The “preexisting condition” of being black in America – on mourning and revolutionary optimism
Biodun Jeyifo
What is the preexisting condition of being black in America? For the avoidance of confusion, let me begin this discussion with the clarification that I am referring here, not to a state of Being that precedes existence itself, but to a very specific term of the discourse and practice of medical care in America. In other words, in this article, I will for the most part be using this term as a metaphor and not in its literal connotation. And what is this literal aspect of the term? Well, it pertains to the fact that since healthcare in America is the most costly in the world, most people in the country, including the very rich, depend on health insurance of a robust and dependable kind in order not to lose all they own through paying for their care when they get very sick and need lifesaving medical attention. However, no matter how good on the surface the terms of your health insurance are, God help you if you are deemed to have a “preexisting condition”!
And what exactly is a preexisting condition? It is any disease or chronic illness that you had before joining the plan of your insurers. This is especially true with regard to the most serious diseases like cancer, diabetes, stroke and other myriad serious diseases of the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, and the brain. It is nothing short of catastrophic for any person to be found by his or her insurers to have a “preexisting condition”, whether from your own honest declaration to your insurers or from details they discover, legally or illegally, from your personal medical records. Once this takes place, your healthcare costs balloon astronomically, to the point where you lose all your life’s savings or in the worst circumstances, lose life itself because you cannot afford the cost of staying alive. To put this matter in plain language, it is a great economic and psychological liability in America to have a preexisting condition. This is because no insurers will enroll you in their plan and if they do, it will be at a cost far beyond the earnings or the total financial resources of most Americans families or individuals, except the very wealthy.
The grimness of the matter can be gleaned from the fact that only if you have never been seriously ill in your life can you be free of a preexisting condition. This is why saying “preexisting condition” to any American conjures images and thoughts of some of the most truly disadvantaged in the land. The prayer is silent, very silent, but if you have an inner ear, you can hear Americans to whom you utter this term invoking God’s benevolence in sparing them of the disaster of having a preexisting condition. Indeed, Obamacare is so popular in America precisely because of the effective protection that it gives to millions of Americans from the exclusions and disadvantages of the “preexisting condition”. In other words, before Obamacare, uncountable number of people had striven to find one way or another, indeed any and all ways to escape from the “curse” of the preexisting condition. Here I give a personal testimony from my own experience. In 1995 when I was first diagnosed with the chronic illness that has dogged me for several decades now, only very narrowly did I escape being trapped by and in the calamity of a preexisting condition. I will not go so far as to say that I am alive now because the insurers did not adjudge my illness to be a preexisting condition but all the same, I do realize that if they had done so, life between then and now would have been significantly different for me, mostly in an onerous direction. Permit me to use this personal testimony to now take up the metaphoric aspect of this term as indicated in the title of this piece, this being the preexisting condition of being black in America.
At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps necessary for me to make very clear why and how I am using the phenomenon of the “preexisting condition” as a metaphor for blackness in America. Ostensibly, it seems to be a metaphor of great disadvantage, a trope of an almost natural and unalterable proneness to misfortune. This is clearly deeply problematic. It is as if, because the chronic illness for which I was diagnosed in 1995 disproportionately afflicts more black people than white people, blackness itself is an inevitable precondition for the chronic illness, a sort of ersatz preexisting condition. But we know that this is a half-truth because most black people do not get the diseases of which they are deemed to be more afflicted than other racial groups; only a small percentage of them do and it is that fraction of black people that are compared with the fractions of other racial groups that get the same diseases. In other words, to talk of blackness as a preexisting condition for medical and/or social malaises smacks too dangerously of a racial determinism. If this is the case, the question then arises: why talk at all about blackness in this discursive idiom of an unalterable preexisting condition? This question leads us to the heart of the matter in this article.
