Monday, January 15, 2018

How do we honor the heritage of a segment of our culture without turning it into a weapon of polarization

It's MLK Day, and there's no shortage of reflections on how Dr. King's vision stacks up against where 2018 post-America is as a nation. I don't know that that's the right way to go about thinking about him 50 years after his passing.
King was, as we all are, a fallible human being, but he was also exceptional, as most of us aren't. The emphasis is rightly on the virtue of his vision. He was the kind of great orator whose greatness had to come from something more fundamental than just his speaking chops. He was on fire at a podium because he was driven by a clear understanding of the right and the wrong present in his experience of American life. He probably would not have been remembered for a thunderous deliverance if his subject matter had not so completely consumed him. His sincerity couldn't be doubted.
But it bears pointing out at the outset of any reflection on his legacy that he was writing at a time of real, pervasive, institutional bigotry and racism. The set of societal conditions he addressed no longer characterize life in this country.
Sorry if that outrages anyone, but the burden to process reality is on you.
We know that's so because when it is pointed out to today's race-hustlers that nowhere in America does one find separate drinking fountains, denial of service in dining and lodging facilities, or systemic white-on-black police brutality, they have to retreat to claims of ill-defined "subtle forms." Ta-Nehisi Coates has to resort to claims that opposition to Obama's climate and health-care policies had a strong racial element, and reserves the right to assert as much with no substantiation.
An interesting cultural question, it seems to me, is the degree to which there's a black American culture within the broader general American culture. It's obviously real to some extent. There are black churches in which the music and preaching style are distinct and recognizable. There is, of course, still a form of popular music we call R&B which, as grotesquely morphed as it is, is traceable back to the jump blues and doo-wop of the middle of the twentieth century, and big-band, stride-piano, Delta blues and ragtime antecedents from decades earlier. At ethnic-food festivals, there is often an African-American booth, serving barbecued ribs, sweet potato pie and stewed greens. There's a vibe within the sports world that is identifiably black, as we know from the ugly and ridiculous form it took in the take-a-knee phenomenon that caused NFL ticket sales to decline by a third this season.
The question that follows from that one is indeed pressing: How to acknowledge and properly honor that cultural distinctiveness without attaching a victim mentality to it? Obviously, when families that are entirely black, as is still generally the case, even as interracial marriage has proliferated, and enjoyed widespread acceptance, get together for pitch-ins, you're going to see the kinds of food mentioned above. These are the recipes handed down from grandmothers and their grandmothers, confirming a heritage that bonds generations, a healthy bulwark against the dysfunction that statistics about black family formation so grimly remind us.
Speaking of which, consider that Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family, and the 25 percent-out-of-wedlock birth at the time of his writing, came out in 1965, so that we can see that other currents were impacting black life in America along with the bigotry and racism that Dr. King was struggling so mightily against at the time.
Or consider the February 1963 publication date of Norman Podhoretz's discomforting Commentary essay, "My Negro Problem - And Ours." 1963, the year that would see the "I Have a Dream" speech delivered to hundreds of thousands on the National Mall, as well as the Birmingham church bombing. Podhoretz was writing about his own childhood, in the 1930s, in a section of Brooklyn mainly populated by Jews of Eastern European descent, Italians, and blacks, and how racial intimidation was mainly directed at the Jews by the blacks.
Also consider that by 1963, Berry Gordy Jr.'s Motown empire was well into its ascendancy, Miles Davis was playing Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, Bill Cosby's first comedy album for Warner Brothers was selling like hotcakes, and Sidney Poitier was within a year of getting an Oscar.
So America was learning how to celebrate the black component to its overall culture.
The world we inhabit over a half-century later is one characterized by a sad irony. There is a thriving black middle class, in which one finds stable families and achievement in all the same fields any other Americans are contributing to. And then there is the chaos of high murder rates, fatherless children, drugs, and materialism one finds in cities in palpable decline - as well as a grievance industry that has convinced those trapped in it that their problems are not of their making. Furthermore, blacks striving to join the stable middle class, who use proper diction in their speech, who excel at science courses, who are maneuvering the minefield of horrible schools and gang intimidation are mocked for somehow not being "true to their race."
This is the question we face on yet another MLK Day: how to honor the rich heritage of the black component of our culture without bringing along a notion of victimhood that does not reflect what is possible for any American who happens to be black and wants to mainly live and be regarded as such.
Can we give up the identity politics and retain the identity?







16 comments:

  1. Have you heard the legend of John Lennon refusing to play Jacksonville unless the stadium was integrated? Google it. Now O suppose you shall want to task me with a 500 word eaaay here on late in the day.

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  2. No, but I don't understand why it's particularly relevant. It's a noble act from the 1960s. And?

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. Speaking of higher education, I heard on black radio today that we have more prisons in America than colleges and more prisoners than college students. Wonder what you think they think that means.

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  5. Reread the question. And, oh, Lennon refusing to play before a segregated audience in Jacksonville back in 64 just doesn't seem all that long ago, that's all.

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  6. Reread it and my answer is the same. If we have that more convicted criminals than college students, it's too many.

    1964 was over a half-century ago.

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  7. Your answer is not their answer. So you
    did not answer. I don't think you care though. I know, it's not in the vocabulary of your mode of governance.

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  8. So, again, what do you think they think about their incarceration rates here in our great land, land of the Pilgrim's pride? The

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  9. Not sure I want to conjecture about why others point up facts without some kind of indication from them about why. I do know that there are a lot of race-hustlers who point up the incarceration rate for Americans who happen to be black in order to try to convince the public that there is still systemic bigotry in America. But I think it would be unfair of me to ascribe that motive to the radio commentators you heard.

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  10. Well then, do you conjecture that what truth may be found in the latest CPB report that a full one third of Americans are unable to buy food, shelter and health care for themselves in America might be a problem or a concern for the Americans so-affected?

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  11. No, that sounds ridiculous on the face of it. And it's also unrelated to the subject at hand.

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  12. I'm pretty sure you meant to put a "F" in "CPB" because I'm pretty sure you're referring to the report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was the brainchild of the hard-left charlatan Elizabeth Warren, who may hate human freedom more than anyone else in post-America.

    What the report actually says is that a whole lot of post-Americans are so saddled with debt and have save so little that they are indeed precariously close to financial disaster. But at present nothing like a third of post-Americans are sleeping on grates and eating once a day at soup kitchens.

    Now, unless you can tie that in to the subject of this post more clearly, I'm done discussing it.

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  13. Anyhow, my answer to the question posed as the topic for this thread as with almost everything else involving our fellow man is listen instead of communicating.

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  14. Whatever that means. I just know that the CHPB is dog vomit, as is the notion that a third of Americans are shivering in cardboard boxes.

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