What is the black endgame? At what point does one reach zero marginal utility for blackness? At what point in American history will the need for black politics be obviated? When do African Americans drop the hyphenation?
As some inveterate readers of Cobb know, I have written essays every 5 or so years going back to 1984 entitled 'The End of My Blackness'. And each time I surpass what I thought was black, I find a new reason to reinvest. That's just me, but it's clear that some folks, like Ward Connorly for gratuitous example, have stopped reinvesting. I think the answers to these questions will come all in individual packages - there is no one answer for the nation, but that blackness will fade slowly into distant memory like the sound of a dime going down into a pay phone. People will still talk about 'dropping a dime', but nobody will do that literal thing. People will still talk about 'black community' but it won't exist.
It's hard to imagine anyone saying that 'the black community' would cease to exist, but in many ways it already has. It just depends on which black community you're talking about. My aunt was born at home. Who is born at home? I haven't asked about it but there was probably a time in my grandparents' generation when it was just unthinkable for blackfolks to go to hospitals to have babies delivered by doctors. And I'm quite sure that there were many black midwives who handled the business of birthing babies just fine. I, for one, know zero about that culture. All I know about hot water and lots of towels I learned from old black and white TV shows and movies.
Sometimes I wonder what's up with Pops. He has no cable, he got his first cell phone this year and has a DVD player but no DVDs. He sends me newspaper clippings by mail. I know it's love, but it's slow love. Eight times out of ten I've already read the story and written about it or ignored it. So I wonder if he's trying to tell me not to make my life too convenient. I wonder if he's trying to maintain in me, the discipline of literacy that made him a scholar. Perhaps he's trying to preserve that old black community that was his. In his library are Negro Digest and Freedomways. In his library is Rosa Guy and a book about Orangeburg. He has binders and binders of typewritten documents. Somewhere in that pile in his office are stencils for his old mimeograph machine; the one I used to crank by hand and he'd pay me one cent per copy. They are old ways and they remind me of old days. Long gone, and now preserved only in memory and in this thing called blogging.
I once remarked that black is that which survives, that the Africans at the bottom of the Atlantic don't get to decide what's black. They failed to survive. And I said that in the context of a black family that is statistically non-existent, but that the broken homes will fail and those families of the righteous marriage will persist. Only the strong survive. Only the persistent will thrive. Whatever that is, at some point we will call it something other than what we call it today. After all, my aunt was born Negro and only became black after some transformation. But the transformation was voluntary and it was considered her new strength and so she buried her Negro soul and grew a new one.
Who laments the Negro Community? I don't even know if that's what they called it, and nobody, I imagine could place an exact date on its death, nor was it likely something precisely planned. Everyone knew that its days were numbered when Johnnie came marching home from France where the Alabama soldiers and Parisian girls could dance. People were exposed to a new world. People could not go on living the same way. People were ready for change, and somebody said, if this is what a Negro is, I want to be more. That colored girl had to look in her mother's eyes and tell her "Mama, I can't live like that."
People presume the Kwaku Network. People assume there's a plan - that blackfolks have a plan and that they're coordinating. Nothing like that is happening though, a few choice topics get bounced around and blackfolks decide what it means to them, and they guess what it means for other blackfolks. Commonly, there are common answers to common questions like, "Could Luther sing?" or "Does Bush speak for me?" or "Is Oprah still one of us?". There are uncommon questions with uncommon answers as well, and these are the ones that turn the big boat inches and degrees. Even when you touch someone slightly, you alter their path. While some folks have got their mind made up, others are still listening. It's not a plan, it's a ripple that sometimes becomes a wave.
The Black Endgame is an economic moment. Its a point in time at which a mystical flag tied to magical rope crosses over an arbitrary line in identity's tug of war. You could declare the tug of war to be over once the line is crossed, except that in this war, new people are born into the struggle and the tugging continues.
So we're watching blackness go back and forth over lines we imagine to be the end of blackness. How come we don't have but one TV show, Good Times? How come there's no McDonald's in our neighborhood? How come they don't play our music on the other radio stations? Can a black man be the Chief of Police? Those were questions at the end of blackness when I grew up. That's all done. And yet people reinvest. Well, OK forget what I said then, what I really meant was this kind of black person being Secretary of State. No what I really meant was a black Senator in a Southern state. No I meant somebody other than Jay Z as a media mogul. No, rap music winning Grammys isn't good enough, I really meant Oscars and Tonys.. no Pulitzer ..no Nobel.
Sometime after the fourth black President, somebody will ask why it's only 4 out of 60. That's not proportional. Or maybe by then the Endgame will have already occurred and people will stop asking such questions. I always recall that at the end of WW2 the big question was whether the average Negro was intelligent enough to drive a truck. People stopped asking such questions - they are Negro questions, beneath us all, long forgotten, like Negroes born at home in the Negro Community. Like sharecroppers from Louisiana wondering if they could survive in a big Northern state like Massachusetts where today the governor is black.
The thing is, you never know. You just watch the who's tugging, and you keep track of your own imaginary lines. Or maybe you lose track. Or maybe you stop counting. Or maybe you decide that the world is not enough. More likely however, the world keeps turning, and something new becomes what's happening.
Thirteen years ago some black businessmen from Harlem told the black people of Harlem to resist and refuse this new thing called the Internet. Refuse it unless a black company can get the rights to own the wires. And a few years later there became this thing called the Digital Divide, because it was said that black people had no computers and no stake in things digital. Today, black teenagers have all of that and then some in their pockets. I watch them download music and send voice messages and digital pictures at the mall. That's more than most people at MIT did thirteen years ago. Nicholas Negroponte bade us be digital in 1996. All of us are. How big is the black question of being digital? Very small indeed. Who cares about black wires?
The Black Endgame will sneak up on everyone because we'll be preoccupied with something else, but most of all because we will forget to care that much. People will always ask what does it mean to be black, just like people will always ask what does it mean to be an American? But it will be one of those boring questions for sophomores in high school that most folks will abstract into flatness - like the multicultural murals of the 80s grafittied over in the 90s.
I'd add one more note in passing. Debra Dickerson famously wrote a book called 'The End of Blackness', and these days has caught herself complaining that she's not getting any calls to be black during Black History Month. The flag inches over the line.
I'm beginning to think that it is reasonable to believe that the end of black politics will come when we have a black President, rather like the end of Irish Catholic politics. That's about as specific as I can get, and so on that, I'll end this ramble.
Recent Comments