The Black Spasm

People have been telling me today about a guy named Tim Scott who has presented some confession in the context of all the deadly lynch mobs roaming America looking for black flesh to char under the color of authority. I hear that this Tim Scott guy is a senator of some sort. I'm not particularly interested in finding out. No wait. I wrote a line about him a couple years ago, and then I completely forgot about him until two minutes ago. Here's the thing about Tim Scott (which I have not read). Somebody feels they have the right to ask any black man, "Hey! What's the most racist & humiliating thing that ever happened to you?" and believe he is obligated to answer. So do I have the right to ask any woman, what is the rapiest thing that ever happened to you, just so I could make some statement about feminism today?

 

I know that well-meaning people expect that there is some multicultural formula that they can adjust to weigh out exactly what level of insult to the dignity and person of aggrieved minorities can be tolerated. I know for example that the kind of ethnic jokes that were popular when Richard Pryor recorded 'Bicentennial Nigger' would not be tolerated today. I doubt that there are few millenials that could stand the humor of the film Blazing Saddles. And I know that most people judge this to be some measure of social progress. I also know that people who enjoyed watching Archie Bunker in All In the Family would be horrified if George Jefferson were to tell jokes like Kevin Hart. I myself am horrified that Kevin Hart make more money than Sherman Hemsley ever did. Or Roscoe Lee Browne for that matter. 

When I grew up, I did hear the term 'black spasm' before in just such a pejorative context. It was an insult to call somebody a black spasm, but exactly what kind of insult I do not recall. So I am re-inventing the term to mean the response to that question. Tell me about your humiliation at the hands of white people. I know you must have experienced it. It's part of the black experience. I cannot tell, nor do I care to estimate the extent to which any black individual finds fault with the question, or might be negatively affected by the presumption. But I cannot see how it's not essentially prying. Why wouldn't anyone shiver at the cheek of the question? 

People have been commenting that we have returned to 1968 in America. I dig the metaphor. My particular take on it is that we are treating today's cops like yesterday's Vietnam vets. People have decided the lenses through which they want to perceive the lives of others and we have come to a moment in which black Americans are celebrated for sharing their humiliations. That's a political and social agenda that I despise, and have my entire life.

Ellis Cose wrote about this problem very persuasively in his 1994 book 'The Rage of a Privileged Class'. So this is the power of the politicization of black life which is the ability for the moral one-upmanship of 'social justice' to make anyone they please a martyr for their cause, whether or not the individual actually suffered. In short, I don't decide how much racism affects my life, you do. I deal with this problem on a periodic basis, as I have the occasion to comment on race in America with the authority vested in me as an award winning black blogger. I accept the fact that I have a racial identity whose shape and meaning lies beyond my control. Yet I do determine what I will and will not respond to. 

We saw this at the beginning of the Obama Administration. More beer summits anyone?

• Six Pounds of Racism
• What's Your Excuse?
• Life and Death of the Boohab - An Anti-Racist Activist's Retrospective