcing laborers to live in fear) or the literal
reproduction of labor (labor is not, after all, a constituent element of slav
ery38), but, more fundamentally, as a means of self-making, allowing non-
Black people to know themselves as not-Black by the kinds of violence by
which they are not positioned structurally.
The violently anti-Black structure closely guards its sadistic drive toward the
Black body in a manner that is foreclosed to challenge by the performative iter
ations of Black people. Another way of saying foreclosed is quilted39 or fixed in
place in a permanent way, often violently. If the possibility of reiteration and
resignification is a kind of slipperiness that is inherent to any sign, power struc
tures like white supremacist fascism, the collaboration of state with civil society,
come about to stop this slipperiness—that is, to “quilt” it to prevent slippages
to the maximum extent possible so that “the n��r” means what white fantasy
says it means.40 Performativity as an approach to how we intervene in and
against power structures needs to account for the subjectivities of those of us
who are hailed, a priori of performative interpellations, within asymmetrical
relations of domination, which is to say, structural gratuitous violence. After
all, a subject that is hailed by the fact of its genocide and captivity—by its literal
murder and/or suspended death sentence, revocable at any time, for any reason
or no reason at all—is, properly speaking, not a subject but, in a sense, a human
object. Black people were not interpellated by the “conventions” of Jim Crow so
much as by the raw asignifying terror of it. Jim Crow was a particular historical
manifestation of the five-hundred-year-old structure of anti-Blackness that did
not and does not primarily require our compliance. Among the essential things
without which slavery could not function were our social and physical death
and captivity, which might or might not have anything to do with our exploit
ation as laborers under capitalism.41 The same is true of Jim Crow in the US
South and the northern and western US correlate “peculiar institutions”42
against which Baldwin and Parks struggled.
It is necessary at this point to clarify the relationship between structure and
performance. I define structures as human-made entities consisting of separ
ate static and dynamic component parts that can be substituted (metaphoric
ally) for other parts and that work to greater or lesser degrees in concert with
one another. I understand structures to include what we might call paradigms
or power structures, such as the modern five-hundred-year-old world-system,
as well as subjectivities, psyches, and bodies. Conceptualizing oppressive
modes of power as intersecting (networked) sets of structures helps us under
stand the adaptability and staying power of certain modes of oppression, how
DANCE CHRONICLE 9
they work at multiple scales to shape subjectivities and intersubjective rela

tions, how, despite cosmetic forms of change, core functions of certain modes
of oppression continue, or even strengthen, while seeming to be in retreat.
Most importantly, structures can be historicized, their trajectories of develop
ment, climax, denouement, and renewal charted, making them analyzable as
totalities and as separate parts (as opposed to being normalized as “human
nature”), rendering them available to change or even replacement.
Importantly, structures do not, in themselves, diminish the significance of
performance and performativity. But, in seeking to dismantle structures in favor
of justice, the question becomes one of what kinds of performances, with what
predicate levels of non-performative force, can be most efficacious. Performance
and collective performative moves, though often used to shore up power struc
tures, can help identify the seams in unethical power structures through which
revolutionary collective exertions might introduce a more ethical order. It is in
this regard that I find Baldwin’s work in Take This Hammer to be instructive.
My work is most concerned with the structural paradigm of anti-Blackness,
which, as performance theorist Jaye Austin Williams explains, is based on:
the assertion that blackness constitutes a locus of violent accumulation (of wealth for all
but slaves) and fungibility (the reduction and interchangeability of humans into objects,
commodities, currency for an array of uses), such that it is more useful to read the
Middle Passage rhetorically and symbolically: as a point of severance … rather than as a
chartable historical event that can be recuperated and overcome by collective fortitude.43
Such an analysis identifies the slavery of the Middle Passage as an

ongoing structure, shaping Baldwin’s performance in 1963 every bit as
much as it shaped his ancestors’ lives a century or two prior. Frank B.
Wilderson III describes the violence at the core of this ongoing structural
relation of slavery as “gratuitous (not contingent on transgressions against
the hegemony of civil society) and structural (positioning Blacks ontologic
ally outside of Humanity and civil society).”44
The concepts of gratuitous and structural violence are absolutely crucial
elements of that structural and psychic network of relations to which
Baldwin bodily indicates throughout Take This Hammer. When the per
formance theorist is faced with subjects who are positioned—a priori of
anything else—by gratuitous violence, what are we to make of theories of
performativity as the mechanism by which subjects (including Black ones)
are formed? This premise, of course, has serious implications for our ana
lysis of subjectivity, performance, and performativity.
Indeed, Saidiya V. Hartman has shown that there is a complex history
between Black people and concepts like agency, subjectivity, and performance
and performativity. Even if we define performance and performativity as
broadly interchangeable, as Hartman does, to mean “enactments of power,
denaturalizing displays, and discursive reelaboration as a set of interrelated
10 O. B. RICKS
strategies and practices,”45 then for people who have historically had a “troubled
relation to the category ‘human’,”46 there is a real danger of conflating the ways
Black people “assert their humanity” and “hav[e] a good time among their own
color”47 with the “facile and spurious”48 notion that Black people “have” agency
and subjectivity as a function of their subjection within language. Hartman
shows that for centuries there has been widespread (US society-wide, if not glo
bal) psychic investment in Black performance, an investment that has
“masterfully simulated black ‘will’ only in order to reanchor subordination.”49
More recently, Hartman shows, this investment in Black performance has
led many students of Black performance and performativity to apply the
Foucauldian concept of “agency as an enabling constraint or an enabling vio
lation”50 to the study of Black people even under the regime of chattel slav
ery. Significantly, Hartman shows that such approaches have operated under
the assumption “that all forms of power are normatively equivalent, without
distinguishing between violence, domination, force, legitimation, hegemony,
et cetera”51—and certainly, one may notice, without acknowledging the dis
tinction between the contingent violence of “enabling constraints” and the
gratuitous structural violence that positions Black people as Black. Hartman
asks, “How does one discern ‘enabling conditions’ when the very constitution
of the subject renders him socially dead or subversively redeploy an identity
determined by violent domination, dishonor, and natal alienation?”52
Hartman’s insight here serves as a call for us to Blacken our understanding
of performativity when it is faced with a subject positioned by gratuitous vio
lence, to define performativity’s operations from the perspective of the cargo
hold of the slave ship.53 The performance theorist who would downplay a
structural paradigm of slavery and, instead, read Baldwin’s performativity as
a primary mechanism of his subject formation (or even liberation) is danger
ously understating the role of gratuitous violence in the formation of Black
subjects (and, contrapositively, the role of contingent violence in the forma
tion of non-Black subjects). In other words, what Butler has theorized is less
performativity per se than white or non-Black performativity. Hartman points
out that even Michel Foucault cautioned against an overstatement of the
agency of those oppressed within vast asymmetries of power:
There cannot be relations of power [as opposed to domination] unless subjects are free.
If one were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on
which he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of
power. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a
certain form of liberty.54
Gratuitous and structural violence are constituent elements of the rela

tions of domination and force through which Black subjects are brought
into (non)being as such. But how do gratuitous and structural violence
relate to Baldwin’s performance in Take This Hammer?
DANCE CHRONICLE 11
Gratuitousness should not be understood to only imply things that can be

called spectacular or acts—and this is especially true where structures of violence
are concerned. In the case of Take This Hammer, to read Black subjectivity in
relation to gratuitous forms of violence, one must read the violence within, for
example, the geographies and temporalities from which Baldwin’s performance
emerges. In other words, in geographies like Bayview-Hunters Point or the
Harlem of Baldwin’s youth, violence cannot simply be the name for an act that
happens performatively, as an iteration to be broken. That’s not even the most
meaningful way to understand the violence associated with the ghetto, and if
one looks for only such manifestations of violence when one thinks of “the
ghetto,” one is already missing the overwhelming majority of the violence that
is a function of “the ghetto.” Prior to any performance of violence inside the
ghetto, one must consider the violence that forms the ghetto and sustains it in
the first place—a convergence of multiple technologies of force that serve to fix
Black people in a geographic place of deprivation of both material resources
needed to live and of the libidinal resources that accrue to lives that matter. The
very existence of the ghetto is itself violence against the people who live there.3
Theorizing Black performativity therefore requires special care because
Blackness itself is not primarily an ethno-cultural identity. A priori of that,
Blackness is a racialized structural position on which many dominant power
structures—including the psychic formations and filmic figurations of norma
tively white settler-colonizer documentary viewers—rely for their coherence.55
The performativity of chains of signifiers is less essential to the formation of
Black subjects than is the “point of severance,”56 the gratuitous violence, vio
lence in excess of signification, shorthanded as the Middle Passage. As we will
see, throughout his performance of the documentary host-subject role in Take
This Hammer, Baldwin reflects a remarkable degree of critical awareness of the
very problematics that inhabit this tension between Butler’s performativity and
Hartman’s Black performativity. What remains now is to properly theorize
some of the performative expectations of Baldwin’s role in this documentary
and to theorize some of the ways his critical awareness of those expectations
shows up in his performance and the ethical horizon toward which it aims.
The “Ideal Insider” and the Lean

