For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter, John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.
I am a US psychoanalyst who comments on books, movies and conferences from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. Intended for those curious about applied psychoanalysis, this site grows out of a project - the 10,000 minds project of the American Psychoanalytic Association - to help the public become aware of contemporary psychoanalysis. I post 2-4 times per month and limit posts to about 2,000 words.
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Friday, November 25, 2016
Ta-Nehisi Coates calls for reparations from our Midwestern campus – can we hear him?
James Cone came to talk to our University community onWednesday of last week, and Ta-Nehisi Coates came on Sunday. Cone used a boxing metaphor to describe his
writing career, and having these two on campus this week felt like a one-two
punch. Though the first is a black
liberation theologian and the second is an atheist, their talks fit hand in
glove. Coming on the heels of the Donald
Trump election, their reactions to this disorienting outcome were also
complimentary. I went to the second talk
with the reluctant step-daughter’s boyfriend, an avowed liberal theologian who
is just starting his professional life at a local church that is on the edge of
insolvency. As we walked away from
Coates’ talk, we were both dumbfounded by what Coates had said – he provided an
African American economics lesson that we didn’t dispute, but that was so much
at variance with our received (and unquestioned) wisdom that we didn’t quite
know what to do with the information.
I grew up in a segregated America. When I was six, we moved to Florida. We lived first in Orlando and then moved to
West Palm Beach, and I went to school in fourth, fifth and sixth grade at
Belvedere elementary school. It was a
neighborhood school. I walked to it –
and was a crossing guard in sixth grade.
There were no blacks that I remember in the school. The only black person that I remember was the
woman who cleaned our house once a week and I remember driving her home and
being surprised that she lived in a neighborhood where there were many
blacks. It was a curiosity. I curious, but also hopelessly uninformed – I
was as naïve as the Bridges of Kansas City.
Coates informed us that the histories of white and black
America are inextricably intertwined; including through the shared economies of
the two worlds. He noted that America’s
revolutionary war debt was largely repaid through slave labor – 60% of our export
income was derived from cotton (in his article on reparation in the Atlantic,
which I found much less compelling than his talk, he cited this as an 1840
figure – I think our Revolutionary war debt was largely repaid by then – but Hamilton the Musical, and Hamilton by Ron Chernow – which is the source for the musical,
make the point that the Southern States paid more than their fair share of the
Revolutionary war debt, and did so because they had wealth that was generated
by slave labor). He went on to note that
in 1860, America’s single greatest asset based on monetary value – and one that
was so large that it was greater in value than all of the other assets we had
put together – railroads and banks and properties – was our slaves.
Directly as a result of Brown
vs. Board of Education, I was going to be bused in the seventh grade. In the south, school districts are county
wide. So there was a Palm Beach County
board of education. In the north, school
districts are determined by city, so white flight was possible (and the inevitable result is that schools are more segregated now than they were when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided). People could move out to the suburbs from the
city core and find a new school district and students couldn’t be bused across
district lines. In Palm Beach County, there
was no place nearby to fly to. I was
going to be bused to an inner city school or, perhaps, to the center of Florida
to go school with migrant workers near the everglades (counties in the south of
Florida intersect in the middle of the state).
Coates pointed out that segregation, which in our gauzy
imagination is just separate drinking fountains and restrooms, was actually a
way to enrich the whites who were in power.
Blacks, who were kept from the voting box by intimidation and poll
taxes, paid regular taxes, but were not allowed to use the facilities that
taxes paid for. They were not allowed in
the libraries, swimming pools, zoos and museums their taxes supported and,
perhaps most damagingly, they were not allowed to go to the State Universities.
This was, in Coates’ mind and mine,
taxation without representation – the very thing that fueled the American Revolution. In Virginia, South Carolina, and Mississippi,
blacks outnumbered whites – and across the south they made up about 1/3 of the
population. Afraid that blacks would
revolt, whites used terror to control them, with the Lynching tree being the
foremost means of doing that (lynching did not take place before the civil war
because that would have required repaying a slave owner for damaged property).
To avoid going to a predominantly black high school where my mother was told by the black principal that I likely would have been a target of bullying (something I had already
experienced at the hands of whites) and would have had a below standard
education or riding a bus two hours out and two hours back to go to a school
that would have been primitive at best, my parents intended to enroll me in an all-boys
all-white boarding school. I took the
tests and was enrolled. I looked forward
to it in an odd sort of what-does-this-mean way, and I was relieved that I was
not going to be beaten. From Coates’ and
Cone’s perspectives, I was being taught to fear those whom my tribe was
responsible for suppressing – and this would prepare me to suppress them later,
violently if need be. While I don’t
doubt that, the lived experience was much more one of curiosity. Who were these people that were to be
feared? Would that I were a person far
enough advanced to wonder what it would have been like for them to go to a
school in which the teaching was inferior and there was (what was for me a
real) threat of violence – but I was curious about others and saw them as
static and people to be feared – and therefore I was not in an empathic mindset
– they seemed not akin to me but somehow essentially different.
Coates noted that when the first African Americans arrived –
one year before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock – the differences between
the slaves and the white indentured laborers brought by the colonists to work
the extensive land holdings they had were nominal. The primary difference was that after seven
years, the indentured laborers would earn a plot of land and start to compete
with their landholding bosses. But the
Africans and the laborers lived together and worked together – they intermarried
and found themselves to be in a largely common predicament. By 1848, the nominal differences were
exaggerated until the primary distinction was not between rich and poor but
between black and white, and the poorest white, John Calhoun – the Senator from
South Carolina is quoted by Coates as saying, belonged along with the rich
whites to the upper classes. No matter
how ne’er do well I might be, I am, like Huck Finn’s dad, better than almost
half of the population.
