Somewhere I got notified that the first African American, Sophia Danenberg, has ascended Everest. I had no idea that it hadn't been done already and am rather surprised. I mean if I had known that title was up for grabs, I might have tried it while I was still single back in the late 80s early 90s. It just never occured to me that it wasn't a done deal. I suppose with a little poking and prodding, one could find a whle bunch of first black milestones that haven't been done or even approached, not that anybody is keeping score.
Or are they?
Now some cat named Bill Pinkney sailed around the world solo and is getting his props. I can get behind him, because truth be told I only had three serious black heroes when I was a kid. First and foremost among them was Mathew Henson, who went to the North Pole with Peary. But I'm not sure there's much significance in this beyond inspiration for kids. In other words, this blackification of events is not doing DuBois' work.
But really I say there is very little political or social uplift to be
gotten in tracking such events. Not that they aren't interesting or inspiring to youth, but they simply don't serve DuBois' purposes. Despite
the fact that I have a gripe against the whole role-monkey business, I
don't believe anyone is being consistent in this kind of appropriation. I mean, if you are
the first black to accomplish anything, the entire significance of it
is that you represent the unlimited potential of blackfolks. But that
only makes sense in the political context of oppression and
suppression. I mean it's obvious that blackfolks are endowed by their
creater with certain undeniable humanity, so why bother counting the
first nose? Well, only because it means that black person is bogarding
and a pioneer having accomplished something others before have failed
at because of racist descrimination.
But are those the kinds of celebrations we see in praise of diversity? I percieve a kind of checkboxification going on and a reflexive statement about 'race relations' etc. Everybody plays this game. My token is more representative than your token. But I don't think it is fair to the achiever, the achievement or to the audiences. And now I'm going to dump some verbiage in from David Brooks:
..the liberal writer Michael Tomasky published ''Left for Dead,'' which argued that the progressive movement was being ruined by multicultural identity politics. Democrats have lost the ability to talk to Americans collectively, Tomasky wrote, and seem to be a collection of aggrieved out-groups: feminists, blacks, gays and so on.
At the time, Bernstein and Tomasky were lonely voices on the left, and the multiculturalists struck back. For example, Martin Duberman slammed Tomasky's book in The Nation, and defended multiculturalism:
''The radical redefinitions of gender and sexuality that are under discussion in feminist and queer circles contain a potentially transformative challenge to all 'regimes of the normal.' The work of theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jeffrey Weeks, Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler represents a deliberate systemic affront to fixed modes of being and patterns of power. They offer brilliant (if not incontrovertible) postulates about such universal matters as the historicity and fluidity of sexual desire, the performative nature of gender, and the multiplicity of impulses, narratives and loyalties that lie within us all.''
Duberman insisted that postmodern multicultural theorizing would transform politics, but today his gaseous review reads as if it came from a different era, like an embarrassing glimpse of leisure suits in an old home movie.
So what I'm saying is that I resent and resist the racial symbolism of every African American achievment being piled into some massive calculation for the purposes of multiculturalism.
If Mr. Pinkney or Ms. Danenberg seek out notariety as Black, that's fine. It's their achievement and their privilege. I'm just not comfortable that it should be done for them. And what I certainly don't want to see, which seems inevitable is whether some question of their political fidelity arises automatically, which it must if we are talking about The Struggle.
Black history itself is apolitical. I seriously doubt that those we have traditionally celebrated every February would survive the political litmus tests we have today about what legitimately passes for Black Politics or Multicultural Politics. So here's to hope that African American acheivement remains apolitical.
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