Baldwin is fitted into a role or function that is needed whenever the white
settler-colonizer trains a camera on the racialized other during a time of
3
It is clear that Baldwin regarded the ghetto as a necropolitical technology of the racist society. In Take This Hammer,
he refers in several places to ghettos as structures that are formulated to kill. “What marked all the survivors” of the
streets of Harlem, Baldwin says, “was a certain ruthlessness which was absolutely indispensable if one was going to
survive” (8:45). In other words, “home” and “community” are places to be survived, not necessarily sites of refuge.
And, a few months before his visit to San Francisco, he had published The Fire Next Time, in which he shared a letter
he wrote to his nephew, saying, “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that
you should perish.” James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 293.
12 O. B. RICKS
heightened consciousness about racism. Trinh T. Minh-ha highlights a pos

ition she calls the “ideal Insider,” the documentary subject whose function
in ethnographic documentaries is to give information about the Other to
the ethnographic documentary’s gazing “Master.” This “ideal Insider” is:
the psychologically conflict-detecting and problem-solving subject who faithfully
represents the Other for the Master, or comforts, more specifically, the Master’s self-
other relationship in its enactment of power relations, gathering serviceable data,
minding his/her own business-territory, and yet offering the difference expected.57
And, like many ethnographic documentaries, Take This Hammer does

much labor to “give voice”58 to the Black people on whom it focuses, extract
ing knowledge from the lived experiences of those on whom it focuses and
creating knowledge for its viewers while appearing to allow Black epistemes
to shape the narrative that emerges. The “exchange,” argues Trinh, is almost
never equal, even when it purports to be a corrective or to be “giving voice:”
The question is also not that of merely ‘correcting’ the images whites have of non-
whites, nor of reacting to the colonial territorial mind by simply reversing the situation
and setting up an opposition that at best will hold up a mirror to the Master’s activities
and preoccupations … .The question rather is that of tracking down and exposing the
Voice of Power and Censorship whenever and in whichever side it appears.59
Part of Baldwin’s labor as an author and activist was “tracking down and
exposing” the contours of a racist power structure that suppresses Black modes of
knowledge, that demands that Black people serve it in all kinds of ways, even
“psychologically conflict-detecting and problem-solving” roles in a documentary.60
Take This Hammer lets us see how Baldwin performs this labor via the embodi
ment of Black queer performativity—specifically what I, a middle-aged Black cis
gendered heterosexual man, interpret as elements of the movement vocabulary of
shade—deployed in resistance to a violently anti-Black and queer-phobic structure.
In understanding how Baldwin’s gestures are resisting the expected per
formance of documentary host-subject, it is helpful to borrow from dance the
orist Kemi Adeyemi’s close reading of the angular coordinates of bodily
gestures as they relate to the racialization of, and resistance to, the structures
that force Black people to the ground. Specifically, she finds that the upright
90� position of bodies in relation to the ground has a unique and fraught his
tory and present when it comes to Black bodies.4 Out of the long historical
4
Historically, white men arrogated to themselves that upright 90� stance in relation to the ground as their sole and rightful
domain, the vantage point from which they alone could commune with “the god-head” (religion) or the cosmos
(science), manage the books, oversee the people they enslaved, and stand over those whom they had killed in genocidal-
imperialist wars. “As Man/whiteness is instituted by and valorized as 90� verticality,” writes Adeyemi, “black life has been
forcibly staged in its surrounding angles,” to either be in the supine 0� or 180� position (being raped on the ground, lying
dead in the street) or hunched over in 20� to 50� postures of backbreaking labor, say on plantations, and in
housekeeping service or cobalt and coltan mines today. Black people approximating the 90� posture have risked being
called “uppity,” a common rationalization for lynching us. The 90� position came to be identified with Reason, authority,
and even proper participation in the public sphere and civility in opposition to positions assumed by protestors, like
kneeling football players protesting the ongoing police murders of Black people. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ” 11-16.
DANCE CHRONICLE 13
context in which an upright 90� posture connoted slaveholder-colonizer white

masculine authority, other postures and gestures emerged, like the leaning
postures and gestures that Adeyemi says are associated with Black women’s
and Black LGBTQIAþ folks’ cultural practice of throwing shade:
a practice of highlighting someone’s faults, but rather than directly calling them out,
expressing them through indirection, suggestion, omission, and obfuscation – letting,
in other words, the person in question know exactly what is wrong, but without
stating it explicitly. Shade is an outgrowth of reading, both of which have roots in
LGBTQ black and brown drag, ball, vogue, and kiki scenes which are themselves
indebted to the quotidian performance repertoires of black and brown girls and
women.61
For Adeyemi, throwing shade has emerged as “perhaps the only appro
priate response to a life lived under siege” and a “range of affects … are
generated as a result” of these postures and gestures.62 Certain heightened
physical gestures indexed to specific parts of the anatomy show up as cru
cial elements of the Black and brown LGBTQIA þ cultural practice of
shade, and link closely with vocalizations. These gestures include
“performers’ hands … thrown upward, downward, or flippantly outward to
physicalize the dismissiveness sounded by their mouths, … [and] tonal var
iations of ‘mmmh’ and ‘hmmm.’”63
Understanding these “varying physical practices of leaning [that] are
inextricable from these sonic vocabularies”64 will prove helpful to our
examination of Baldwin’s performance in Take This Hammer. The lean of
Black queer performativity from which Baldwin’s performance emerges is
not a nonchalant, Humphrey Bogart-type lean that sits relaxed within the
privilege, comfort, and safety of being a white man in a white supremacist-
patriarchal world, for “It requires a not-insignificant amount of muscle
tension”65 and may involve several other parts of the body, such as one
arm “crooking at the elbow so the hand is level with (or sometimes
performatively propping up) the chin.”66 And, of course, “Finalizing the
precise affect of any given lean is the position of the head, be it tipped
forward with eyes bugging out, rolled upward in sheer incredulity, or
lolling back in feigned disinterest.”67 The coordination of all of these
embodied physical and vocal postures into what Adeyemi calls “a complex
racialized queer angle”68 is brought into full fluid animation when we
remember that, whatever the mental image concocted from the words used
to describe them, they do not appear as images or poses but as gestures,
“the exhibition of a mediality”69—means without ends. Adeyemi points out
that there is a practiced “technique” to these gestures, “rooted in the
gestural economies of black and brown subject formations” and “a critique
of the physical-ideological foundations of 90� ” with its attendant “ideals of
civility and rationality.”70
14 O. B. RICKS
Image 2.
Image 3. These two stills show Baldwin arguing that canonical U.S. literary figurations of
Blackness are related to the harmful, often deadly ways in which white people position Black peo
ple in the contemporary social structure. By way of illustrating the power that white fantasy has
to shape and condition Black life, Baldwin’s posture is just about as far out of the expected 90�
authoritative posture of “Reason” as he could be and still stay in the chair. The lean here conveys
the obviousness—how white fantasies of “the n��r” are hidden in plain sight. The lighting
arrangement clearly did not anticipate Baldwin’s lean gestures as he often leaned briefly into
shadow or out of focus in the otherwise well-lit and more controlled production environment of
the living room. Such movements that defy the anticipated gestures of documentary hosts under
score and are inseparable from the ethical force of Baldwin’s overall critical performance.
Description: Two Black-and-white stills of James Baldwin sitting on a light brown couch. The cam
era frames his head and shoulders in the center of the shot. He is wearing a light-colored shirt
with a collar and a handkerchief around his neck. In the first still, his torso is leaning far forward,
very close to the camera, with his head tilted forward, hunched down into his shoulders, and
cocked slightly to the left. His eyes are wide and staring slightly up and off to the left as though
he is expecting an answer from his interlocutor. His lips are pursed and his face is partly out of
the light. In the second still, his torso is now leaning slightly forward toward the camera. His eye
brows are raised, his brow furrowed, and his eyes wide and staring slightly off to the left. At right,
his left hand is open and his fingers are spread as he illustrates something to his interlocutor. His
lips are pursed.
Screenshots from Take This Hammer. Reproduced by permission of The WNET Group.
DANCE CHRONICLE 15
At the heart of shade as Adeyemi explains it is an intensely ethico-polit

