I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!, page 14
all racial groups are already on the same cultural level.268
It must surely be a first in the annals of antiracism that a self-described antiracist opposes supplemental budget allocations for underperforming Black schools.
The notion of crime-ridden poor Black communities is no less a racist fiction:
The idea of the dangerous Black neighborhood is the most dangerous racist idea.
It has been purveyed not only by racist whites who adduce spurious crime statistics but also and especially by the racist Black community:
Rising levels of violent crime engulfed impoverished neighborhoods. Black residents bombarded their politicians and crime fighters with their racist fears of Black criminals as opposed to criminals. Neither the residents nor the politicians nor the crime fighters wholly saw the heroin and crack problem as a public-health crisis or the violent-crime problem in poor neighborhoods where Black people lived as a poverty problem. Black people seemed to be more worried about other Black people killing them in drug wars or robberies by the thousands each year than about the cancers, heart diseases, and respiratory diseases killing them by the hundreds of thousands each year. (emphasis in original)
Isn’t it a tad racist for Kendi, looking down from his lofty perch, to presume that Black residents had ignorantly fixated on the Black race of the perpetrator instead of on the crime itself; that Black residents were oblivious to or too stupid to notice the social roots of violent crime; that Black residents, by focusing on crime instead of health care, got their priorities all screwed up?269 He did a brief stint in his college years slumming in a poor Philadelphia neighborhood, which he has since parlayed to like affect/effect as Barack Obama’s “community organizer” shtick: “I felt alive when I moved into this Black neighborhood.” Now rolling in antiracist big bucks, it’s a sure bet he ain’t feeling alive there anymore. What’s more, his condescension recalls Obama’s public chastisement of Black people. “Barack been talking down to Black people,” Jesse Jackson, who was present on one such occasion, whispered to a friend. “I want to cut his nuts out.” Even as Kendi distances himself from Obama in his books, both tout a pseudo street cred so they can then patronize Black people. On the point of principle, surely it’s possible to isolate this or that deficit, even a syndrome, without impugning the whole of Black culture.
In yet another bizarre plot twist, Kendi disparages the belief that Black people have suffered psychic wounds from racism: it’s one more racist-assimilationist prejudice. Whereas “to be antiracist is to think nothing is behaviorally wrong” with Black people. In one of his signature verbal flourishes (or flops), he proclaims:
As long as the mind oppresses the oppressed by thinking their oppressive environment has retarded their behavior, the mind can never be antiracist.
If even revered Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison comes in for a drubbing, that’s because he said of the slaves’ degraded condition, “Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds.” That’s racist, as it casts doubt on the immaculate and immutable perfection of Black people. Further, only an “illogically racist mind” could imagine that slavery induced “vices” among Black people or “made Black people inferior.” Two hundred and fifty years of servitude just made them “different.” In another of his cringey passages, Kendi observes that “racist Americans” couldn’t conceive
that Black people had not been damaged by slavery: that Black people could dance into freedom without skipping a beat.
It would appear, then, that when the dust had settled after Juneteenth, the newly-freed slaves, having endured a lifetime of battery and brutalization, and now stripped of shelter and livelihood—they cavorted as if one big happy, huggable family, just like The Jeffersons and The Huxtables; as if poised to boogie down the Soul Train line.270 Douglass, who, it might be thought, knew a thing or two about slavery, did not view matters as quite this rosy. Like Garrison, he shined a harsh light on the “mental and moral wrongs” inflicted by slavery, its “dehumanizing character,” its “obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family,” its “soul-crushing and death-dealing character,” its “ten thousand horrors…, striking hard upon the [slave’s] sensitive soul, [that] have bruised, and battered, and stung” him, its “deliberate and constant war upon human nature itself, [that] robs the slave of personality, cuts him off from the human family, and sinks him below even the brute”; the “broken spirit” of slaves, their lack of “any moral training, other than that which came by the slave driver’s lash,” their “enforced degradation” and “enforced ignorance of two hundred years.” The trauma wrought by slavery, Douglass reckoned, could not be “blotted out in a day or a year or even in a generation. The slave would yet remain in some sense a slave, long after the chains are taken from his limbs”; “the transition from degradation to respectability was indeed great, and to get from one to the other without carrying some marks of one’s former condition, is truly a difficult matter.” Enforced degradation, enforced ignorance, below even the brute: on the evidence, it would appear that Douglass was a yet more egregious racist than Garrison.271 And Du Bois, who adjudged American slavery “the ultimate degradation of man,”272 was more emphatic than even Douglass that the moral blight of slavery retarded the freedman’s progress (more on which presently).
