my past, present, and future

Books Read in 2016: April

Ayi Kwei Armah and "The Work"

Books Read in 2016: March

By the second half of the nineteenth century, two alternative black political cultures had arisen, each nurtured by a particular Black experience. Akin to the social divergences that appeared throughout slave societies in the New World, communities of free Blacks gravitated toward the privileged social and political identities jealously reserved for non-Blacks.  At the same time, on the plantations and in slave quarters, slaves tended to form a historical identity that presumed a higher moral standard than that which seemed to bind their masters.   Among the two formations in the United States, the better publicized was the assimilationist Black political culture that appropriated the values and objectives of the dominant American Creed. Especially among the urban free Blacks of the colonial and antebellum periods, a liberal, bourgeois consciousness was nourished, packed with capitalist ambitions and individualist intuitions.  A constant before and after the Civil War and into the new century, this consciousness manifested itself in a tendency toward an American optimism about integration/assimilation. When assimilation seem ill-conceived, the quiescent Black middle stratum of wage labors and professionals hunkered down, and a minority and renegade species of Black nationalist desires was enjoined. But within this galaxy of liberalism, regardless of variant, a special affection for republican values predominated, grounded on a presumption that leadership was reserved for an elite defined by nature and excellence. It was, to other Americans, the more easily understood of the two political cultures, because it flowed from the political and social intercourse between this free Black “elite” and American society in general. Moreover, since bourgeois Black culture mirrored dominant political beliefs, it had the advantage of an economy of expression. Taking American material values and national ambitions for granted, liberal Black political culture could resonate with the ongoing public articulation of the American majority. Given this license, it was possible to frequently create the illusion and self-serving conceit that such values and interest represented Blacks en masse.   To the contrary, the Black mass movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries proved both the existence and vitality of an alternative Black political culture, emergent from the brutal rural regimes of slavery, and later peonage. Inventive rather than imitative, communitarian rather than individualistic, democratic rather than republican, Afro-Christian rather than secular and materialist, the social values of these largely agrarian people generated a political culture that distinguished between the inferior world of the political and transcendent universe of moral goods.  Separatism was the principal impulse of this culture and over the next century or more this separatism would assume several forms already familiar: marronage, emigration, migration, domestic and external colonization. Although it foreclosed the possibility of integration or assimilation, separatism in its most sanguine manifestations accommodated the possibility of social coexistence, avoiding the moral squalor of Black racism. But in times of acute oppression, the impulse could assume the forms of xenophobia, including the most virulent forms of race-hatred rising from both real and imagined experiences.”

Various Thoughts on Modernity and Race

Reflections on Malcolm's 90th

Some of us also have great insights about how to end the present impasse and move into an intelligent future. But beyond that, we are unable to organize institutional venues and activities. Why not? Possibly the most obvious reason is that follow-through activities demand serious commitments of time and energy, and we are individually, already fully committed to institutional frameworks that push us far from our ideas and ideals. We are committed to these alienating, sometimes spiritually stressful holding situations because they give us the wherewithal to survive more or less comfortably, short term, in the world as it happens to be now, that is to say, the world the slavers and the colonialists made, a world we would like to change. There is humor in our situation. We know what we would like to do if we had free time and energy, but because our time and energies are taken doing what we would like to not have to do, we have no time to do what we would like to do.

Lecture Notes: Jacob Carruthers, African Deep Thought, and Revolutionary Theory