[M]uch of the understanding of blacks in the Americas is the constant problem and problematic of labor, dehumanization, and resistance to exploitation. These considerations have a profound impact on the study of such blacks. Fanon’s quip from Black Skin, White Masks is illuminating in this regard:
One day St. Peter saw three men arrive at the gate of heaven: a white man, a mulatto, and a Negro.
“What do you want most?” he asked the white man.
“Money.”
“And you?” He asked the mulatto.
“Fame.”
St. Peter turned then to the Negro, who said with a wide smile: “I’m just carrying these gentlemen’s bags” (p. 49).
One could easily add the gender dimension to labor along with this point. The existence of middle-classed black men and women don’t negate the modern history that has not only linked blacks to labor but also to slave labor. The distinction between labor and slave labor is located at the point of entitlement. Slave labor is denied any entitlement whatsoever, and as such, it makes any effort toward recompense appear as crossing sacred borderlines. The slave and slave descendants who seek more for their labor—in fact, seek anything for their labor—encounters a world that treats him or her as a transgressor. Thus, calling, say, the Irish “the blacks of Europe” in the European context fails to address the fact that there were blacks in Europe and in Ireland who turn out to be black in North America, South America, Asia, and Australia, and those blacks, often designated by the term (not mixed) Negroes, carry the weight of a history of being expected to carry bags for the whites and the many shades beyond which blacks represent the nether zone. The modern world hates to see black folks resting.
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