It would profit at this juncture to take a step back so as to take stock of Kendi’s contentions. He purports that it’s racist to infer that slavery was not just brutal but that it also brutalized Black people, that the hurt and harm suffered by slaves was not just outward but also inward. But would any rational, let alone empathetic, person want to argue that the former inmate of a concentration camp or federal penitentiary, the victim of abusive parents or an abusive relationship, wouldn’t be psychologically seared and debilitated by such an experience? So how could it possibly be racist to assert that “two hundred years heavy with human bondage” will have induced deleterious habits of mind and body, and deposited on the souls of former slaves a baleful burden of psychic afflictions, the cultural transmission of which undercut the freedmen’s ability to compete in the new social order thrust upon them? The miracle would be were it otherwise, and it’s certainly no shame to acknowledge it. Indeed, why would one want to deny it: isn’t its “soul-crushing” stripes the blackest mark against slavery as well as a plausible causal factor behind this or that socioeconomic debit in the African-American ledger? “All too few people realize,” Martin Luther King rued, “how slavery and racial segregation have scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man.”273 Clearly, Kendi cannot be counted among those insightful few.
Noted Black psychologist Kenneth Clark fares even worse than Garrison. He is chastised for speculating that racism and poverty might account for the higher incidence of deviant behavior in Black communities. However many blows and batterings they might endure, however many kicks and pummelings they might suffer, Black psyches, ever resilient, ever resourceful, ever renascent, emerge, in Kendi’s telling, ever triumphant and pristine:
They invent and reinvent cultures and behaviors that may be different but never inferior to those of residents in richer neighborhoods.
If Malcolm X embarked on a life of petty crime, only a racist, it seems, would connect some of the dots back to his grade-school teacher’s admonition, “A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger.” Indeed, Kendi categorically declares that
This stereotype of the hopeless, defeated, unmotivated poor Black is without evidence.
It is true that “racist ideas … manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.” It’s just as surely true that, absent a massive infusion of material resources, it’s impossible to cut the Gordian knot of “institutionalized pathology” depicted in Clark’s Dark Ghetto. But, by denying racism’s psychic inflictions, doesn’t just a flea’s, or fool’s, hop separate Kendi from the diehard racist who purports that Black people conjure up the crippling psychological effects of racism as a crutch?274
A popular French saying declares, les extrêmes se touchent: extremes meet. Thus, the strange political bedfellows of Black nationalist Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan. Kendi is cast in the Garvey mold, but without his master’s saving graces. The case he mounts against assimilationism proves on closer inspection to be a grand—or better still, grandiose—apologia for racism. He so apotheosizes cultures in general as to render them beyond any reproach. He so elevates Black culture as to deny it has suffered from any deficits. He so ennobles Black people as to gainsay that racism causes them any psychic injury. If one were to plot on a Venn diagram the conceptions of Kendi the antiracist and the rabid racist who defended the “Southern way of life” and denied that happy-go-lucky “Sambo” suffered under slavery, the overlap of the two circles would almost certainly exceed the spaces distinguishing them. Here, finally, is Kendi waxing prophetic on the assimilationist disease wracking the American body-politic and the antiracist panacea for it:
The American body is the White body. The Black body strives to assimilate into the American body. The American body rejects the Black body. The Black body separates from the American body. The Black body is instructed to assimilate into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew. But there is a way to get free. To be antiracist is to emancipate oneself from the dueling consciousness. To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power.275
Did the publisher forget to translate this passage from Ebonics to English?
Was W. E. B. Du Bois A Racist?
W. E. B. Du Bois wasn’t a brilliant Black intellectual. He was a brilliant intellectual, without racial caveat. It humbles as it overwhelms, his range and depth of learnedness, his capacity for inductive generalization born of both his broad knowledge as well as his attentiveness to detail as the sine qua non of true knowledge. He exemplified Thomas Edison’s ethic, “Genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.” Du Bois recalled in his memoirs that one girl in his grade school added up columns of figures faster than him. Otherwise, he makes no mention of a worthy rival in his many years of schooling through his graduate studies, almost certainly because there wasn’t any. (His doctoral dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade was the inaugural volume of the Harvard Historical Studies series.) His biographer marvels at the some ten hours Du Bois put in each day at his desk in concentrated mental toil.276 Come hell or high water, he turned in punctually at 10:00 p.m., but not before immersing himself in quality literature at day’s end. (If he was also a stand-alone stylist, it traced back to this literary regimen.) He studied at a time when to speak of “training” signified something of substance. He first attended Harvard, which, although the preeminent university in the U.S., was something of a backwater internationally. But then he was off to matriculate at the great University of Berlin, where he was no longer shadowed and weighed down by the incubus of racism. (He would remember a lecture at which the redoubtable Heinrich von Treitschke blurted out, “Die Mulatten sind niedrig! Sie fühlen sich niedrig”—“Mulattoes are inferior; they feel themselves inferior!”