Toward a Black media philosophy

Marshall McLuhan is often considered a media philosopher, not a race theorist. Yet, his work is full of racial implications that often go unexamined. For McLuhan, media were ‘any extensions of man’, which is to say that the men of McLuhan’s ‘tribal’, ‘detribal’, and ‘retribal’ cultures were differentiated based on their use of different media. For McLuhan, the phonetic alphabet was an important extension of detribal man, it moved him out of a presumed tribal past. Interestingly, Frantz Fanon made a similar argument: the Black body was a vehicle toward the materialization of Western man. Rather than coming into being through recognition of others, Fanon noted that Western man perceived himself as ‘civilized’ based on his enactment of violence against Black bodies. Bringing together McLuhan and Fanon, I argue that Black bodies function as media: they are extensions of man into his raced self-conceptions of the world. And despite such a media relation, Black people have consistently fought against the reduction of our bodies to extensions of Western man.