How to Be Black (17 page)

The Future of Blackness

T
his book has been my chance to explore a theme that is essentially personal, necessarily political, and often hilarious: how to be black. Based on what I've learned through the process of putting this book together, I'm going to put forth a plan for the future of blackness in America. This plan is mostly prescriptive in that it's full of ideas that I and those I interviewed want for Black America, but it's also descriptive because it's based on things that are already under way.

The Grand Unified Theory of Blackness consists of three major components.

1. New Black History: teaching a more complete and honest history of black people and, thus, America in far more interesting ways

2. Distributed Struggle: spreading the burden of fighting oppression more broadly across society

3. The Center for Experimental Blackness: opening up the doors of blackness by passionately embracing the eclectic, the nonracial, and whatever else suits your fancy

1. New Black History

Say it loud! I'm black and I'm proud!

Let's face it, given most of what is commonly taught as black history and how it's communicated, the subject can be depressing. The quick viewfinder perspective is: snatched from Africa, dragged across the sea in the least accommodating of accommodations, delivered into slavery, stripped of language and religion, freed (reluctantly), terrorized for generations and, generally speaking, treated like crap. My people, this is not an uplifting story. It's a downer.

Derrick spoke to some of the psychological harm that can come from internalizing this image of yourself as a loser, saying, “I think that black [Americans] need to love ourselves more. There's a lot to love, and part of the problem we have is that our history is not adequately taught.” He continued:

If you look in modern-day history, and the modern world—the West, New World, Africa, the Old Worlds, whatever—and you remove the historical context, it's easy to believe that you're less than. African-Americans make less money; they live shorter life-spans; they have higher health risks; they have lower general economic outcomes and lower expectations. You would think, “Oh, well maybe they are less than, right?”

He described a girl in Ghana who said to him, “You've got to admit that white people are better than us . . . I mean look at them. They have everything,” as well as a group of black Americans who frustratingly asked why more slaves didn't fight back and escape. Both cases represent people who don't know the full story, the history of the compound effects of advantage and white privilege over time as well as the history of never learning the stories of your people who fought and succeeded in breaking out of their circumstances.

But Derrick wasn't the only person to describe this tragedy of an exclusively negative understanding of black history. Elon spoke of it in the context of watching the History Channel during February, and Jacquetta complained that anytime she was told about black history, it was generally along the lines of “Things suck for us!” Accepting such a negative spin on your own history necessarily affects your view of your own self-worth, your potential, and your place in this world, not to mention the view others have of you.

At the same time, I believe we need to make room in these lessons to acknowledge the pain of our upbringing in House America. There are long-term psychological effects of long-term abuse, and the constant dehumanization and attacks on families won't be erased just by telling positive history tales. Those tales need to include the dark side and maybe an American Therapy Program, not just for black people as the victims of abuse but for the entire nation.

The New Black History Course aims to address these massive gaps, and it isn't simply some repackaged Afrocentric curriculum that says, “Black people were kings and queens back in the day, and The White Man is terrible!” Instead, it's just an honest and more complete version of events.

But at the heart of this new education plan is the story of the critical place black people occupy in American history.

America. Fuck yeah.

The United States is a pretty special place, in a good way. Growing up with knowledge of this country's significant imperfections and the cost black people have paid for those errors, I always looked askance at the notion of strong U.S. patriotism. I wasn't prepared to wrap myself in the Stars and Stripes and sing loudly of the land of the free and the home of the brave. I didn't hate America, but let's just say I was skeptical of its awesomeness. I often felt as Frederick Douglass did when he said in his 1852 Fourth of July speech, “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary!”

Of course, there's a difference between his perspective on America and my own. He was an actual former slave. I'm the great-grandson of one. Yet as I look at my own story and that of my family, even as I write this book, I recognize that this is an impressive and bold country whose ideas of what it means to be a country are still, over 230 years after its founding, revolutionary.

The missing link for many inside and outside of Black America has been to fully understand the role black people have played in helping make those beautiful ideas more tangible and more real.

Our early existence in America exposed the nation's shortcomings from the start, and thanks to our struggle, America has become more of what she has the potential to be. As Derrick put it, black people in America “have literally been the physical embodiment, the manifestation of the ideals that the Founding Fathers said they believed in, thought they believed in. But they didn't exist until us. That's something to be proud of.”

True black pride is also American pride, and black people truly are the most American of people in this country. We have nowhere else to go! So as much as we might feel some distance between us and the U.S., and as much as others may try to push us away and claim directly or indirectly that we're not “real Americans,” that line of thinking is patently false and is a disservice to everyone.

This country is our home, and we helped build it both physically and morally. The struggle of black people in America, therefore, is the struggle of America itself to, as damali put it, “get behind its own dream.”

So that's a sampling of what the New Black History Course might consist of: a broader story of the Diaspora with a special focus on the Americanness of black people in America. In addition to what we pass on to each generation, it's also important to change how we teach these lessons. Looking toward other ethnic groups in America may provide a partial model.

Jacquetta elaborates:

[My husband and I] have a lot of friends who are Chinese, Jewish, whatever. On Saturday morning, they get to go up to their ethnicity school and learn about
them
. We don't have that. They make it fun. They make it exciting. There are games with Hebrew. There are games with Chinese, et cetera.

