A Martin Luther King Day look at Politics, Race, and the American Soul
I figure, in honer of Martin Luther King day, I ought to take a look at politics and race.
First, lets have some links to some of my mentors on the subject:
- Cornel West on C-Span’s Book Notes
- Nikki Giovanni on C-Span’s Book Notes
- Tavis Smiley on C-Span’s Book Notes
- Michael Eric Dyson on C-Span’s Book Notes
Also worth taking look at is Robert Caro, the pretty definitive biographer of Lyndon Johnson.
There’s a number of videos I’d like to show you, but C-Span’s not as great as it once was, as far as having old programs online.
Ok, with that, allow me to share my thoughts and feelings on race in America, and all this lovely stuff. It has been said that race in America is the canary in the coal mine. The idea here being that there are all sorts of toxins in our country, forces of darkness, lets call it the night side of America: The American Shadow, to go Jungian on you.
Listen, we all have a shadow side, all have a dark side. The shadow is essentially the Freudian unconscious. It is that part of our soul where the light don’t shine so much. We give a lot of attention to the development of a certain part of our potential, as a result the other parts stay in a more immature form, and thus act immaturely. Still in us, they exert and influence that goes largely unnoticed.
The notion of the canary in the cold mine is that race effects how we are effected by the shadow side of the American Soul, to put it a certain kind of way. It would seem that as a result of this, we see in the African American population a stronger ability to wrestle with our night side then we see in the culture at large.
If you don’t wrestle with your shadow you become a vehicle of that shadow in the world: If we, as American’s, fail to wrestle with our own darkness, then America becomes a force of darkness in the world. For this reason I look to race politics to help save our collective soul.
So how how do we wrestle with the shadow?
A nice little clip on the subject:
When we get into Howard Zinn vill, we are getting into a radical politics of a far left variety. This is a politics that is not terribly polite, and is not well received by main stream media, culture, and especially not politically speaking: This is controversial stuff. Controversial enough that my speaking of it might be provocative to some readers. So I must try to talk to those readers:
The subject of race, as we all know, can be a divisive one, as is also true for these radical politics. On this subject, there are various ways I can come at it, where I believe I might be able to speak to you in a way that transcends the subject’s divisive character:
One way is to talk about forces in our society in a way that, on a certain level, deemphasizes the roll an individual plays in the shaping of his or her own destiny, from how we might normally see it. For starters we live inside complex webs of interdependence, and we can see this on multiple levels. Economics is, among other things, a kind of study of economic interdependence. Ecology is a study of interdependency. What roll do the people in our lives play in shaping our lives? What roll does the society we live in play in shaping our lives? Our parents? Our culture? Media? Diet? Our social economic strata? Education?
In addition, though still part of the subject of interdependency, there is the way that our very decision making process is not as rational as often believed and often has to do with unconscious factors. These unconscious factors are a combination of biology and “programing” (both of which are products of interdependency.)
In psychoanalysis there is the subject of the channels thoughts have to travel before they can dawn on the conscious mind. These channels play a significant roll in shaping the form of the thoughts we think. These channels are shaped in an interplay between our wills, our biological impulses, and our societies value system; over the course of a life time but particularly so in early youth. (This having everything to do with the shadow I was talking about earlier) There is the story of how our life’s scripts are formed in early childhood. Nietzsche has a wonderful thing he says about free will: He says you’re will isn’t really free, you have many wills and whatever will takes the dominant roll you then identify with and call it “my will.”
How About another video? This time Alan Watts, which is to say a little eastern philosophy. Eastern philosophy tends to be a little more collectivist then western philosophy, and thus has dealt with these kinds of issues in a more depth then our wester philosophy:
Ok, now we are getting deep. Suddenly the subject of interdependence leads to God. Well lets pull out of this depth, to get back to our original aims of making a more radical politics, more palatable. I haven’t quite given this thread it’s full treatment, but we’ve probably gone far enough so that you’ve seen the iceberg’s tip.
Our next little thread, related to our earlier thread, has something to do with statistics. We can look at statistics through out history, and from these gleam some understanding of hidden orders. We can see that in year X there was Y number of killings by knives, and Z number of killings by guns. We can look at these statistics over time and see trends. We can ask questions about why and how: the numbers point to hidden orders. Conventionally we often take a view of ‘good and bad people,’ “you are in this situation because it’s your own damn fault!” We segregate people into the conceptual boxes of “good” and “bad.”
The trouble here is that conceptual boxes are a product of the mind, not of reality. The world is not full of things! The differentiation between things, that we make, is simply a matter of how we frame things. On a collective level, in particular, the framing up of reality is in large measure driven by power relationships. A function of state power is to divide groups up into criminals and non criminals.
At this point it might be good to share another, though this time shorter, Alan Watts Clip.
All this leads into very complicated waters. For now I merely want to suggest that one can appreciate that there are hidden systemic forces at work that order society, and that it might be possible to effect how society is ordered in such a way to create a more ideal situation.
I’ve gone on for a while now, there’s still more threads to explore, but I think these will have to wait for another time. For now lets travel back to the African American experience.
Is there, in the American Shadow, unconscious and systemic racism? It seems at this point a good time to turn to Bill Cosby:
What Bill Cosby is saying, no doubt, makes some sense. But there are a couple things that I would like to bring to your attention: #1 He is emphasizing personal responsibility aka the individual, and #2 his appreciation for hip hop culture is not very deep. For a deeper look at hip hop culture, allow me to recommend the links at the top of this entry from Poet Nikki Giovanni, and black intellectual Michael Eric Dyson.
In fact, lets take a moment to look at a bit of hip hop culture, one that illustrates it’s strength in wrestling with the American shadow. How about a little Public Enemy?:
Ok, now that we’ve had a taste for that, how about we go to two videos with Michael Eric Dyson commenting on Bill Cosby:
And our second video:
You will no doubt note that Michael Eric Dyson is talking about the systemic forces, and contextualizing Bill Cosby into that context.
Another thing that’s worth mentioning here is that there are generational divisions between the Civil Rights generation and the Hip Hop generation. These are probably well expressed in the Gap between what Cosby is saying and what Hip Hop is saying.
In all this I don’t discredit all of what Cosby is saying, there is no doubt that in Hip Hop there are all types of negative forces at play, right along with the positive ones. Personal responsibility is not unimportant.
To get deep into this will no doubt take another blog entry, so I’ll just leave you here.. Where I hope I’ve showed something of how all of this stuff informs modern debate.