The Sound of the Drum

"We don't know who we should be because we don't know where we came from."
-- a black girl

At Google video, there's a highly rated short documentary that interviews several young African American women who tell stories of insecurity about their appearance. It could be seen as something more than that, which is the point. How much more is a problem a large number of Americans seem to be wrestling with. That's too bad, because we already know the answers. I say 'we', but it's hard to tell how big that 'we' is, or must be.

I've called those who are on the outside of self-esteem for ages-old reasons those who haven't heard the 'sound of the drum'. It's a problem Cornel West aptly described in his book 'Race Matters' as the reason that blacks have a different orientation towards America. African Americans have an existential hunger, a need to feel a part of something other than an outcast minority. This hunger drives and distorts a great deal of African American interaction in the public sphere. I think it is often expressed poorly in a desire to change Aemrica rather than to change the self. But most blackfolks do have an understanding that 'knowledge of self', is key to success. The problem is that there are charlatans and crackpots in the self-knowledge business.

For a long time, I called those hustlers 'The 50 Page Book Men'. If you live in New York or Los Angeles, you've seen them out on the sidewalk with their kinte or mudcloth covered folding tables full of thin paperback books rightously selling consciousness to the black man. Their libraries inevitably include Franz Fanon, Neely Fuller, Elijah Muhammad and Francis Cress Welsing, a veritable anarchists cookbook of racial conspiracy theory. Few if any of these 50 Page Book Men could ply their trade on college campuses. They'd have to contend with black professors who have done a great deal more diligence in order to earn their bones. And so it is to those black men and women of the streets, 'the masses' that these operators direct their efforts.

Very much like the mass media's (ivnolunary?) portrayal of blacks as indigent crooks during Katrina, there is a similar cottage industry of soundbite clipery which like the 50 Page Book Men pretend that the world is similarly uneducated. And it is the problems of the ignorant sold back to the ignorant and their middle class nemeses that complete that weary cycle of commerce. Some people have the nerve to call this enlightening. I think those people are Liberal and equally ignorant. And so in a half-baked recreation of the Clark experiments, we are reminded of how colorstruck pre-schoolers can be.

If wisdom truly came out of the mouths of babes, is our entire educational system a scam? Couldn't we just sit around at home, have babies and thereby gain insight into the ways of the world? Couldn't we then videotape their utterances and cobble together a philosophy to share with the world? Evidently, the maker of this film thinks that's how it goes. There is no benefit of the doubt to be given. The 50 Page Book Man has been updated to Web 2.0 and the ignorant selling to the ignorant continues. But that is not the Sound of the Drum, it is just the beating of bleeding hearts and the echoes of yet empty minds that you hear. There are principles and content missing.

There are those who believe that some connection to Africa or some understanding of the savage dehumanizations of American chattel slavery will light a spark in the minds of people with dark skin and give them insight to some special internal strength. It will not. It will only connect to the human emotions of shock, shame and anger. That is no program for success, merely a motivation for complaint against atrocities that cannot and will not be adjudicated. They are merely lessons of history, improperly taught. They are not paths to self-knowledge, but paths to self-pity and emotional exile.

I imagine that there are unlimited pools of motivation to exploit fellow humans. But that doesn't make me any less irritated at such continuing treachery, nor am I unmoved by the victims of this wrong-headed reasoning. I can only link this message to the Google video and hope those who watch that, can read this blog and know that there is much more to life than empty ignorant complaint and self-pity. And for them I link again to the Return of the Bogard, my anthem to black youth.