ical critique—what Giorgio Agamben would call a gesture5—for it is not
just critique of any particular individual who has done one wrong or
transgressed a deeply held more, but an immanent critique of an entire
arrangement of an anti-Black, misogynoir-ist, queer-phobic, trans-phobic
paradigm in which, as Miss Roj said in George C. Wolfe’s play The
Colored Museum, “If this place is the answer, we’re asking all the wrong
questions.”71
Leaning, writes Adeyemi, “signals one’s dissatisfaction with a given
event while expressing a deep understanding of the limits, if not impossi
bility, that one would ever receive the desired reconciliation from said
event in the first place”72 and “is a waiting that is a holding—but not
necessarily still—until the time is right … for something”73—perhaps
freedom from a necropolitical anti-Black world that is overdetermined by
“desensitization to the sights and sounds of black death we are inundated
with mixed with the expectation that we, too, will be subject to the
ground sooner or later.”74 Such a framework—gratuitous violence that we
can all expect but never anticipate—gives rise to a particular affect, a
“Black apathy,” that “is not actually a lack of interest” but, rather, “a fully
invested finishing touch on an ongoing critical stance”, “which neither
strives upward for utopian enlightenment nor covets the down
position”:75
Black apathy, in particular, is an always already critical practice that emerges out of
and is tethered to an awareness that to be possessed by racial blackness is to be
possessed by a distinctly flattened relationship to the ground; is to live a life that is,
in turn, a never-ending battleground.76
Adeyemi’s theorization of the lean within the Black queer performativity

of shade operationalizes Hartman’s critiques of Butlerian performativity in
a way that allows us to see Baldwin’s labor throughout Take This Hammer.
Especially in the final monologue, as we will see, Baldwin adopts a lean
posture, evincing the kind of Black apathy of which Adeyemi speaks. With
that affect in mind, it is helpful to attend closely to this film’s archival
5
Dance theorist Carrie Noland reads Agamben to say, “That which in each act of expression remains
unexpressed is gesture,” the essence of which is “a medium that exposes itself as such” (Noland, “Ethics,
Staged,” 69). The gesture, for Agamben, opens the possibility of the ethical. This does not mean that all
gestures are ethical in the prescriptive sense that their content is necessarily “good” or “ought to be done,” but
rather in the more descriptive sense that, whatever the specific content of the category “the ethical” for a
given ethical subject, the ethical act is animated by an excess that is left when language has been exhausted.
Hence, the ethical is animated by that which absolutely resists oppressive structures’ attempts to lock
everything into a commodity, even though it is a means without ends. See Giorgio Agamben, Means without
End: Notes on Politics trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000), 55; Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 72; Carrie Noland, “Ethics,
Staged” Performance Philosophy 3 no. 1 (2017): 69; Deborah Levitt, “Gesture” in Alex Murray, Agamben
Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 79-82.
16 O. B. RICKS
documentation of the gesture6 of shade—the structures and subjects whom

it targets.
“You’re the N��r, Baby”

At around forty minutes into Take This Hammer, Baldwin “flips the
script”77 on the normatively white audience. We have not been led to
expect Baldwin to look at the camera, at us, the viewers. The film’s cin�ema
v�erit�e style is not necessarily known for direct address. To the contrary, it
was known for adopting a fly-on-the-wall observational mode—enabled by
the new (at that time) technology of hand-held cameras—in which filmic
subjects did not generally acknowledge the presence of the camera, immers
ing the viewer as if the viewer were there.
Yet, the film has still managed to set up the expectation of intimacy. In
the first place, although the purpose that frames the film relatively early on,
according to director Richard Moore, is to “explore the existence of … atti
tudes of … bitterness, demoralization, and despair” among San Francisco
Black youths,78 a focus that often betrays a “what’s the problem with Black
people?” film, Baldwin’s presence thus far has implied a kind of reassurance
of “authenticity.” Baldwin’s presence seems to imply a deep level of per
sonal understanding for the people with whom he talks.
From early in the film, the viewers have witnessed Baldwin actively engag
ing in some of the functions typical to the cultural performance of Black
community leadership at the time (and even to this day). He has counseled a
group of Black youths to “realize that you can become a—you can become
the president [of the United States].”79 He has discussed the displacement of
entire Black communities with Black community leader Orville Luster, while
standing at the construction sites of expensive new high-rise condominiums,
inevitably leading to “Negro removal,” one of the disparate “million forces
which are inevitably set in motion when a people are despised. And you can’t
pretend you’re not despised if you are.”80 He has meditated on what he
6
For Agamben, gesture is what makes ethics possible. Deborah Levitt reads Agamben’s idea of gesture in the
following way:
Ethics emerges precisely because of the absence of ontological ground or telos; gesture names an a-
ontological figure that traverses this open space and catalyzes events, differences, and constellations within it.
(Levitt, “Gesture,” 81)
Agamben, ever-critical of the ways capitalism and modern society make commodities of everything, points
out that gesture, which is fluid and dynamic, is in tension with and cannot be contained in things like image,
which is frozen and static: “Every image, in fact, is animated by an antinomic polarity: on the one hand
images are the reification and obliteration of a gesture … on the other hand, they preserve the dynamis
intact … .” (Agamben, Means without End, 54). In other words, frozen or fixed images can, on the one hand,
preserve some of the in-between-ness or motion of a gesture and, on the other hand, quilt the dynamism of
a gesture, rendering it available to be turned into a very predictable product in service of capital, regardless
of its intentionality. For this reason, Agamben links gesture to the ethical possibilities of cinema: “Because
cinema has its center in the gesture and not in the image, it belongs essentially to the realm of ethics and
politics (and not simply to that of aesthetics)” (55). Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics
trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
DANCE CHRONICLE 17
considers the central question tying these “million forces” together: the ques
tion of “exactly what a Negro means to a white man.”81 These are all topics
on which he was known to write, only this time there is a 16mm camera fol
lowing him every step of the way for the sake of the viewer.
Additionally, the film has sought in several more stationary moments to
create an intimate profile with Baldwin, a recognizable Black author who by
that time had earned a comfortable position among an international white
and Black literati. Baldwin, whom Norman Mailer famously accused of being
“incapable of saying ‘Fuck you’ to the reader,” was an author whom many
have said was without peer “at creating a sense of intimacy with the reader.”82
Image 4. The element of gesture shows up vividly and functions to distance Baldwin from the
white savior frameworks that he saw undergirding most representations of Blackness in U.S. cul
ture. In one moment, the gestures often mildly imitate those narrative frameworks in order to
humiliate them, and in the next moment, they reflect on the terror such fantasies hold for the
Black people who cannot escape living within them.
Description: Black-and-white still of James Baldwin, framed on his head and shoulders, sitting
on a light brown couch. He is wearing a light-colored shirt with a collar and a handkerchief
around his neck. His torso is leaning slightly back into his seat and onto his left arm that is
resting on the armrest. His right arm is bent at the elbow and the fingertips of his right hand
gently touch his chest. His eyebrows are raised, his eyes are gazing slyly off to the right, and
his mouth is open with a slight grin.
The film fades in on Baldwin, seated in Moore’s living room, the site of
some of the film’s most reflective thoughts, his torso and head centered in
frame. He is leaning slightly off-right and looking down in that same direc
tion, wearing a light-colored, short-sleeved, collared, button-down shirt, and
a light-colored bandanna tied around his neck, glancing down-right at what
we cannot see, perhaps the cigarette he is about to light. Baldwin appears to
be in conversation with someone seated just off-screen right. What follows is
a monologue by the thirty-eight-year-old Baldwin that will retroactively
threaten many viewers’ frameworks on the preceding forty minutes:
“One of the great American illusions,”83
18 O. B. RICKS
He savors the word “illusions,” still hunched over leaning to screen right,
his tonal variations already putting us on notice that shade will be thrown:
“One of the great American necessities, is to believe that I,”84
On the word “I,” the camera starts to slowly zoom in on him as he lifts
his torso to a centered, somewhat upright still-seated position on screen,
and indicates himself with his right hand. His side-eyed glance locks very
briefly on someone off-screen right, and he seems to be signifyin’ on the
ideas he starts uttering by tilting his head on the pivot of his neck:
“a poor benighted Black man whom they saved.”85
His neck jerks back as if this word “saved” is distasteful to say, lingering on
it vocally, elongating the vowel sound /�a/ and again using pitch variations:
“ … from the elephant-ridden jungles of Africa.”86
Looking down, he punctuates this statement with slightly exaggerated stac

