All efforts to determine who is Black and just how Black they are immediately thrust us into an interminable crisis involving criteria. What or whose standard should we use? Should people be considered Black merely because they claim to be Black, or must the claim to be Black be accompanied by other specific characteristics, commitments, and connections?
Of course, some people provide swift and savvy answers. But the more we are persuaded by their arguments, the more likely it is that those same arguments will lead us to preclude ourselves or a significant number of others we thought were Black.
Thus, Howard Winant wrote, "Race is not only real, but also illusory. Not only is it common sense, it is common nonsense. Not only does it establish our identity; it also denies us our identity."
It is also disturbing how the very notion of "being Black" often seems to uphold the very form of racist thinking it is said to oppose.
Racism is the idea that a person's pigmentation somehow determines their proclivities, potential, priorities, and pursuits. It is also the fallacious notion that one can judge who's better than who merely by the color of their skin, and when this attitude is acted on, it is leads to sinister and savage efforts to elevate one so-called race above all others.
Of course, this means that racist thinking is not only reflected in overt degradation of others. This misguided mindset is also and always mirrored in the expectation that people should believe and behave certain ways simply because they are said to possess certain biological traits.
For example, racist logic is reflected in the very popular assumption that there is a generic and global "Black community" upon which "racial" identity has conferred limited likes and dislikes or "a set of unproblematic group interests."
Such is "a deceptive cloak of racial consensus," as philosopher and social critic Cornel West dubbed it in his must-read essay titled "The Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning."
This "racial reasoning" should be renounced and resisted not only because it is deceptive, but because it inexorably (mis)leads people to perspectives and practices that force them into arbitrarily fixed and fettered modes of being and expression rather than liberate them to pursue all positive possibilities.
iAMrj * richard jones
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Relevant excerpt from "Black Leadership and the Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning" by Cornel West:
"In short, blackness is a political and ethical construct. Appeals to black authenticity ignore this fact; such appeals hide and conceal the political and ethical dimension of blackness. This is why claims to racial authenticity trump political and ethical argument – and why racial reasoning discourages moral reasoning. Every claim to racial authenticity presupposes elaborate conceptions of political and ethical relations of interests, individuals, and communities. Racial reasoning conceals these presuppositions behind a deceptive cloak of racial consensus – yet racial reasoning is seductive because it invokes an undeniable history of racial abuse and racial struggle."
"The undermining and dismantling of the framework of racial reasoning – especially the basic notions of black authenticity, the closed-ranks mentality, and black cultural conservatism – leads toward a new framework for black thought and practice. This new framework should be a prophetic one of moral reasoning with its fundamental ideas of a mature black identity, coalition strategy, and black cultural democracy. Instead of cathartic appeals to black authenticity, a prophetic viewpoint bases mature black self–love and self–respect on the moral quality of black responses to undeniable racist degradation in the American past and present. These responses assume neither a black essence that all black people share nor one black perspective to which all black people should adhere. Rather, a prophetic framework encourages moral assessment of the variety of perspectives held by black people and selects those views based on black dignity and decency that eschew putting any group of people or culture on a pedestal or in the gutter."
Entire essay online @ http://www.terry.uga.edu/~dawndba/4500CornellWest.html
Relevant excerpts from bell hook's essay titled "Postmodern Blackness":
"[10] ...We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency."
"[11] Employing a critique of essentialism allows African-Americans to acknowledge the way in which class mobility has altered collective black experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our lives. Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one- dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of the 'primitive' and promoted the notion of an 'authentic' experience, seeing as 'natural' those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or stereotype. Abandoning essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to racism. Contemporary African- American resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes reinscribing notions of 'authentic' black identity. This critique should not be made synonymous with the dismissal of the struggle of oppressed and exploited peoples to make ourselves subjects. Nor should it deny that in certain circumstances that experience affords us a privileged critical location from which to speak. This is not a reinscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege some voices by denying voice to others. Part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and identity that are oppositional and liberatory. The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many African-Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African- Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of 'the authority of experience.' There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black 'essence' and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle."
"[12] When black folks critique essentialism, we are empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black identity that are the lived conditions which make diverse cultural productions possible. When this diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as falling into two categories--nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white- identified. Coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for black experience, particularly as it changes our sense of identity, means that we must and can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding..."
Read this entire essay online @ http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_182 70.html
And, finally, a book review - "Let Us Be Done With Totalizing 'Black' Histories" by E. Nathaniel Gates - that also touches on these issues:
"Although frequently invoked, the idea of a generic 'black community,' upon which 'racial' identity confers a single, common sensibility — together with a set of unproblematic group interests — is one that will not bear sustained scrutiny. As Orlando Patterson and others have powerfully argued, such a conception relies upon a symbolically overdetermined and stigmatizing vocabulary that is far more inscriptive than descriptive. While it is indisputably a matter of historical record that, periodically, men and women of African descent have collectively endured (and to a meaningful extent, continue to endure) the consequences of social isolation and political persecution, as a result they did (and do) not constitute a bonded, organic entity that is constitutively different, or fundamentally distinguishable, from surrounding social and cultural formations, or from the formal institutions from which such formations spring."
Read the entire review in PDF format @ http://www.cardozo.yu.edu/cplpej/CAP104.pdf
Kwame Anthony Appiah on the idea of race:
"In a society like ours, in which most people take their race to be a significant aspect of their identity, it comes as a shock to many to learn that there is a fairly widespread consensus in the sciences of biology and anthropology that the word race, at least as it is used in most unscientific discussions, refers to nothing that science should recognize as real."
"But, of course, a discussion of some of the literary ramifications of the idea of race can proceed while accepting the essential unreality of races and the falsehood of most of what is believed about them. For, at least in this respect, races are like, for example, witches: However unreal witches are, belief in witches, like belief in races, has had - and in many communities continues to have - profound consequences for human social life."
SOURCE: Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Race: An Interpretation," Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African American Experience (1999).
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