In the last few weeks in this column I have discussed again and again the extraordinarily promising developments in the protests and demonstrations under the leadership of the BLM in particular and, more generally, the entirety of the African American community. Without mincing my words or restraining the exuberance of my language, I have given testimony to how black people in America and around the world, together with forces of solidarity from other racial communities, are powerfully contesting virtually all the forms and expressions of their historic oppression as a racial group. I now wish to make this more explicit as I hereby declare that in all of my adult life, I have never seen a more consequential movement of black people heroically and effectively challenging every aspect of all the institutions, all the laws, all the practices that have historically been created to oppress them. Indeed, it is a complex but also exhilarating thing not only to be a witness to this history of a deeply redemptive kind but also to try to capture it in words and language, in image and metaphor. Permit me to add that I say all this about these current eruptions without having suffered an amnesia about the uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s in Black America, part of which I was also a witness and a participant.
But we are still haunted by the question: Why go into the misericordia of blackness as a preexisting condition for medical and social malaise as I seem to be doing in this piece? Let my response to this question serve as my justification for the issues that I am taking up in this piece. I will state it briefly first before expatiating on it in the rest of the discussion. It is this: Yes, being black in America at this moment in history is far more audaciously self-assertive and life-affirming than I have ever seen in all my adult life of more than a half century; but there is also a quality of mourning, a harrowing sense of disaster and loss, a cry of joy that is deeply inflected by what Soyinka once called the possibility of a tragi-existential catharsis at the core of Being itself. Have you noticed, dear reader, that in many festive national occasions these days in America, African American hymns and spirituals, with their unique mix of joy and sadness, pain and psychic release, are rendered as an accompaniment to the American national anthem? Yes, this has an old and familiar ring for haven’t “Kumbaya” and “Amazing Grace”, among a great repertoire of traditional Afro-American gospels and spirituals, been appropriated into the national heritage of traditional American music? So, yes this is not entirely new but it is a different thing altogether when the biggest sports league in the United States, the National Football League (NFL), plays a recording of the acknowledged African American anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” side by side with the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner” before every game.
We must move toward the conclusion of this piece. In the present context, space will allow me to briefly explore only two instantiations of this phenomenon of a sorrowing, mourning side of the revolutionary optimism of the Black community in America at the present time. As I do this, please bear in mind, compatriots, that blackness as preexisting condition has its origins, not in the discourses of Black people themselves, but in the supremacist myths and practices of White racism. For we must never forget that even as the eruptions of revolutionary ferment in Black America rock the country and the whole world, White supremacist rhetoric and myths are at their most blatant and widespread in more than a hundred years in America.
First, then, think of Black people in America and the Covid-19 pandemic. With the possible exception of Latinos/a, the pandemic has killed a far greater proportion of Blacks in terms of their percentage of the national population beyond that of any other racial or ethnic community. Let me put this matter in as graphic a form as I can. The Black Lives Matter movement started before and continues to be a mass phenomenon separate and distinct from the ravages of the pandemic. But they are linked, even if the loss of lives contested and mourned in the BLM movement do not exactly dovetail with lives lost to the pandemic. This is because the disproportionate deaths of Black people from the pandemic could not have come at a worst moment than the upsurge of deaths of Black men and women at the hand of the violence of racist White cops.
Let us be very clear about this situation. It is the deaths of the George Floyds and the Breonna Taylors killed by the police that provide the rallying cry for BLM protests and demonstrations. But powerfully, if only subliminally, the deaths of tens of thousands of Black people killed in the pandemic seem as needless and as wanton as the deaths from police killings. Revolution in the time of the Coronavirus pandemic: even if Black people were only marginally affected by the pandemic because they are less than 20% of the population, the very fact of the grisly background provided by the pandemic suffices to provide an explanation for the anarchist rage at the edges of the BLM protests and demonstrations.
Secondly and finally, there is the dimension of uncertainty or contingency in the deep mourning that pervades the joy and exhilaration of BLM protests, together with the demands for a radical and transformative reordering of American society. As much as things seem to be very auspicious for fundamental changes in America, there are dangers ahead and there are no certainties that we can cling to. The only thing we can be sure of is that after the coming presidential elections at whose core is an uneasy alliance of the most radical elements in the Black and White communities, things will never, never again be the same in America. For there is an almost as powerful a current of counter-revolutionary energy and imagination in Trump and his revanchist, authoritarian hordes as there is with the BLM movement and its allies. I personally tend more to the element of optimism and tragic joy in these convulsions. But let us not ignore the forebodings.
Biodun Jeyifo
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