cato head movements, vocally punching the pronunciation of each of these
words, especially “Africa,” perhaps as if he were a movie announcer advertis
ing a Tarzan film and each of these words was meant to thrill and titillate
normatively white audiences. Then with the last of his breath he says:
“To whom they brought the bible.”87
The camera’s slow zoom in stops here, framed closeup on his head and
shoulders. Here Baldwin, again looking down, strikes a match, lights his
cigarette, and then, inhaling and shaking out the match, he continues:
“ … is still grateful for that.”88
The match strike hits the eye as an abrupt punctuation that seethes with
meaning as the struck match roars into a flame, at once perhaps an articulation
of Baldwin’s frustration with the act itself but also perhaps an embodied theor
ization—a gesture—remarking on the very violent striking, slashing, dragging,
and torching processes by which “they brought the bible” to Black people (and
others) repeatedly over the past five hundred years of slavery, genocide, and
imperialism, even though, in that moment, Baldwin is talking about a figure of
fantasy that many of his white contemporaries continued to hold to that day in
their thinking about and relationship to Black people—the “grateful,” “poor,
benighted Black” from “the elephant-ridden jungles of Africa.”
We must here note that Baldwin’s gesturing vocally and bodily on the
word “saved” powerfully evokes the trope of the white savior, a gesture that
is, of course, occurring in the moments leading up to his direct address of the
camera. This ensemble of gestures is key because the camera is two things.
On one hand, it is the essential apparatus of production of the cin�ema v�erit�e
documentary, making his gestures toward the camera a metonymic critique
of the genre itself with its investment in the “look, a n��r.” On the other
DANCE CHRONICLE 19
hand, from the perspective of the documentary host-subject’s performative

iteration, the camera is the essential metonym for the normatively white
audience. This audience is at once shaped by and articulated through the
“look, a n��r” documentary of the sort Baldwin is trying to prevent this
from being. Baldwin’s critique of the white colonial project performatively
attempts to hail the documentary production crew together with all the white
colonizers whose gaze animates and is fed by the labor of this film.7
The close juxtaposition of alluding to white saviors and directly indicting
the documentary genre and its normatively white audience is, of course, in
keeping with the factual historical record. Dating as far back as the first
full-length documentary, Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic film Nanook of the
North (1922),89 the performance of the documentary subject has had a
genealogical connection to the longue dur�ee of the racist structure and to
modernity’s racist projects of ethnography and colonialism. This connec
tion was no less apparent in the ostensibly “new” (at that time) media of
cin�ema v�erit�e, for, among the founders of the form was Jean Rouch, a
French anthropologist who had done much of his research in West Africa
and seems to have considered many of these problematics he faced there as
he was innovating the genre of cin�ema v�erit�e.90 Any documentary with
Black life as its object is inevitably entangled in the sticky web of problem
atics belonging to those projects. According to the ideology behind such a
project, the role of the documentary host-subject in a zone like Bayview-
Hunters Point is to produce “rational knowledge”91 of the Black ghetto and
its inhabitants for the white documentary viewers:
What you say about somebody else, you know, anybody else, reveals you. What I think
of you as being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own, um,
fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you. I’m describing me.92
It is important to briefly highlight that Baldwin here seems very aware that
this documentary is epistemologically accountable to the normatively white
audience. The assumptions of the project of Reason, its “unilinear trans
mission”93 of knowledge from Europeans, who ostensibly have all the know
ledge, often seeks to create certain constricted and constructed kinds of
knowledge, including through methods like documentary film and perform
ance, that purport to be universal, but that ultimately tend to restrict the range
7
Within a thought framework that attends rigorously and unflinchingly to structures of dominance, neither the
location of a white person’s birth nor their preconscious identity (how they refer to themselves through
conscious speech) have ever been essential to them being structurally positioned as a settler-colonizer. At the
level of preconscious speech, they might protest, “I’m no settler, I was born here” or “I’m too settled to think
of myself as a settler,” but that does not stop violent power structures from collaborating to hold space for
them within the structural position of the settler-colonizer (Wilderson 80). This is why Wilderson, utilizing
Jacques Lacan’s tripartite registers of subjectivity (preconscious interest, unconscious identification, structural
position), locates the settler as a structural position, not in the imaginary identities one might consciously
speak of oneself (28). See Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 80.
20 O. B. RICKS
of poseable questions and statements to ones that reaffirm the racist structure,
questions like “What’s the problem with Black people?” or statements like the
central thesis of many documentaries concerning Black life: “Look, a n��r!”
“Now here in this country, we’ve got something called ‘the n��r,’”
Baldwin says, leaning hard toward screen left, “who doesn’t in such terms,
I beg you to remark, exist in any other country in the world. We have
invented ‘the n��r.’ I didn’t invent him.”94
Baldwin hits the “I” kind of hard, a vocal gesture that, in one stroke,
emphasizes himself not as an individual but as a Black person, making a
necessary severance from the “we” who “invented ‘the n��r.” Now raising
his cigarette like a cup of tea, the rim of which he is just peering over, almost
catching the camera in direct address, Baldwin here again drags off the cigar
ette, punctuating the thought and enriching the pause with anticipation
before specifically attributing the invention of the figure of “the n��r:”
“White people invented him.”95
Up to this moment, Baldwin the documentary host has not looked dir
ectly at the camera for any sustained period of time in a way that would
create the kind of intimacy with the viewer that Baldwin the author was
known for creating with the reader, intimacy that his presence in this film
has anticipated. The indirectness has, in a sense, left open the possibility of
shade being thrown but has also been readable as an opening for the nor
mative white viewer to lean in.
Also, Baldwin has thus far been doing a lot of leaning out of the 90�
posture, hunching over, looking down, and choosing few moments to make
sustained eye contact, not in a shamefaced way but in a way that is leading
up to something he cannot say directly—not yet, not “until the time is
right.”96 His gaze has been anchored somewhere down and off screen, with
only a bit of sustained eye contact when he mentions how white people
expect Black people to “be grateful” that they released us from the slavery
that they imposed on us in the first place, and a little bit more sustained
eye contact on “What you say about somebody else, you know, anybody
else, reveals you … .I’m not describing you when I talk about you. I’m
describing me.”97 It is not until after he mentions “the n��r” that his
gaze becomes anchored in the eyes of the person in front of him.
Interestingly, this locking of his gaze does not occur on the word “n��r,”
as if some part of him is still deciding if “the time is right”98 to “highlight
[white people’s] faults” “through indirection, suggestion, omission, and
obfuscation”99 or to straight-up tell white folks about themselves, to lever
age the admiration he received as a Black author for creating intimate con
nections with his normatively white readers into what could be a truly
teachable moment for his normatively white documentary audience. To
DANCE CHRONICLE 21
shift into such a confrontational mode of performance was, of course, to