—but generously chalked it up as a benign idiosyncrasy.)277 Du Bois memorialized Europe as the place where he was first able to “look at the world as a man…, unveiled by the accident of color.”278 But after returning home, he suffered one wretched professional slight after another and, despite his proven track record of research and publication, would be left hanging—the shamefulness of this still galls the reader—as he strained for grants to subsidize his scholarly projects, as ambitious as they were fastidious. Even as he managed to earn their grudging acknowledgment, Du Bois demurred at socializing with his white colleagues. He couldn’t but intuit the condescension, be it conscious or unconscious, that lurked behind their encomia. If he could come off as arrogant and aloof,279 it was, as Du Bois retrospectively parsed it,280 a defense mechanism to protect his self-regard against patronizing white patrons, who couldn’t quite reconcile that he, in the first and the final analysis a Black man, held himself their equal, really was their equal, and wouldn’t brook their skepticism, however veiled, of his cerebral parity (if not superiority).281 It might seem callous to say, and Du Bois would probably recoil at it, but it was perhaps his great good fortune not to be crowned with professional recognition.282 The racist barriers thrown up against him simultaneously shielded Du Bois from the dual allurements of fame and fortune that, in the course of their ascent to stardom, would later prove fatal to many a Black academic. Not too long ago, Harvard assembled a “dream team” of African-American scholars, some of whom possessed formidable talent. But en masse and all told, they produced less of enduring value than Du Bois did in any one year at financially strapped Atlanta University (an H.B.C.U.). The moral is, it can be a blessing in the long run not to be discovered. It’s also true to say, however, that Du Bois probably wouldn’t have succumbed to earthly blandishments as he embarked on his life’s mission. From an early age he set as his raison d’être to eradicate the color line, not, however, by prestidigitation, demagogy or pyrotechnic (even were that possible), but, on the contrary, by clinging fast to Truth, as the sure method and guarantor for resolving “the problem of the twentieth century,” and also, perhaps more so, as the only modus operandi worthy of a scholar beholden to the life of the mind: “The thinker must think for truth, not for fame.”283 What stands in relief in Du Bois, as both scholar and personality, is his utter fearlessness and inner calm in the face of Truth. It always helps, never hinders; he is ever patient with it, never fazed by it; if an egregious practice be discovered among Black people, it can be rationally accounted for, without diminishing Black humanity. Consider, by way of illustration, his treatment of corruption during Reconstruction. It was a staple of academic and popular literature when Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction (1935) that the postbellum governments in the South, presided over by Northern “carpetbaggers” and newly freed slaves, were riddled with graft and theft. Du Bois doesn’t deny that corruption was rife; on the contrary, he keeps returning to it in excruciating detail. However, he situates and analyzes this phenomenon from multiple angles: the gamut of U.S. politics at every level of government was infected by venality; widespread poverty in the South was fertile soil for corruption to pullulate; Southern whites deliberately abetted jobbery to discredit the Reconstruction experiment in radical democracy; Negro voters and officeholders committed to social uplift were outnumbered and outflanked by Republicans and Democrats alike mired in graft; corruption was as pervasive in Southern states where Negroes didn’t as where they did figure in public life; what was denoted corruption was often public debt accrued to subsidize public services (e.g., schools) hitherto unknown in the South; most of the large-scale peculation traced back to the “financial graft of Wall Street and its agents.”284 Still, Du Bois doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that the hands of the newly freed Negroes weren’t entirely clean. Instead, he coolly parses the phenomenon:
How far, then, was postbellum corruption due to Negroes? Only in so far as they represented ignorance and poverty and were thus peculiarly susceptible to petty bribery. No one contends that any considerable amount of money went to them. There were some reports of show and extravagance among them, but the great thieves were always white men; very few Negro leaders were specifically accused of theft, and again seldom in these cases were the accusations proven. Usually they were vague slurs resting on the assumption that all Negroes steal. Petty bribery of members of Reconstruction legislatures, white and black, was widespread; but Wallace [an historian] in Florida shows the desperate inner turmoil of the Negroes to counteract this within their own ranks; and outstanding cases of notably incorruptible Negro leaders … are well known. Certainly the mass of Negroes were unbribable when it came to demands for land and education and other things, the beneficent object of which they could thoroughly understand. But they were peculiarly susceptible to bribes when it was a matter of personal following of demagogues who catered to their likes and weaknesses. The mass of Negroes were accused of selling votes and influence for small sums and of thus being easily bought up by big thieves; but even in this, they were usually bought up by pretended friends and not bribed against their beliefs or by enemies. To the principles that they understood and knew, they were true; but there were many things connected with government and its technical details which they did not know; in other words, they were ignorant and poor, and the ignorant and poor can always be misled and bribed. What made the Negro poor and ignorant? Surely, it was slavery, and he tried with his vote to escape slavery.285
Even as he forthrightly notices incriminating facts, Du Bois does not affect a spurious balance to ingratiate himself with white interlocutors. On the contrary, he underscores that many Negro officeholders stood in the forefront denouncing corruption and, in any event, the Negro was but a bit player in this squalid business: “least of all was it the guilt of Negroes”; “without a doubt many of the colored leaders shared in this graft, but from the very nature of the case it was not a large share”; “the very last place where the blame for the situation could, by the wildest imagination, be placed, was upon the newly enfranchised black labor”; “to charge this debt to the Negroes is idiotic.”286 Likewise, Du Bois refuses to truck in morally obtuse pieties delivered from on high. Of one ballyhooed instance of corruption in South Carolina, he derisively observed:
