Two Black Intellectual Stories

A thoughtful reader writes:

1. I think the pathology of white racism impacts Black folks in various degrees depending where you are on the ladder both income and color of hue.

2. To many Black folks are still wounded from the pathology of white racism in America and as a result it makes them create and develop a low self esteem and as such you get this need to seek validation, affirmation from the very forces that wounded and fractured your cultural, self and community and..

3. Black intellectuals who for some reason refuse to create and advance their own paradigms simply then parrot and mimic the paradigms of white intellectuals

4. I would argue that few Black folks have cross this barrier and have the capacity to actually create new paradigms entirely removed from the blueprint and constructs of white folks..

And I respond.

On point 1, yes. I agree that many black Americans do internalize White Supremacy. It's kinda how they know they are still 'black'. And the constant racism chasing done by various parties keeps them assured of their place in society - which they are perversely comfortable in.  Money and light-skindedness are just two ways they offset that. Money is more real, but then it has to be real money.

2. Yes. That's absolutely right. The big problem is, of course, that people believe falsely about who 'white' people are, how they get and how they maintain their power. After enough time of looking at all power as a corrupt white hustle, these black people do themselves in. They doom themselves to powerlessness because they never learn the lessons of what real power is. It's like the man who only looks at women as objects because he's never known a truly good woman and all the ones who answer to 'bitch' are well.. just that. So that's all he knows. That's all he gets. He's doomed.

3. I think we, speaking for myself in this, have put too much faith in somebody special to explain it all to us. On the one hand it's true that we used to lack for enough righteous education and we needed our own leaders. But that's not really the case any longer. After all, it has been almost 50 years of public accommodations. And the fact of the matter is that if you really read Carter G Woodson or James Weldon Johnson, you'd realize that the answers are all out there and they're old answers. The problem is that people have been convinced that their freedom isn't real unless everyone in the race is free. That's foolishness and the Klan talking. See Point 1.

There doesn't need to be a brand new paradigm. The whole of revisionist history 'for' black poeple is wrong, which is what I hope Jelani Cobb was implying in his piece. People need to understand the whole of real history, not the self-esteem steroid version. Christianity is sufficient.

Let me take this tangent for a moment because it's kinda important and personal.

I'll tell my story about Nell Painter.
Nell Painter wrote the definitive biography/history of Sojourner Truth. I met her around 1991 when she joined the faculty at UCLA. So one day I'm on campus and she's being introduced to students and she talks about Tubman and being glad to be in Los Angeles. Then one of the students pipe up. What do you think is the solution to the problems in the black community? And of course, Painter, being an honest peson, can't asnwer. She's not from LA and she doesn't know what's going on in this black community. She's a little flustered but the answer that comes out is essentially, hell you live there, you should be telling me!

I'll tell you another story: of Derek Walcott.
I bought his epic poem Omeros when it came out. I was reading Moliere at the time and digging it, but thought I should perhaps pay attention to some blackness. So every once in a while, you could catch me with his book trying to rap it. And I would do so in cafes like the young pretentious aesthete that I was trying to be at the ripe old age of 29, just loud enough so people could ask me what I was doing. And I would explain that Derek Walcott was the darling of the intellectual set (and he was) and everybody acknowledges what a painstaking act of genius it was to take the story of the Illiad and translate it into a black Caribbean metaphor. Have you never heard of Derek Walcott?  He won the Nobel Prize in Poetry. But he didn't solve the problem of the black community. And nobody in the black community reads anything by Derek Walcott.

The black community is its own problem. Black Intellectuals who try to solve its problems always fail. Black Intellectuals who don't try are not long considered Black Intellectuals. So it basically comes down to this point. Who's down with The Struggle and who's not. 

Now the difficulty with The Struggle is that it has been hijacked by people who can't think their way out of a paper bag. And that's because the Real Struggle has already been won and the architects of that struggle have moved on. The laws of the most powerful nation in the history of the planet are now not against you based on the color of your skin. And in case you haven't noticed, thousands of people from halfway around the planet have come here in the past 20 years to work in an industry that didn't even exist until 20 years after those laws were changed. So why are there more Indians than black American in Silicon Valley? Was there ever an apartheid of computers? No, of course not. But the Black Intellectuals didn't go in that direction - they all wanted to rewrite history as academic department heads, not through private enterprise. The Struggle is a farce. It's about getting police officers fired. It's about getting comedians to apologize. It's about getting 20 year olds into undergraduate programs. That ain't power. That's middle class meddling.

So The Struggle is all about getting people out of ghetto depravity into middle class mediocrity, which is the essential component of Christian Missionary work in deepest darkest Africa. Teach 'em some hymns. Not that it's an entirely bad idea, lord know some of those pound cake thieves could use a lesson in Christian ethics. But it doesn't take an intellectual to effect such a program. Just a big bleeding heart and gobs of patience, which could easily be substituted with condescension - your mileage may vary.

Now might be a good time to go back and watch Sanford and Son. A father raised his son. Lamont Sanford didn't turn out so bad.