risk the gratuitous violence to which he knew himself to be always already
available, a kind of gratuitous violence with which he would become more
familiar in subsequent years as his outspokenness against anti-Blackness
caused him to be shunned as “bitter” by the white literary establishment
that had previously showered him with high praise.100
Image 5.
Image 6. Baldwin’s shift into direct address gestures toward the tension between the “American
illusions” and “American necessities” of structural anti-Blackness. The deadly seriousness of reject
ing the imposition of the figure of “the n��r” in the first still contrasts with the embodied
knowledge in the second still that the fantastical delusions that created this figure are not his.
Description: Two Black-and-white stills of James Baldwin, framed on his head and shoulders, sit
ting on a light brown couch. He is wearing a light-colored shirt with a collar and a handkerchief
around his neck. In the first still, his torso is leaning slightly back into his seat, his head is tilted
over his right shoulder. His hands are at shoulder level, his fingers pointed inward toward his
chest. There is a smoking cigarette in his right hand. His eyes look off to the right. His lips are
closed. There is a relaxed but serious look on his face as he says “I am not a n��r” to his inter
locutor. In the second still, his torso is leaning slightly back into his seat, his head is tilted over his
right shoulder. His hands are at shoulder level, his left hand holds a cigarette and is blurred with
movement. His face is looking directly at the camera and his lips are closed.
22 O. B. RICKS
That is also what makes it such a powerful editing choice and gestural
moment of shade when Baldwin finally does just barely begin to break that
barrier of direct address while speaking on the topic of self-knowledge
among Black Americans, and especially of the role of anti-Blackness in the
self-knowledge of Black Americans:
I’ve always known—I had to know by the time I was 17 years old—that what you
were describing was not me, and what you were afraid of was not me. It had to be
something else. You had invented it, so it had to be something you were afraid of.
And you invested me with it.101
By this point, Baldwin has begun to turn his gaze toward his viewers,
and, although he is not yet in direct address—looking straight at the
camera and, metonymically, at the normatively white audience—he is
closer to it than he has been thus far in this documentary. “[P]art of the
agony,” says Baldwin, “is that I’ve always known that I am not a
‘n��r.’”102
On the word “n��r,” Baldwin, using both hands, indicates himself but
gesturally leans back to perhaps a 97� posture, estranging himself from the
word “n��r” as if it is so toxic as to require a backward lean, his eyelids
narrowing briefly, partly in “agony,” partly as if he is taking a fighting pos
ture toward the one who would foist it on him:
“But if I am not “the n��r,” and if it’s true that your invention reveals you, then
who is ‘the n��r?’"103
As Baldwin has labored bodily and vocally to expose, “the n��r”8 is a

figure that, in this film (as well as in the world it covers), conjoins collect
ive fantasy (“illusion”)104 and material reality (“necessity”)105 at the scales
of the individual psyche; the institutional practices of churches, police
departments, liquor stores, unemployment agencies, housing developments,
and public television stations; and the macro structure of the entire social
order. The ubiquity of this illusory figure is due to its necessity––but,
again, for whom? He has said it directly already, but, for some reason, he
opts not to do so here, leaving the question unanswered like a jazz chord
that refuses to resolve, sharing the agony of anticipation, even though, as
he presses on, it is clear that the answer to this question matters deeply to
Baldwin.
“I am not the victim here,”106 Baldwin continues, a defiant, perhaps
tearful smirk creeping across his face as he now shifts fully into direct
In so many words, the question of “who is ‘the n��r?’” is a shorthand way of expressing the central
8
foundational question of modernity. Political theorist Achille Mbembe shows that the first question of many
forms of modern sovereignty is not “who should live and how?” but “who must die?” Another way of saying
this is that modern political subjectivity presupposes a prior determination of who is not and never will be a
subject. Or as Baldwin says the same thing, “Who is ‘the n��r’?” See Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
DANCE CHRONICLE 23
address, the part of shade that is not dismissing the audience but seeks
instead to make them listen. Just for a moment, he is starting to let down
the guard. His head is tilted at an angle over his right shoulder. He
appears vulnerable, seeming to look the viewer directly in the eye as he
elaborates a very brief history of his own knowledge about himself as a
Black person, as one who understands “that a person is more important
than anything else—anything else.”107 Here he seems very sincere, his face
very open, his shade gestures seemingly at their least. “I’ve learned this,”
he says, “because I’ve had to learn it.”108 Much like the writing for which
he had gained international acclaim, the moment is tender, earnest, intim
ate, and raw.
It lasts 30 seconds.
Then Baldwin glances down off-screen right, inhales, picks up the cigar
ette that he had put down, and, as he returns to direct address, the
momentary intimacy evaporates in a nanosecond and his tone becomes one
that might be read as something in between acerbic confrontation and cool
matter-of-fact description:
“But you still think, I gather, that ‘the n��r’ is necessary.”109
Here, Baldwin shifts back to a centered posture, drags off of his cigarette,
gesturally effecting something like a Brechtian verfremdungseffekt [alienat
ing the audience], a way to “make ‘strange’”110 the very idea that it is
necessary (or ethical) to have a figure called “the n��r,” a structural pos
ition that exists to contain human beings who exist to be exposed to gra
tuitous violence. Then, with hardly a beat in between, he bounds on to the
next statement, as though the logic of the statement that follows is obvious
and the normative white audience needs to just keep up.
“Well he’s unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. I’m gonna give you
your problem back. You’re ‘the n��r,’ baby. It isn’t me.”111
Image 7.
24 O. B. RICKS
Image 8. Baldwin’s sardonic “no thank you” to the imposition of the figure of “the n��r” fol
lowed by his cool inversion of same illustrates the move from what Kemi Adeyemi calls
“indirection, suggestion, omission, and obfuscation” to “directly calling [white people] out”
(Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ”, 11).
Description: Black-and-white stills of James Baldwin, with the camera framing his head and
shoulders, as he sits on a light brown couch. He is wearing a light-colored shirt with a collar and
a handkerchief around his neck. In the first still, his torso is leaning slightly forward toward the
camera. His head is tilted slightly down and over his right shoulder. His eyes are looking directly
at the camera. The fingers on his left hand are gently touching his chest as he says that the fig
ure of “the n��r” is “unnecessary to me so it must be necessary to you.” In the second still, his
torso is leaning slightly forward toward the camera, his head is slightly tilted over his right shoul
der. His eyes are looking directly at the camera. His left hand points directly at the camera.
Gestures of Black Apathy

Baldwin’s monologue moment stands out because it appears to be a
moment of “reversing” the direction of knowledge extraction by “hold[ing]
up a mirror to the Master’s activities and preoccupations.”112 We can see
how Baldwin is refusing the “companionably [white] ego-reinforcing”113
performance of “ideal Insider” in a variety of ways here, showing that
Baldwin is clearly aware of this documentary’s focus on the “Negro [as a]
problem.” Contrary to the expectation that the host-subject of a documen
tary accept the premise of the film—the project of “Reason,” the “look, a
n��r”—to labor as an “ideal Insider” to provide a normatively white
audience with knowledge about the problems with Black people, Baldwin’s
performance radically challenges that premise. At one level, simply saying
“I’m gonna give you your problem back”114 feels like a powerful refusal of
the label “problem to be studied,” an attempted denial to the documentary
genre of that which it needs to live, an attempted reversal of that
“problem” label, as though the cameras are turned in precisely the wrong
direction and the real problem is the normatively white audience who
inquires “what’s it like to be a problem?” through the camera and the
cin�ema v�erit�e genre aimed at Black people in communities like Bayview-
DANCE CHRONICLE 25
Hunters Point. More powerful still, however, is the fact that Baldwin is ges
turing repeatedly in the monologue moment toward the white audience—
with his eyes, head, hands, voice, and ideas—while simultaneously describ
ing what they are doing. This unflinching gesture of shade turns a moment
meant for the production of knowledge about “the n��r” into a moment
for the production of knowledge about the normative white audience,
which, through its very gaze, reveals its own “fears and desires” (“What
you say … reveals you”).115
At a glance, Baldwin’s reversal of the “look, a n��r!” here also almost
seems to resonate with the notion of words such as “n��r” as essentially
performative or what Butler calls “excitable speech,” words that hurt but
that must gain their force from reiteration and are therefore unstable and
available to inversions of the type Baldwin appears to be doing here:
Paradoxically, their status as “act” is precisely what undermines the claim that they
evidence and actualize the degradation that they intend … .The possibility of
decontextualizing and recontextualizing such terms through radical acts of public
misappropriation constitutes the basis of an ironic hopefulness that the conventional
relation between word and wound might become tenuous and even broken over
time.116
But Baldwin’s performance in this film has highlighted the “million

