I'd been planning to discuss The End of Blackness by Debra
Dickerson and thought the end of Black History Month an appropriate time to do
it. But by the time I set out to write I realized whatever I write will only
start out as a discussion of the book. I look at books like this on three
levels: what is the point the author is trying to make, how well the author
support the point, and is this point the one that should be made.
The Point
Viewing Dickerson's book through the lens of
web site makes you come away with a different view than you do if your only
forewarning of her intent is knowledge of her previous book. Here's a longish
excerpt from her site, the parts that made me interested in the book emphasized:
Now that blacks are
free from whites (i.e. the societal understanding of them as the caste which
can be oppressed and exploited at will), The End of Blackness will argue that
its time for black people to free each other. Blacks can not effectuate
their collective will, unmediated by outsiders or insiders beholden to
outsiders, until they trust themselves and each other to effectuate their
individual wills.
Blacks must locate and embrace the selves they've not known since 1619. Only by
daring to live as autonomous individuals with voluntary group loyalty, only by
being brave enough to chart a course unconcerned with the existence of white
people, only by taking complete responsibility for their comportment and
decisions--only then will blacks be able to achieve collective goals, assess
collective penalties, award collective benefits, and jockey for socio-political
position like fully entitled citizens.
Til now, blacks have been social weaklings buffeted about and passively
informed of their reality (e.g. you may live here but not there, you may sit
there 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 time
for blacks to engender passivity in others, to inform outsiders of who blacks
are and what will and won't happen in black communities. Blacks must now
stop screaming at the top of their lungs and start speaking with quiet
authority; the authority of the fully entitled, the authority of the calmly
confident, the authority of the self-legitimized citizen who has no intention
of being silenced or marginalized ever again, but who, most importantly, does
not expect to be.
The first step in freeing each other is for black people, collectively, to
surrender, to consciously give up on achieving racial justice. Certainly, they
must renounce any notion of justice meant to even the historical score or to
bring about actual racial integration. The Civil War did not end with Lee's
surrender at Appomattox. Nor did it end with the passage of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act one hundred years later. It continues to this day. But that War over
the social and political position of black people must end and that end can
only come in the form of black surrender. What blacks must surrender is
the notion that they can be made whole for the centuries of loss and
degradation, that whites can be made to suffer guilt and shame equal to the
portion they dealt blacks, that America will ever see itself the way that its
blacks citizens do. America will never feel blacks' ambivalence for the
Founding Fathers, it will never waver from nostalgia for that much vaunted 'Age
of Innocence' that the black experience proves never existed. It can't. If it
did, it would have to come up with another, less glorious definition of itself
because that 'innocence' is that of the criminal whose victim lies mute, buried
in an unmarked grave and lost to history. Whites will never cringe with the shame
blacks feel appropriate; they will never welcome blacks freely into their
neighborhoods and schools. They must abandon the quest for whites'
respect, settling instead for their acceptance, however grudging, of the fact
that interference will be summarily dealt with (and not via bullhorn). Blacks
must cease clutching the unlocked fetters of humiliation and voluntary
outsiderness that hobble them to a view of the present shrink-wrapped to the
circumscribed past. Alas, they don't even have their faces pressed up against
the plate glass window of the future. They should be working towards a day when
segregation is turned on its head, when whites sue blacks for admittance to
black schools, black medical staffs, black businesses. Until then, blacks
will remain the annoying kid brother Mom forces you to tolerate.
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