Steve Reiss - The Undefeated Essay Collection: 30 Dynamic Essays from The Undefeated

Copyright 2022 by Andscape Books

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First Edition, October 2022

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Hard Cover ISBN 978-1-368-07663-0

eBook ISBN 978-1-368-09057-5

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Let me just put this right out there. I am using this foreword to make a pointor rather to put forward a different point than one normally makes in a foreword. Im just saying that I need to put the reason for this collection of essays front and center over the collection itself. And Im not just pulling a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand to get you to buy a book that you could get for free with a laborious lean on Google. Im also doing it to make sure that its raison dtre is neither misunderstood nor taken for grantedtwo of the twenty-first centurys greatest metaphysical nightmares and hence to be avoided at all costs. So, I write this foreword to tell you that this book is the harbinger of and a balm for a world transformed.

It is not, in ways small, large, fundamental, and irrevocable, the same world it was when Andscape (then known as The Undefeated) came into existence. That was on May 17, 2016. The President was biracial. Pandemics were overblown plot points in blockbusters and there was no TikTok. This was several racial reckonings ago. Black was lowercase, and the ability to live on a spectrum instead of at the sharp end of a dichotomy was considered exceptional. These essays stand together as a portrait of what was Before and how we got to Now.

Not that Im minimizing the importance of the actual essays themselves. I most certainly am not. These are your maps to navigating this strange new world. How strange? (Is that an undercurrent of boredom I detect? With a top note of cynicism?) We now live in a world where real is considered a point of view. Where truth can be stood in but no longer sworn upon. There is no certainty in a place where talk of all of this is a computer simulation is now a matter for the experts. This place we find ourselves where the five pillars of storytellingironic, funny, tragic, soul-killing, and senselesshave crumbled and rebuilt themselves anew using different mirrors. See America is facing a reckoning over race, but weve seen this before by Michael A. Fletcher:

Reconstruction tried and failed to get the nation to recognize the humanity of African Americans. Following World War I, African Americans who had proven their valor in the trenches of Europe were returning home and hundreds of thousands of others were moving north to flee racial terrorism and abject poverty in the South. They found opportunity, but also murderous white hostility.

After World War II, as civil rights lawyers found once-unthinkable success chipping away at state-sanctioned segregation, the old order was maintained by redlining, massive resistance and white flight. Even as the Black middle class grew, educational levels increased and Black officials filled thousands of political offices, culminating in the election of Barack Obama as the nations first Black president....That structure is now being challenged in unprecedented ways. But what will become of this moment?

It seems both unseemly and pointless to wave you down only to tell you that we were here first and please use us for safe passage on the journey. Because this is real. We saw this. Why do you think we changed our name? Because the way we see ourselves now is so different as to demand a new, more flexible vessel to pour ourselves into. Here I quote myself from Toni Morrison made me stop wanting to be white in this collection:

Slavery took our bodies. Cultural hegemony tries to take our mindsand destroy our hair. [Toni] Morrison gave it all back to usif we have the strength to take it. What did she say in Beloved? They do not love your body. So you have to love it and love it hard.

This is not about being seena watered-down approximation of affirmation if ever there was one. We are seen every day and seen wanting, thanks to the economic demands of a scientifically ignorant people who built a sweet land of liberty on the backs of other, darker humans. Its not right to own people. But it seems almost worse to convince yourself and those you enslaved and their descendants that it has something to do with their own inferiority. Thats twisted.

So please use us for safe passage on your journey. We are here to ensure the path stays lit and to reassure you that you are correct. The path is in your hands. You need these essays, and you need them in this handy dandy curated collection to guide youlest you become misunderstood or taken for granted.

I am certainly not saying that this is going to be easy, or that you will never be angry again, though I do wish that for you. But I am telling you to be optimistic. And I offer these essays, once again, as an aid. They are a reminder that though the other thing is true too, Black means more than resistance. It also means every single other thing that you bring to it. We do not live as a cautionary counterpoint to White. We are simply living. And then we put a little hip-hop on it, because not just surviving but thriving under such circumstances is what one would call flexing. Or, as Soraya Nadia McDonald writes in Can a Black heroine fix the racist stereotypes infecting King Kong?

Pittss Ann is adventurous, independent and determined. But shes also a Black woman who, like Kong, is ensconced in a production that doesnt seem to have taken full account of what that means beyond a mealymouthed, post-racial conclusion that anyone can play anything! And its totally fine! Progressive, even! Perhaps, more than anything else, thats what ties Kong and his Black Darrow together on Broadway, even more so than their victimization at the hands of the arrogant Denham. Both remain suspended in a parable that, however well-intentioned, remains grafted onto a fundamentally racist foundation.

You are not suspended or rather you are no longer suspended in anothers parable that, however well-intentioned, remains grafted onto a fundamentally racist foundation. You and all your Ands (pardon the branding) create the Scape we have created in this collection of essays. (See what I did there? Explaining again what Andscape means and what it matters. But we are sowing hearts and minds, not just reaping rewards.) And to paraphrase the great James Baldwin, please also use this collection as proof that you have earned this Scape of your own. This Scape. Your Ands have been bought and paid for by those of us who came Before but are not here Now.

We are the ballast. The anchors. A way for those who are close to the edge to find their way back, or their way home. This is true for Black mothers, who are especially tested and learned in all the dread fates of Black bodies. We are the hedge against the people who dont see us. We are an assertion of Black life.