forces”117 that converge to make “the n��r” primarily a structural pos
ition, and secondarily (albeit still importantly) a performative speech-act
that is used against Black people. He has attributed the destructiveness of
the word “n��r” to its connection to a networked structure of terror.
“N��r” is not just one of many racial or ethnic epithets that lose their
ability to hurt through resignification. Baldwin walks us through the ghetto,
knowing fully well that the ghetto is a colonial society’s way of naming the
residents of that ghetto as “the n��r.”
The word “n��r,” of course, grew from its polyglot origins in various
European languages and found its way to the Atlantic culture through the
slave trade.118 From very early on in its history, the word “n��r” has
been tied to the “motive will, [and] active desire” that animated “the socio
political order of the New World.”119 It is a figure on whom an entire
social order is based, including capitalism itself as Karl Marx conceptual
ized its “rosy dawn.”120 The word hurts because it is inseparable from, and
articulated out of, the structures that maintain that concept—“the
n��r”—as a position of human objects who exist to be forever available
to gratuitous violence, an “absolute index of otherness.”121
Moreover, “n��r” the concept is imposed most frequently when the
word itself is not even used. Indeed, if, as Baldwin would later observe,
“the world has more than one way of keeping you a n��r, has evolved
more than one way of skinning the cat,”122 then, over the course of Take
26 O. B. RICKS
This Hammer, being named “the n��r” might look various ways—like a
shaken fourteen-year-old Black girl who says that her family will be “living
on the street in tents”123 because they will soon be displaced by “removal
of Negroes,”124 like a young Black man who makes an off-hand reference
to having been arrested by San Francisco police at the age of eight,125 like
a Black youth telling another Black youth that “We have no country … we
have no flag,”126 and even like an accomplished Black author who was
born and raised in one ghetto being asked to do a documentary about the
“bitterness” of Black youths in another ghetto, both of which ghettos are
located in some of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest nation on Earth.
Baldwin saying “you’re ‘the n��r’” is indeed excitable speech that he
makes a gesture to resignify right back onto the very people who created it.
But that resignification and inversion are foreclosed a priori because of all
the technologies of gratuitous violence it takes to make and keep someone
“the n��r.”9
Baldwin is using performative gesture, especially his repeated use of lean
ing postures, to comment on his role as a documentary host-subject, the
normatively white audience, and the “Look, a n��r!” documentary.
Although there is no room to fully make the comparison here, Baldwin’s
gesture toward the normatively white audience contrasts sharply with the
ways he used gesture to reach out to the youths. Almost nowhere in the
documentary does Baldwin gesture toward the youths with the lean posture
or anything else that implies shade. The only occasion of this kind of crit
ical, skeptical gesture is very briefly when he talks with a Black youth who
says “the police has never really bothered me”127 after that same youth just
seconds before said the police harassed him and his wife for so long they
forced the couple to cancel their evening plans to go to a show together.10
Other than that one moment, the lean posture throwing shade is only
adopted toward the normatively white audience, generally during moments
in the living room where Baldwin is around the white director and crew—
and the camera, which, of course, is metonymic of the normatively white
audience and the filmic genre.
9
Baldwin’s embodied presence exceeded the typical bounds of the role he was expected to play and threatened
to open up meanings that would be difficult to foreclose on. And so it was partially censored by the KQED
Board of Directors, and there were some Board members who wanted to cancel the film altogether without
having seen it. See James Day, The Vanishing Vision (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 52.
10
At around 14:00 in, the director’s cut of Take This Hammer shows how this moment continued. After the soft-
spoken young Black man says the “police serve a purpose” and have “never really bothered” him, even
though they harassed him and his wife, the documentary as it aired in 1964 cuts away from this moment. In
the director’s cut, however, this moment continued with Baldwin dialoguing with the youth until the youth
says, “when a Negro becomes a policeman, he thinks like a white man.” This priceless moment modeling
knowledge production was edited out of the version that was released in 1964, along with emphatic
statements Baldwin made comparing the now-dead U.S. president John F. Kennedy with white supremacist
police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor and some statements by youths promoting Black Muslim
philosophy and positions. Take This Hammer: The Director’s Cut (directed by Richard Moore, 1963), 59:13.
DANCE CHRONICLE 27
Image 9. In several moments, Baldwin uses his cigarette to pause, as if to allow the white viewer
to catch on to the fact that it is precisely their fantasies about Black people that are at the root of
the problems that Black people face. This unflinching direct address refuses to let white people off
the hook and underlines the serious necropolitical impacts that white fantasy has for Black people.
Description: Black-and-white still of James Baldwin, with the camera framing his head and should
ers, as he sits on a light brown couch. He is wearing a light-colored shirt with a collar and a handker
chief around his neck. His torso is leaning slightly forward toward the camera, his head is tilted
slightly forward and in front of his right shoulder. His right hand is in front of his mouth, his lips are
puckered around a cigarette that he is holding between his index and middle fingers. His face is
looking directly at the camera, his eyes are wide, and his eyebrows are raised.
Baldwin’s lean serves to gesture this affect of ambivalence, what Adeyemi

calls Black apathy—“dissatisfaction with a given event while expressing a
deep understanding of the limits, if not impossibility, that one would ever
receive the desired reconciliation from said event in the first place,”128 an
affect that circumscribes the Black “social life in social death”129 of a global
structure of anti-Blackness—making us appear disengaged while also ready
ing us to “linger in that cut” where “we might commit an action.”130 The
physical gesture of the “lean” is one that Baldwin is clearly adopting toward
the normatively white viewer in a significant departure from the 90� rela
tionship to the ground that was typically expected of a documentary host
prior to the innovation of technologies of the handheld camera that
allowed the emergent genre of cin�ema v�erit�e. That departure is both part of
the work of the cin�ema v�erit�e genre and an aspect of Baldwin’s performa
tive knowledge production of immanent critique toward the normatively
white audience with its project of Reason. Baldwin, through his lean, is sig
nifyin’ on the seeming gesture of inclusion comprised in putting a Black
person in this position of upright authoritativeness that Adeyemi says is
reserved for white men, as though he knows too well the perils of serving
as the “ideal Insider” to whom white documentarians seem to be “giving
voice.” As he would later say, "I was never going to be anybody’s n��r
again."131
28 O. B. RICKS
By my reading, Baldwin’s performance throughout Take This Hammer is

thrumming with what Adeyemi would call lean,11 which tracks precisely
Agamben’s definition of the kind of gesture that underwrites both the film
and the author as ethical possibilities, and in contradistinction to the
upright 90� authoritativeness associated with white masculinity. Baldwin,
an author, in a cinematic (documentary) production, is reaching toward
the Black youths without a coherent telos, trying to put himself “into
play”132 among them, even discussing the need for Black revolutionary vio
lence with them without either committing to concrete tactical means or
denouncing it on principle.133 His performance in the monologue is a bod
ily act of “pure means” that “exposes itself as such,”134 engaging on “a
never-ending battleground”135 against the gratuitous violence that positions
the Black host-subject of the documentary as a “problem” (perhaps in
something similar to what Antonio Gramsci called a war of position136), “a
waiting that is a holding—but not necessarily still—until the time is right
… for something”137 moving decisively against that unethical structure so
that an ethical order can be born.
The lean Adeyemi describes connotes shade, an immanent critique that
Agamben would call a gesture. It animates what Adeyemi calls a Black
apathy that admits that Black people—especially Black LGBTQIA þ people
and Black women and girls––literally cannot live like this but are in a fully
engaged state of suspension, not wedded to a specific means, not in pursuit
of any specific ends—at least not “until the time is right.”138 Adeyemi’s
descriptions of the gesture of shade highlight a messy ethics of in-between-
ness in motion of the sort that Agamben suggested made cinema (like Take
This Hammer) and authors (like Baldwin) ethical.12 In putting himself “into
play” with the ethical dilemmas of Black youths and the knowledge they
11
The convention of documentary hosts up until this time had generally been to serve as “talking heads,”
positioned very intentionally before a stationary camera on a tripod, their range of vocal inflection and
physical gestures bounded tightly within the physical frame and the performative frame of positivist reportage
of “just the facts.” Such positioning would entail standing in what Adeyemi calls the upright 90� position that
was connotatively linked with authoritativeness, a central tenet in the project of “Reason” that documentaries
were formulated to advance. The change in film technology, the increasing availability of 16mm handheld film
cameras and portable synchronized sound recording equipment, enabled a sudden and drastic change in the
documentary form in order to achieve the desired “authenticity” that could no longer be associated with the
upright 90� staged talking-head documentaries (which had by then become tightly linked with official-looking
news and propaganda films). The technological change and the reification of this new form of cin�ema v�erit�e
changed the expectation of how the physical presence of “authority” manifested in a documentary. Cin�ema
V�erit�e: Defining the Moment, directed by Peter Wintonick (National Film Board of Canada, 1999), 1:42:00.
https://www.nfb.ca/film/cinema_verite_defining_the_moment/
12
The author, for Agamben, is an ethical figure of gesture who embraces the struggle [“hand-to-hand
confrontation”(Agamben, Profanations, 72)] of putting herself on the cutting edge where no moral rulebook
can provide a roadmap for a kind of becoming that is in rebellion against the apparatuses of modern
capitalist society. In “The Author as Gesture,” Agamben writes, “Life is ethical not when it simply submits to
moral laws but when it accepts putting itself into play in its gestures, irrevocably and without reserve––even
at the risk that its happiness or its disgrace will be decided once and for all” (69). Through this struggle,
Agamben writes, “a subjectivity is produced” (72). Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books,
2007).
DANCE CHRONICLE 29
produce and also gesturing a critique of the limits of performativity as a