When I was growing up, people were always like, “You've got to be black. You've got to be black.” But they made black sound like it sucked. It was always about getting into trouble or fighting or being oppressed. It was never, “We're going to get together and be black, have some awesome food and tell stories . . .” They never put a face on black that was like, “Yeah! Fun!”

What do we do? I don't know. We complain about it. But why not have a Saturday school program where you can go and learn about us? It doesn't have to be just African-Americans, okay? Anyone can go. But put a nice face on it.

Then, when you turn a certain age, you get to have a ceremony or something, and then you're black! And then no one else could ever take that away from you, no matter what you do. No matter if you go and work for Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Doesn't matter.

I love the concept of a Certificate of Blackness that you'd get upon completing the special Saturday school, but the larger point of making the story of black history more attractive is a point well taken. Once we've got that down, we can free ourselves even further.

2. Distributed Struggle

What do we do about today's struggle against racism? Do we need a “national conversation on race,” as many mainstream media figures tend to think? No, according to Elon:

I'm not interested in having a national conversation on race. I don't believe a racial conversation can actually happen and be meaningful. I believe that every time this stuff happens you're either preaching to the choir or you're talking to people who don't understand or don't care. The only thing you can do is put out information, and put out as much information as possible. And when people hear the information, they will go back to their own world, and they'll think about it, and they'll figure it out, and that's how it will grow.

That's what the Republicans are doing. They're not having a “national conversation” around conservative ideals. They just keep saying shit, and then eventually people come along with it. The same [is true] with the Tea Party. They just keep talking, and talking, and putting it out there, and then people will go back home and they'll think about it themselves. And then they'll either join your cause or go completely against you, and want you in the street choked, like me. But that's what's going to happen.

So maybe we don't get tens of millions of people to sit around the national table and discuss race. We just start putting our ideas out there, yet how do we actually attack contemporary problems? We do what some of the most successful American businesses do. We outsource and collaborate!

I'm not suggesting we directly ship anti-racist warrior jobs to Indonesia to take advantage of less expensive labor, but the gist of the plan is to spread the costs of Black Struggle Operations across a larger base.

Outsourced struggle?

Certainly part of being black in America is acknowledging “the struggle,” but there's got to be more to it than that. Blackness has got to be more than suffering and fighting racism. In 2007 the NAACP held a symbolic funeral for the word “nigger.” I don't think this has led to any reduced usage of the word, but the idea inspired me. Since then, I've wanted to hold an actually meaningful ceremony making the destruction of racism the official responsibility of white people. It would be like passing off the Olympic torch. You could literally have a black person holding a flaming baton whose dancing flames spell
RACISM
, and he or she would hand it to a white person, and then it would be their problem. We could stream it on the Internet!

damali firmly agrees with the core of this proposal.

There's only so much we can say to white people anymore about this, because we've been saying the same things to white people for generations, decades upon decades. It is now really up to them. You're going to learn it or not. You're going to take care of it or not.

I've done workshops where I have literally taken all the people of color out and left the white people and said, “Your job is to end racism, and I'll be back in twenty minutes. You set it up. Take it down.”

I like it: shock doctrine for ending racism.

Do you know what would happen to black people if we could hand over responsibility for ending racism to white people? Our high blood pressure would subside. We would live longer. We would smile more! Kamau could do a different one-man show! And for white people, it's a good deal, too. Fighting racism builds character, and makes you a better person.

Let's do this, America!

Collaborative struggle

The program of Distributed Struggle doesn't end with handing the racism baton to White America. Kamau introduced a concept I wish I could take credit for.

Black people get so caught up in the black struggle that we forget to be caught up in other people's struggles. And we forget to realize that we should be just as concerned about their struggles as our struggle. And it's really sort of frustrating me.

Any black person who's not with the people in Arizona, on the side of the immigrants, you're an asshole. Not that it's the same thing, but these are all struggles of oppressed people. Any black person who's like, “Gay marriage???” Let me just sit you down and talk to you for half an hour. I get you think gay is creepy. But other than that, there's no way you should be [opposed].

I've recently come to the conclusion: I think that all people who are fighting for oppressed people should only be allowed to work for the group that's one over from them. Black people should only be allowed to work for the Mexican immigrants' struggle in America. Mexican immigrants should only be allowed to work for gay marriage. Gay marriage should only be allowed to work for black people. I feel like if we all just stepped one group over, I think we would get things done a lot quicker.

You can't end racism and make sexism worse. You can't end racism and make homophobia worse. You have to put it all forward . . . So a big part of my how-to-be-black is actually trying to be inclusive of all the struggles. Slow clap.

Yes, he actually said “slow clap” at the end of his statement. I had to leave it in!

The first two components of the Comprehensive Plan for New Blackness are about clearing items off the runway. A better understanding of our history and a shared sense of responsibility for “The Struggle” should help lighten the burden we often feel as black people in America.

In terms of history, it's worth considering that while black Americans share history with the rest of the Diaspora, we aren't bound by it in the same way as other groups are by their culture's expectations. We are uniquely American, and America is young. Jacquetta compared this to older cultures that might feel threatened by a new thing.

It's the Wild, Wild West of African-Americana out there. You don't have to stick to five thousand years of a traditional culture.