(Anti) Black Self-Actualization

I just browsed through an interesting and new blog to me called Black Women Blow the Trumpet. I read the first post reviewing a film about a woman caught in a web of pity and thought eww. But I soldiered on through more and found an interesting passage.

In the long and detailed post called Multiculturalism and the Dangers of White Privilege Idolatry the author starts off banging away at some dysfunctions.

At this think tank, we have examined many aspects of the conditioning that occurs in those constructs. The emotional baggage that most of them have unknowingly accepted seems to have fostered several fallacies:

Fallacy #1: Black women have to take responsibility for black children.
Fallacy #2: Black women have to prefer black men above other men.
Fallacy #3: Living among all blacks proves blackness and affirms racial loyalty.
Fallacy #4: Black women should uplift/rescue black men in order to solidify their own destinies.
Fallacy #5: Black women are not highly desired by men of other races so they should do everything they can to be validated and chosen by black men.
Fallacy #6: Leaving all-black constructs will result in social isolation among non-blacks and rejection by blacks who are in black constructs.
Fallacy #7: Divestment requires the rejection of black men.

It stays juicy and it gets better. We get interesting passages like this:

In order for black women to leverage their resources wisely, they need to understand how to shrewdly navigate the social systems in several different cultures within this country. Multiculturalism requires mastering of social systems of several cultures.

I have noticed that many black women are not ashamed of being culturally ignorant. They make uninformed and stunningly ignorant comments about other groups without any embarassment at all. They actually think that blacks, whites and Latinos are separate races. They don't know the difference between a racial group and an ethnic group. They decide that the cultural ignorance embraced by others justifies their own ignorance. For black women, the costs of remaining culturally ignorant is too high.

We finally land here:

I think that black women need to think strategically about how to leverage their agenda within all settings that they find themselves in. We need to stop focusing on gaining acceptance from other groups, and begin to strategically leverage the Four Pillars of Black Self Actualization:
Dismantle!
Divest!
Diversify!
Dominate!

There is both odd consistency and inconsistency in what the author, Lisa, a black minster, writes. But it's clear that she recognizes the wreckage wrought by the false loyalty to blackness. She appears to be desirous of reconstructing blackness, and I wonder how close she will come to tossing it out entirely. I note this because she is definitely critical of afrocentrism and she adopts a post 9/11 mentality with regard to understanding that a social bomb has gone off in black America and so many people are still picking up the pieces. On the one hand she is wary of multiculturalism to the extent that it is somewhat defined by whites (but she never says white liberals, which is why she may be in a quandary) and yet she clearly understands that her black women subjects will not be respected if they do not reciprocate respect for other cultures.

But what is clear is that she appears to recognize no black orthodoxy. So it comes as no surprise, as pomo as her reading list suggests, that she is a deconstructor of black identity. That's useful, and I think that on the road to recovering a sense of individuality that black Americans have sacrificed, her writing will be paid more attention.