I have been wrestling with these issues for a number of years and believe these questions are vital not just to the future of peoples of Africa descent in the US but to the society as a whole. As well this topic may seem a little early, however as dailykos is so wonderfully congested, I find it necessary to get a leap on diaries relevant to Afri-US History Month by posting a week early.
Note: My use of the term Afri-US denotes Black people in the US who are linked to the society through ties of history, culture and identification with those African based cultures grounded in the experience of slavery in the US. African American denotes, for me, the larger community of peoples of African descent in the Western hemisphere.
In the December issue of Esquire John Ridley’s essay The Manifesto forAscendancy for the Modern American Nigger though provocative of title and expression it fails in originality for its basic theme. Ridley argues that contemporary perceptions of Afri-US achievement are often overshadowed by the behaviour of "niggers" (i.e. Afri-US citizens that fall into criminal/destructive or anti-assimilationist behaviour). His most dramatic example are the 11 days in March and April of 2001 when two Afri-USs, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of State, Colin Powell, where the "Most powerful people in the world," as they led the diplomatic efforts to secure a US EP-3E signals reconnaissance plane and crew that had crash landed in People’s Republic of China territory. At the moment of the successful completion of the diplomatic mission, police officers in Cincinnati, OH shot an unarmed Afri-US male and the ensuing reaction, an uprising worthy of 1960s urban discontent, "overshadowed" the accomplishment of Rice and Powell. States Ridley
When the images of the homecoming were played and played and played from the morning empty-chat shows through the nightly news to Larry King and his first exclusive primetime interview (with call-ins!) of the crew, all of America would see freedom was won by a black man, a black woman.
They would have seen all that.
Except.
Niggers fucked it up.
Ridley goes onto argue that fundamentally the Afri-US middle class and elite sector must necessarily, for the good of themselves (and no doubt the race), desert the those Afrixcan Americans who are not taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the legislation and activism of the Civil Rights Movement.
This is not a new argument. Since the abolition of slavery and the systematic rise of an Afri-US professional and intellectual class, spokesmen and women have long argued the failure of the Afri-US working/poor and criminal classes to properly acculturate themselves into the US order. Argued has been the limitations that such failures place on their social and political movement, the image such failure presents to White America of Afri-US potential and behaviour and more relevant to this diary, the obsessive fear that the Afri-US elite has of being confused with (Mr. Ridley’s) niggers.
As far back as the late 19th century, W.E.B. DuBois in his groundbreaking sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro argued that "under class" Negro criminality and dubious morality made it difficult for upstanding Negroes to receive their just dues from White institutions. Because a negro was a negro was a negro for most white citizens, "the better class of negroes" were unfairly denied their seat at the table of America civilization. States Dubois
3,000 Negroes in the city . . . form the aristocracy of the Negro population in education, wealth and general social efficiency . . . it is right and proper to judge a people by its best classes rather than by its worst classes or middle ranks. The highest class of any group represents its possibilities rather than its exceptions, as is so often assumed in regard to the Negro. The colored people are seldom judged by their best classes, and often the very existence of classes among them is ignored. This is partly due in the North to the anomalous position of those who compose this class: they are not the leaders or the ideal makers of their own group in thought, work or morals.
Here lies the heart of our discussion the Afri-US elite has long wrung its hands over, its failure to establish civilizing discipline over the unruly masses and create a unified field of Black behaviour. Fast forward over a century later and we have Bill Cosby before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples’ Celebration for the 50th Anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Cosby’s speech (the infamous "Poundcake Speech:" http://www.americanrhetoric.com/...) was a harsh depiction of the lives, behaviours and choices of the Afri-US working classes. The critique of working class Afri-US life was cast as a lack of will and moral turpitude as, " the lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal." No doubt the "deal" Cosby references is the hard fought but victory over the forces of segregation and discrimination waged by the noble Black elite. What 99.9% of the commentaries failed to ask, except for Michael Eric Dyson in his Is Bill Cosby Right or has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? was a) what accountability has there been on the part of Black middle class leadership, b) what has been the nature of that "leadership" and c) what does it mean to "hold up your end of the deal?"
The failures of Afri-US leadership lay in a lack of clarity as to the direction Black life should take, resulting from an uncritical relationship to the basic premises of US/Bourgeois society. Cosby, for example argues the failure of Blacks in the educational system without questioning the implicit goals of an under-funded system that over the past 30 years has been more interested in creating a reserve army of labor rather than engaged, creative and proactive citizens. An acculturated elite's adhesion to colonial ideology is nothing new, the Black elites' failure is the refusal to recognize the necessity of divergent expressions of freedom and social progress for Afri-US peoples that derive from a divergent historic and contemporary relationship to dominant institutions of US society. To insist that Afri-US peoples are responsible for an anti-intellectualism separate from that of the larger society (ex. John McWhorter’s Losing the Race: Self Sabotage in Black America) or are guilty of a conspicuous consumption that exists in a bubble beyond corporate influence and encouragement is hypocrisy at the highest level. What exactly should be done? Should the working masses of Afri-US people be held to a higher standard of behaviour from the rest of US society? If so than we must be recognized as being a unique historical body therefore unique historical remedies must be put in place to solve these unique problems. For example, if urban education is a concern of Dr. Cosby’s (Ed.D.) than maybe he and other Afri-US millionaires and billionaires should create a system of charter schools in urban centers across the country aimed not at the "Talented Tenth" but students most at risk? On the other hand if there is nothing necessarily unique about Afri-US life (the Conservative "We are simply Americans like you" argument) than why pay special attention to working class Afri-US life and its problems instead of being critical of the larger prostitution of US working class life and the state and federal policies that actively diminish the possibilties of life--Black,White, Brown, etc? The Afri-US elite’s failure to even address this question or look beyond its own investment in a system that consciously underdevelops a substantial section of the "race" has been the source of the diminishment of credible formal Black political leadership, culture and discourse and its attendant failure to meet the needs of the people it claims to represent.