I'd been planning to discuss The End of Blackness by DebraDickerson and thought the end of Black History Month an appropriate time to doit. But by the time I set out to write I realized whatever I write will onlystart out as a discussion of the book. I look at books like this on threelevels: what is the point the author is trying to make, how well the authorsupport the point, and is this point the one that should be made.
The Point
Viewing Dickerson's book through the lens of
Now that blacks arefree from whites (i.e. the societal understanding of them as the caste whichcan be oppressed and exploited at will), The End of Blackness will argue thatits time for black people to free each other. Blacks can not effectuatetheir collective will, unmediated by outsiders or insiders beholden tooutsiders, until they trust themselves and each other to effectuate theirindividual wills.
Blacks must locate and embrace the selves they've not known since 1619. Only bydaring to live as autonomous individuals with voluntary group loyalty, only bybeing brave enough to chart a course unconcerned with the existence of whitepeople, only by taking complete responsibility for their comportment anddecisions--only then will blacks be able to achieve collective goals, assesscollective penalties, award collective benefits, and jockey for socio-politicalposition like fully entitled citizens.
Til now, blacks have been social weaklings buffeted about and passivelyinformed of their reality (e.g. you may live here but not there, you may sitthere but not here on a city bus, you may protest in this way but not that way)by the first class citizens, both their protectors and their enemies. It's timefor blacks to engender passivity in others, to inform outsiders of who blacksare and what will and won't happen in black communities. Blacks must nowstop screaming at the top of their lungs and start speaking with quietauthority; the authority of the fully entitled, the authority of the calmlyconfident, the authority of the self-legitimized citizen who has no intentionof being silenced or marginalized ever again, but who, most importantly, doesnot expect to be.
The first step in freeing each other is for black people, collectively, tosurrender, to consciously give up on achieving racial justice. Certainly, theymust renounce any notion of justice meant to even the historical score or tobring about actual racial integration. The Civil War did not end with Lee'ssurrender at Appomattox. Nor did it end with the passage of the 1964 CivilRights Act one hundred years later. It continues to this day. But that War overthe social and political position of black people must end and that end canonly come in the form of black surrender. What blacks must surrender isthe notion that they can be made whole for the centuries of loss anddegradation, that whites can be made to suffer guilt and shame equal to theportion they dealt blacks, that America will ever see itself the way that itsblacks citizens do. America will never feel blacks' ambivalence for theFounding Fathers, it will never waver from nostalgia for that much vaunted 'Ageof Innocence' that the black experience proves never existed. It can't. If itdid, it would have to come up with another, less glorious definition of itselfbecause that 'innocence' is that of the criminal whose victim lies mute, buriedin an unmarked grave and lost to history. Whites will never cringe with the shameblacks feel appropriate; they will never welcome blacks freely into theirneighborhoods and schools. They must abandon the quest for whites'respect, settling instead for their acceptance, however grudging, of the factthat interference will be summarily dealt with (and not via bullhorn). Blacksmust cease clutching the unlocked fetters of humiliation and voluntaryoutsiderness that hobble them to a view of the present shrink-wrapped to thecircumscribed past. Alas, they don't even have their faces pressed up againstthe plate glass window of the future. They should be working towards a day whensegregation is turned on its head, when whites sue blacks for admittance toblack schools, black medical staffs, black businesses. Until then, blackswill remain the annoying kid brother Mom forces you to tolerate.
This surrender must also acknowledge that blacks are Americans living ina Euro centric culture, but one which could not have been built without them.They should feel free to adopt Western culture, reject it, or meld it with somedesired level of Afro- (or other) centrism. But they should make that choiceaware of its consequences (and, of course, free of coercion fromgoaltending Blacks and their apologists). In a recent book called a Hope in theUnseen, a striving black youngster from the ghetto claws his way to BrownUniversity only to find that the Afrocentrism of his neighborhood educationleft him knowing all the words to Lift Every Voice and Sing but clueless as towho Churchill and Freud were. He was also sorely lacking in the academicbasics. That youngster had mainstream aspirations but was impeded by hiswell-meaning black teachers in availing himself of that to which hiscitizenship entitled him and for which he had worked so hard.
Blacks must accept that they are a numerical and political minority and mustmaster the dominant bodies of knowledge even as they fight for the inclusion ofworthy multicultural knowledge. As rational adults, they should concedethat, forced to choose, it should be Churchill over Patrice Lumumba, the InchonLanding over the Zulus' David vs Goliath victory over the British. Of course,they shouldn't have to choose; the goal should be to expand the base ofcultural literacy, one sinew of a strong nation, not play a zero sum game inwhich one nugget of western civilization must be jettisoned for everymulticultural nugget included. For the same reason that all schoolchildren needto master algebra whether they think they'll ever use it or not, blacks mustmaster the Master's world. They needn't embrace it or even believe it; theymust simply render unto Caesar the things, which are Caesar's. And then subvertit from within.
This black surrenderis not defeat. It is not an admission that either the racists or the politicalconservatives were right all along. It is the mature acknowledgement that,right or wrong, the past is as rectified as its ever going to be, the futuretheirs to claim. Black surrender is both honorable and justified because it isoffered as a response to whites' surrender of the right to exploit and oppressthem or to appease those who do. In short, they've surrendered their right to awhiteness defined as control over non-whites, as a preordained spot at the topof every pile, from character, to intellect, to beauty, to talent.
In order to makefuture progress possible, blacks have to give up on the past. Tomorrow is theironly option.
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