mechanism for repositioning the Black subject within an anti-Black frame
work, Baldwin models an ethics of Black performance and performativity.
Again, Hartman’s idea above that a Foucauldian approach often
“assumes that all forms of power are normatively equivalent, without dis
tinguishing between violence, domination, force, legitimation, hegemony, et
cetera” is crucial here. If relations of power, according to Foucault’s words,
require both sides to have “a certain form of liberty,” of what utility is the
concept of agency where no such condition of liberty exists, even in
Baldwin’s time?
Baldwin models precisely that ambivalent kind of Black resistance of
which Adeyemi wrote. On the one hand, Baldwin exposes the contours of
a racist power structure that would dissemble its existence attempting to
use that very documentary—and the ways his Blackness performs within
it—to do so. On the other hand, he concedes that, “until the time is
right,”139 he is, like all Black people are in the final analysis, powerless to
end this unethical structure through performative means because, despite
the structure’s very material and necropolitical consequences for the Black
people living and dying within it, the ghetto and ultimately the anti-Black
structure at the root of the problems the film identifies are, in fact, nothing
more than “American illusions … American necessities”—the deeply held,
violently guarded fantasies of whiteness. “And you can’t pretend you’re
not” captured within these violent anti-Black fantasies and positioned
within modernity as “the n��r” “if you are.”140 Baldwin’s labor of bodily
and verbally documenting the “radical contingency”141 of structural anti-
Blackness—the ways it “is the explicit outcome of a politics” and hence can
be changed while it also “functions as if it were a metaphysical property
across the longue dur�ee”142 because “the n��r is necessary”143 to white
ness and garrisoned within asymmetrical relations of domination—is an
ambivalent gesture of Black apathy. We must read with care the archive of
his Black performative iteration because, “until the time is right,”144 we are
still part of that gesture.
Conclusion
In Take This Hammer, Baldwin waged a battle to refuse the documentary’s
default “look, a n��r” narrative, to allow the youths’ narrative to control
the film, and to unflinchingly face the Black struggles rooted in deeply held
white fantasies. The documentary is itself a gesture that preserves the traces
of that ethical gesture and how it was at work even in Baldwin’s embodi
ment. And as we engage with it right here, watching the film and reading
30 O. B. RICKS
this article, we might further unbound the possibilities of the gestures in

the film.
Baldwin’s gesture to allow the Black youths’ knowledge production to
overwhelm the documentary’s project of “look, a n��r” seems to have
had an impact on him that lasted after he left San Francisco. A week after
filming Take This Hammer, Baldwin did an interview in New York City
with psychologist Kenneth Clark in which Baldwin quoted with palpable
horror one of the Black youths he had spoken with in San Francisco:
A boy last week, he was sixteen, in San Francisco, told me, on television—Thank god
we got him to talk! Maybe somebody will start to listen—he said, “I’ve got no
country! I’ve got no flag!” And he’s only sixteen years old! And I couldn’t say, “You
do!” I don’t have any evidence to prove that he does. … These are Negro boys and
girls, who at sixteen and seventeen don’t believe that the country means anything
that it says and don’t feel that they have any place here—on the basis of the
performance of the entire country!145
In this clip, the immanent critique and uncertainty Baldwin had wit
nessed from the Black youths he had just met in San Francisco the week
before is still apparent in the ways he brims with fresh emotions when
speaking of his time there. Here, the surge of emotions makes it clear that
the collective gestures of the youths in San Francisco were, perhaps, still
working to change him, and functioned, perhaps, as a mode of Black lead
ership still leading him. His meetings earlier that day with young civil
rights activists who reported being brutally assaulted by white supremacists
while the Kennedy Administration refused to take action146 surely only
furthered the collective gesture of which he was part. Being able to witness
Baldwin’s performative labor in an archival film like Take This Hammer
provides a richly textured document, not just of an historical moment and
an individual biography, but also of an evolving individual-with-collective
gesture.
What we are witnessing in Take This Hammer is a certain kind of
uncompromising resistance to the relations of domination, not subjects of
discourse making an intervention in the hegemonic chain. Despite any
material success he might have enjoyed at the time, the Baldwin we observe
is not a subject who has been interpellated within discourse, nor are the
Black people with whom Baldwin speaks formed as subjects by discursive
interpellations. Indeed, we watch them undergoing some of the very vio
lence by which they are forcibly positioned as “the n��r”—ghettoization,
segregation, police harassment and violence, houselessness, joblessness, and
“negro removal” or the displacement of whole communities—and we can
know good and well that resignifying the word “n��r” could never be
enough to change much of anything in those arenas of human life. This is,
in fact, a violent film, but the violence is hidden in plain sight, and even as
DANCE CHRONICLE 31
Baldwin amplifies the youths’ efforts to expose it, Baldwin must also face
the violence of the filmic genre as an extension of the white subject’s “look,
a ‘n��r’” fantasy and capacity to force Black people to live within it. The
modes of violence it takes to position somebody as “the n��r” are global
sets of forces. And they have more than five hundred years behind them.
Metaphorically substituting white bodies as “the n��r” works in the
Black imagination as performative inversion. But that does nothing at the
level of structural positionality to invert or abolish the “American
illusions … American necessities” of which Baldwin speaks. Those
“American illusions [and] … necessities” insist that Black bodies and Black
communities be positioned as “the n��r.” In the symbolic order of anti-
Blackness, gratuitous violence is just what “the n��r” is for.
And so, returning to Baldwin’s intentional or unintentional resignifica
tion of Fanon, we compare Baldwin’s “you’re ‘the n��r’” with the white
child who looks at Fanon and says to its mother, “Look, a n��r!” Even
coming from a child, it has real implications for Fanon and all Black peo
ple because the child is white and therefore connected to a globally net
worked power structure that has enforced upon Black people the status of
nonbeings, and the phantasmatic images of “cannibalism, backwardness,
fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the
grinning [racist archetype in a popular French advertisement of the time]
Y’a bon Banania.”147 Unlike a random white child riding on a train whose
“Tiens, un n�egre!” quilts Fanon—as well as Baldwin, Parks, and all us Black
people—to the position of “the n��r” despite their most sincere attempts
to resignify that position overdetermined by racist terror, Baldwin and the
youths of Bayview–Hunters Point are objects within relations of domin
ation and have no comparable power to bring about a break in the forma
tions (psychic or otherwise) of whiteness that might fundamentally destroy
“exactly what a Negro means to a white man”—the figure of “the n��r.”
The ego defenses of that white child are actual fortifications like active-
duty police and military. The forces rendering those Black youths “the
n��r” persist today to make Hunters Point a Superfund site, also known
as a “sacrifice zone,” where poisons afflict working-class Black and Brown
people of all ages with toxic substances deposited long ago when Hunters
Point was a Naval shipyard.148 Performativity is necessary but not sufficient
to move an anti-Black power structure to release its violent attachment to
the fantasies of “look, a n��r.” Black performativity can certainly help to
expose the contours of that anti-Black structure that is often hidden in
plain sight, thereby implying some points of intervention that a Black revo
lutionary struggle might take up. And in Take This Hammer, it is evident
that Baldwin knows his performance to be doing such essential labor in
anticipation of the Fanonian moment––when “the time is right.”
32 O. B. RICKS
Acknowledgments
The author would like to extend a sincere thank-you to the editorial and support staff for
their patience and hard work. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their generous
feedback that truly changed my whole approach and made me a believer again in the
promise that academic publishing can be the sharing and joining of conversations. Special
thank-you to the journal editors, Rainy Demerson and Kate Mattingly, for insistently hold
ing down an expansive and inclusive space for things that many people don’t count as
dance (studies) and for helping me to get engaged with this amazing field and journal.
Beyond thanks to my partner, Danae, and my family, for sharing me with this work.
Notes
001. Take This Hammer, directed by Richard O. Moore (KQED, 1964), 44:14. https://diva.
sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/187041
002. Take This Hammer, 00:40.
004. James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2002), 142.
005. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove
Press, 2008), 89.
006. Ronald A. T. Judy, “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” Fanon: A Critical Reader,
eds. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Ren�ee T. White (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 60-61.
007. Ronald A. T. Judy, “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” 60-61.
008. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative (New York:
Routledge, 1997).
010. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism
and Geography” Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 15–24.
011. Ronald A. T. Judy, (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave
Narratives and the Vernacular (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1.
012. The Making of Take this Hammer, directed by Caroline Dijckmeester-Bins, Mark
David, and Alex Cherian (WNET, 2013), 03:50.
013. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
014. Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference”, 15–24.
015. Bill Lyne, “God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth: James Baldwin’s Black Radicalism,”
Science & Society 74, no. 1 (January 2010): 14.
016. Mario Puzo, “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.” New York Times, June 23,
1968.
017. Geneva Abdul, “When James Baldwin Was a ‘Has-Been.’” New York Times, June 30,
2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/magazine/james-baldwin-interview.html.
020. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and
Cultural
Politics (New York: Routledge), 68.
021. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New
York: Random House, 1992), 8.
DANCE CHRONICLE 33
022. Kemi Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� : The Angularities of Black/Queer/Women/Lean,”

Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1 (2019): 18.
023. Butler, Excitable Speech, 100.
024. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 7.
025. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: A Politics of the Performative (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 7-8.
026. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 95-96.
027. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech, 141.
028. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech, 141.
029. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech, 147.
030. Danielle McGuire, At The Dark End of The Street: Black Women, Rape, and
Resistance––a New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to The Rise
of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2011), xviii-xix: “In later years, historians would
paint Parks as a sweet and reticent old woman, whose tired feet caused her to defy
Jim Crow on Montgomery’s city buses. Her solitary and spontaneous act, the story
goes, sparked the 1955 bus boycott and gave birth to the civil rights movement. But
Rosa Parks was a militant race woman, a sharp detective, and an antirape activist
long before she became the patron saint of the bus boycott. After meeting with Recy
Taylor [a Black woman who had been kidnapped, tortured, and raped by a group of
white men in Abbeville, Alabama, in 1944], Rosa Parks helped form the Committee
for Equal Justice. With support from local people, she ‘helped organize what the
Chicago Defender called the “strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a
decade.’ Eleven years later this group of homegrown leaders would become better
known as the Montgomery Improvement Association. The 1955 Montgomery bus
boycott, often heralded as the opening scene of the civil rights movement, was in
many ways the last act of a decades-long struggle to protect Black women, like
Taylor, from sexualized violence and rape. ‘The kidnapping and rape of Recy Taylor
was not unusual in the segregated South. The sexual exploitation of black women by
white men had its roots in slavery and continued throughout the better part of the
twentieth century.’”
031. Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the
Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Akinyele Umoja, We
Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York:
New York University Press, 2013). Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed
Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2005).
032. Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” Social
Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 175.
033. Martinot and Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy” 175.
034. McGuire, At The Dark End of The Street, xviii-xix.
035. Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race
Question’ in the US,” New Left Review 13 (January – February 2002): 41-60.
036. Martinot and Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy” 175.
037. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America. Race and American Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 79-82.
038. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard, 1982), 17-34.
34 O. B. RICKS
039. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 95-96.
040. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 95-96.
041. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 17-34.
042. Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 41.
043. Jaye Austin Williams, “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist
Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (Winter
2018): 193.
044. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 55. Wilderson continues:
“Simultaneously, it renders the ontological status of Humanity (life itself) wholly
dependent on civil society’s repetition compulsion: the frenzied and fragmented
machinations through which civil society reenacts gratuitous violence on the Black—that
civil society might know itself as the domain of Humans—generation after generation.”
045. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America. Race and American Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 217n20.
046. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 78.
050. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 54-55.
052. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 56. Hartman asks, [D]oes redemption rather than
repetition become the privileged figure of the performative? How might it be possible
to dislodge performance and performativity from these closures and reevaluate
performance in terms of the claims made against power, the interruption and
undermining of the regulatory norms of racial slavery, as a way of operating under
duress and constraint and as an articulation of utopian and transformative impulses?
053. Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (Cambridge,
MA: South End Press, 2007, 500.
054. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1994), 12, 18. Quoted in Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 217n17.
055. Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 8.
056. Jaye Austin Williams, “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic
on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 193.
057. Trinh, When the Moon Waxes Red, 68.
059. Trinh, When the Moon Waxes Red, 72-73.
060. James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 528.
061. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ” 11.
069. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics trans. Vincenzo Binetti and
Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 58.
DANCE CHRONICLE 35

071. George C. Wolfe, The Colored Museum (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 16.
075. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ” 19-20.
077. George Yancy, Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2012), 5-6.
082. Campbell, Talking at the Gates, 142.
089. Nanook of the North, directed by Robert J. Flaherty (Path�e Exchange, 1922), 79:00.
090. Cin�ema V�erit�e: Defining the Moment, directed by Peter Wintonick (National Film
Board of Canada, 1999), 1:42:00. https://www.nfb.ca/film/cinema_verite_defining_
the_moment/
091. Mike Wayne, Theorising Video Practice (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1997), 205. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in
Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 63.
093. Ronald A. T. Judy, (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave
Narratives and the Vernacular (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1.
096. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ” 18-19.
098. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ” 18-19.
100. Bill Lyne, “God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth: James Baldwin’s Black Radicalism,”
Science & Society 74, no. 1 (January 2010): 14.
110. Daphne Brooks, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play,” Callaloo 34, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 176-197.
36 O. B. RICKS

113. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 8.
116. Butler, Excitable Speech, 100.
118. Ronald A. T. Judy, “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity,” boundary 2 21, no. 3
(1994): 222-225.
119. Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 206.
120. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, https://www.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf, 531: “The
discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment
in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the
East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-
skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic
proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads
the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.”
121. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Waking Nightmares: On David Marriott” GLQ: A Journal
of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, nos. 2–3 (2011): 359.
122. Baldwin, Collected Essays, 371.
128. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ” 9–24.
129. Jared Sexton, “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts” Lateral 1 no. 1 (2012): https://
csalateral.org/issue/1/ante-anti-blackness-afterthoughts-sexton/
130. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 223.
131. Baldwin Collected Essays, 371.
132. Agamben, Profanations, 69.
134. Carrie Noland, “Ethics, Staged.” Performance Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2017): 69.
136. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans.
Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1992).
137. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ” 18-19.
138. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ” 18-19.
139. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ” 18-19.
141. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 101.
142. Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery” Social
Text 28, no. 2 (103, 2010): 36–37. Emphasis in original.
144. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90� ” 18-19.
145. “A Conversation With James Baldwin,” American Archive of Public Broadcasting,
June 24, 1963. http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-9m03xx2p
DANCE CHRONICLE 37
146. “A Conversation With James Baldwin.”

147. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92.
148. Ezra David Romero, “For These Black Bayview-Hunters Point Residents, Reparations
Include Safeguarding Against Rising, Toxic Contamination.” KQED, July 5, 2022.
https://www.kqed.org/science/1979614/for-these-black-bayview-hunters-point-
residents-reparations-include-safeguarding-against-rising-toxic-contamination
Omar Ricks is an independent scholar, writer, teacher, performing artist, and worker. He
has a PhD in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in New Media from
UC-Berkeley, an MFA in Drama (Performance) from UC-Irvine, an MA in US History
from University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, and a BA in History with a Minor in
African American Studies from Johnson C. Smith University. He has previously published
in Dance Chronicle, TDR: The Drama Review, Slingshot, ASTR Online, ERIC Digest, and
The Feminist Wire. His academic writing brings together radical Black thought, subjectiv
ity, and network theory to trace various modes of performance and performativity in Black
leadership.

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James Baldwin’s Lean: Gratuitous Violence and

Omar Benton Ricks

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James Baldwin’s Lean: Gratuitous Violence and Black

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