… it is apparent that White racial attitudes have undergone a change that is neither insignificant nor yet fully consummated. … white racial thinking now spans a spectrum that runs from racial comity and understanding to ambivalence, then to animosity, and finally to outright racism. The bulk of Whites exhibit ambivalence that may be tipped toward comity or hostility depending on the interaction of the political climate, personal experience, and mediated communications.
(When someone is “ambivalent” and can be “pushed” to racial animosity toward a group due to general atmospheric conditions, that someone is infected with racism—perhaps not yet downright poxy with it, but certainly infected.)
There is but one way to prepare Afro-Americans, descendants of African slaves, to thrive within this intermittently hostile atmosphere. But it demands that we put aside hundreds of years of humiliation and shame. It demands that we look at ourselves and build a common cultural—not political—foundation based on our sojourn in America, based on our unique history and the certifiable triumphs we’ve pulled from it. It demands that we acknowledge that our insistent cultural (as opposed to political) identification with blacks of other cultures is, at least in part, a reflection of the majority’s contempt—our inability to see ourselves through our own eyes instead of theirs, see our own indigenous cultural value, and codify a unique, sustaining American cultural identity upon it.
**********
Sustaining cultures—cultures that sustain their inhabitants—provide a sense of entitlement, and even superiority to those who nestle within them. Per University of Kentucky psychologist Margot Monteith, “To the extent we can feel better about our group relative to other groups, we can feel good about ourselves. It's likely a built-in mechanism." Name me a culture that boasts that its people are equal to other peoples. They don’t; they boast instead superiority. They also have common delineators, usually based on varying combinations of history and ethnicity.
We are Afro-Americans—the American descendants of African slaves. We are not Haitians, Nigerians, Gambians or Sudanese. We are “black” people as much as we are “bipedal”, and cultural identification as “black” is only marginally more valuable; the term “African-American” is merely one half-step more descriptive. It fails to distinguish between a native born Kenyan who moved to Brooklyn two years ago and an American descendant of African slaves—between Charlize Theron and myself. Of course, to suggest that either of those sets shared intimate cultural bonds would be asinine. Africa is part of our history—an important part, but it is no substitute for a rapprochement and full acknowledgment of the more recent past that bleeds into and fully colors our American present.
If you ask ten Afro-Americans from different locales and socioeconomic backgrounds what Afro-American culture is, you’d get factious answers. Some will talk about hip-hop and rap. Some about religion, some about jazz, some about Africa. But these are all just cultural flotsam, outgrowths… cultural results. From what are they born? I don’t think we’ve ever self-defined that—the fundamentals of Afro-American culture—shared cultural touchstones and definitions that allow us, like other cultures, to celebrate our glories, and ingest a sense of cultural superiority and entitlement. What have our American horrors taught us and how have we wrested from them unique ways of thinking about issues such as God, history, death… How has our perception of the world been formed by our American experience, and how does that experience in all of its horror and all of its glory, allow us to be better, smarter, more perceptive than our fellow Americans who have not had the privilege of being born into it. How has it provided us cultural tools second to none in America? Barack Obama had a white mother and guardians injecting him with the majority’s positive views of self, history and culture. Most of us don’t have that luxury.
Define “Culture”
Webster’s Ninth - 5a: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. 5b. the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.
“…transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.” What formal knowledge do Afro-Americans customarily transmit from generation to generation about our distinct sub-culture? This is something at which we have consistently failed. So intent have we been on first righteously fighting persecution, and then, less righteously, on perfecting the majority via politics a la the King. I remember consistently seeing the book “To Be a Jew” on the bookshelves of high school friends of mine. Was there any such book in my house regarding being an American descendant of African slaves? There was not. The Jewish kids I knew went to Hebrew School on weekends and sometimes after school. Jews had learned not to abandon their distinct cultural education to the majority. They had learned that the majority simply does not, and has no reason to care.
During my formative years, I had several advantages that changed my personal cultural circumstance. First, I was comfortably middle class. Second, I was 10 in 1968, and living in Washington, D.C., a place full of middle class blacks. Third, the civil rights movement was reaching its zenith, and Afro-American life, history, culture, practice and theory were alive in the air all around me. And most importantly, my mother was born of a distinct sub-culture that afforded her all the things I hope for Afro-America at large: A culture nurtured and passed down from generation to generation that provided, in part, a sense of self-worth, entitlement, and yes, even superiority.
My mother was born and raised a New Orleans Creole. That means that she was part of an upper caste in Afro-American society dating back hundreds of years. These were half-breeds, quadroons, octaroons whom whites considered tainted by their black blood, but who were afforded and took special status and privilege due to the light skin they wore. They were the sons and daughters of slave masters and overseers, and seized their special status to become more prosperous than other blacks.
Their ability to attain this was based on a grotesque belief: the closer to white, the better you were. However, creoles wrested from this baseness a society they considered as cultured as the white, while taking their place as the elite of the black. In addition, they seem to have considered themselves prettier than either, and were not above holding both in contempt.
It was my good fortune to be born into such arrogance, to be the progeny of people who somehow managed to consider themselves more clever, more resourceful, and more wise than those around them due to their unique history and place in society—despite all the lies, half-truths and contradictions their place bespoke. Because of the high esteem in which they held themselves, they made a point of passing along the idea that I was part of something unique and special, worthy of careful maintenance. They made a point of passing that glowing aspect of their particular cultural information from generation to generation.
Everything the majority had was ours, I was taught, but nothing of ours was theirs. We had what they had—but more. That lesson should be one passed from every generation of Afro-American to the next. We must not only be armed with a thorough and exacting knowledge and level of comfort with the mainstream culture, but in addition, we must be loaded for bear with our own American creation myths, our own American histories, passed among ourselves that exalt us, defining ourselves, finally, once and for all. What’s theirs is ours. What’s ours is not theirs. It is DuBois’ dilemma, but recast from a dilemma to a blessing.
Loving DuBois’ Dilemma, Daily
