Several years ago, I adopted a personality called 'Boohab'. Some of you may know this dude. He was a literary creation of mine. It seemed like a good idea at the time. BTW, I'm not Boohab, nor am I Cobb. I'm Michael David Cobb Bowen, an online writer indulging his intellectual avocations. It's not about me, per se, it's about the ideas I convey as a first-person writer. Who I am is the man who carries on his family name, which is really none of your business.
Like most thoughtful people, I had come to the conclusion that blackness was not monolithic. Like a few that weren't satisfied with that simple statement, I concluded that blackness had become post-modern - that it was largely a cultural state of mind, a choice of flavor which was not determined by inevitable circumstance, but a political and cultural identity that could be nurtured at one's own discretion, or not. If you'd like to weigh in on that bit, please do so below in the comment section. But I say, blackness is a human choice and that anybody who thinks otherwise is a racialist like my man Michael Fisher. You might want to go give him a pound and spare me your bleatings if you're not ready to debate.
Understanding that I had made some distance between myself and the black masses, I recognized with the quickness that 90% of the debates that began "How come black people can't.." didn't apply to me. So I made a concerted effort to focus on the common 10%, which essentially boiled down to anti-racist politics. So like a good Nationalist, I joined identity and politics together in this creation called Boohab, and became overtly, provocatively, and persistently black. Online. Every day for years. Where angels feared to tread. And guess what? I learned something. Among other things, I got props from liberal online establishments and was promoted to Society conference host at the Utne Reader. For someone who doesn't make his livelihood writing, I would consider that a coup. Your interpretation might vary. For example, you might think that I was just selling out to a bunch of radical Jews, rather like some people think I'm selling out to a bunch of rightwing honkies. I can't say that I get the pejoratives right all the time, but I do get the message, beware of non-black allies. The problem of course was loss of a shared black vision.
The loss of -- It would be more fair to say the lack of, to reiterate the common knowledge that there is no black monolith of politics or culture -- a shared black vision is at the heart of a great deal of anxiety that African Americans feel from time to time. Since this is, for me, self-evident and not entirely problematic, I tend to get grief because it has traditionally been part of my duty as a member of the Talented Tenth, to find, defend and promote a shared black vision. I feel that I must remind people that if there is no monolith, that if black diversity of opinion is indeed a healthy thing, then logically there can be no betrayal of black people on the whole - because there are no black people 'on the whole'. There are a wide variety of blackfolks with an equally wide set of opinions. Yeah that may be true demographically, but there is a political center of black Americans who chose to be political, especially those of the Talented Tenth whose political prerogatives I have more or less abandoned, yet whose social significance I still talk about. It puts me in an odd, and sometimes uncomfortable position.
You see if there is no blackness, if blackness has fallen apart, and you could fix it by degrees and yet chose not to.. well, you get the picture. This place I occupy gets me in trouble. It is precisely why I don't trust it - why I think I would never in a thousand years want to be known as the black writer, or the black political leader. I grew up thinking that was the place to be, and have grown to discover it to be shaky ground. From Higher Ground to Shaky Ground: The Dissolution of the Talented Tenth, by Michael DC Bowen.
Today, I don't feel at all uncomfortable in declaring that the direction of blackness has fallen into the singularity that is Barack Obama, from which nothing emerges in recognizable shape. If you ask me if Barack Obama is the end of black politics, I say no. If you say he is the end of black politics as we know it, then I think you are stating the obvious. What is stunningly provocative about that is that when I was writing as Boohab, nobody could predict that anti-racist politics would fail so dramatically and that the focus of blackness would fall so far from where it had been. Just like 9/11 destroyed the Reparations Movement, Barack Obama has destroyed anti-racism as the gravitational center of black politics - not that it was going anywhere. It's something I believe many black partisans are loathe to admit, but it's true.
Speaking of which, there is an important, blazingly obvious fact about Barack Obama that nobody ever talks about, and that is that he has entirely dismissed and therefore disemboweled the Congressional Black Caucus. So let us ignore Jesse and Al for a moment and talk about the political center of the CBC asking about its relevance. There's really not much to say, but I'd like to hear Spence's angle on it anyway. You put the entire CBC on one side of the seesaw and Barack on the other, and the CBC is getting nosebleeds, if not orbital escape velocity.
My mistake, my Boohabian error, was to believe that at the end of the quest for middle-class status, the job of the Talented Tenth was to make anti-racism their political focus. I knew that at some point years ago, or else I would still be writing as Boohab, but I think it's appropriate for me to come out very straight and say so. It was a mistake to use the devices of Black Nationalism to present an identity as a political vehicle. It was a essentially dishonest to appropriate the prerogatives of the Talented Tenth and direct them in a vanguardish fashion having actually lost faith in the ability of the Talented Tenth. In other words, if I can shame myself any further, it was wrong to believe Gwaltney on the one hand and determine never to second-guess blackfolks, and then make efforts on the other hand at recovering some Movement politics in any direction. I think I may have over-slammed myself but I think trying to be more precise would be cheesy. So perhaps it is best for me to suggest that I have been a contrarian thinking myself part of something larger.
I think I have avoided that error since stopping calling myself a black Republican and simply identifying as moderate-conservative Republican. I don't particularly care if moderate-conservatives are black, just that they gain a majority.
That's all I'm going to say now. I'm heading to Pazo for snacks and alcohol. Depending on how well the conversation goes, I'll be up blogging all night.
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