I was rescued from whatever horrors living at an all-white
Episcopal boarding school would have visited upon me – different and I have no
idea whether better or worse than my fate in the public system – by a move
north. My father, for reasons entirely
unrelated to my predicament, was transferred to a northern state and we went
house-hunting in suburbs that boasted top flight public education – in a system
that was almost completely white – there was a small African American community
in the suburb that contributed perhaps 2-3% of the students to the public high
school. I never became close to any of
them, though was aware of them and interested – though I must again admit sadly
– largely as objects rather than as subjects.
Both Cone and Coates emphasize that for the United States to
become whole, we must recognize the ways in which white and black America are
intimately – across a vast divide – entangled.
They are both viewing that divide from the African American side,
necessarily. And from that side, Cone is
seeing the ability of the blacks to survive the terrors that they have – to experience
religious freedom and a tremendous sense of community despite the malicious
intent of European Americans while Coates is seeing all that African Americans
have contributed to the wealth that this country has amassed – and the poverty
that has been their reward. Cone spoke
on behalf of the black blood shed – and Coates spoke on behalf of the labor
that has not been recognized. They were
both accounting for their ethnic heritage and they were finding tremendous value
in it. I think this is a necessary step for
the African American Community – but equally necessary – and potentially more
difficult for the European Community to take.
In our conversation when leaving the Coates lecture, two
white, reasonably liberal guys said to each other, in essence, “Huh, the
narrative Coates just presented is different than the one we have lived
with. Our experience is that blacks are
seen as a drag on the economy – they are on welfare or in prison and white
America has to support them.” In the
wake of the talk, this seemed like a hopelessly naïve position, but I believe
it to be the dominant culture’s position and I bet many blacks would agree with
it. While I don’t think I can reconcile
the positions in this piece any more than Coates can figure out a reparation figure in a lengthy Atlantic article – he recommends that the legislature takethat up and think it through – I think part of the reparation process he
proposes would, then, be an accounting.
How do we take our vastly different narratives and weave them together
into a cogent understanding of something as big and complex and nuanced as our
shared history necessarily is?
We live within the city limits of a large northern
city. Our kids have all gone to an
integrated public magnet high school.
(My son, much to the dismay of the much more progressive reluctant wife,
went to an (integrated) private Montessori elementary school while her daughters
went to a nearby public Montessori elementary school that, at the time they attended it, was intentionally 50% white and 50% other). The kids have all experienced having friends
who are bright and highly motivated who are unable to keep up with the rigors
of the selective high school not through lack of discipline, but because of poverty
and/or chaos at home. They have seen, up
close and personal, what Lyndon Johnson meant by poverty for blacks is different
than it is for whites. The safety net just
isn’t as strong.
Both Cone and Coates were nonplussed about the
election. Both essentially agreed with
Dave Chappelle’s position in his SNL monologue when he stated, in effect, we
have seen you guys do this before and we never expected that you weren’t going
to do something like this. Both Cone and
Coates suggested that the African American community may be better prepared to
weather this than the liberal European American Community; our side is used to
getting our way. I think that Trump’s
election forces us to face some truths that we have not wanted to face – but that
Cone and Coates, between them, can help us address. We have wanted to believe that, by educating
American, in our classrooms and through mass media, about the virtues of
diversity, we have created a sea change in the hearts and souls of the dominant
culture. This has not happened. We still live in a world of us and them –
whether the them is blacks, whites, Mexicans, Muslims or whomever.
Where are we headed?
What might our goal look like?
Cone suggests that European Americans need to own our oppression to
become whole. I agree with that. To me, it sounds like a psychoanalytic goal –
to own the parts of ourselves that we would disavow. And that is a really difficult goal to
attain. It is one thing – and a
difficult thing – for Cone and Coates to gain a sense of the value of their culture. Dave Chappelle said he would cast off being
black in a heart beat if he just could do that (and he is speaking here to a long
history of internalized racism that Mamie and Kenneth Clark scientifically observed 75 years ago using dolls that they presented as evidence in the Brown vs. Board of Education
case). But it is another thing for the
dominant culture to value the contributions of a denigrated subculture. In the process of a productive
psychoanalysis, we come to value rather than run from our unconscious
selves. We see that those aspects of who
we are that we would deny can be useful to us.
But first we have to come to realize that we have an unconscious – and we
have to own it as part of ourselves.
While Cone and Coates cry out for us to own the African Americans as an
integral part of our American selves, Trump has become the mouthpiece for
millions who would disown that.
In a New York Times editorial this week, Mark Lilla maintains that one of the errors that Hillary made was to pander to the various
subgroups of the culture. He points out
that if you fail to mention the subgroup of anyone in the audience they feel
excluded and don’t feel you are on their side.
Cone and Coates are working
towards a more inclusive message. That
message, in 1960s lingo, is something like, “We are all Bozos on this bus,”
meaning that, like it or not, we are one country and ultimately one world, and
we are a complicated country and world – one that is full of contradictions –
some of them so deep and powerful that we cringe when we think of looking at them. But, if we are going to get out of this mess,
we need to do that. And the first place
to do that is to look at the parts of ourselves that we would rather not see. We need to see things that apparently serve
us well – “I am a member of the upper class” – as things that actually hinder
us - “We are all on this boat together and the only way that it will continue
to rise is if we recognize the value of every part of that boat.”
So, it is not surprising that Cone, Coates and Chappelle are
all pretty jaundiced about our ability to do this. We live in an age where we would rather turn away
than sit with something that is uncomfortable – and we have always been
thus. Many of us who are motivated to do
the necessary work are, like me, naïve.
We believe that there will be solutions that involve a Rodney King-like
ability for us to just get along and we don’t realize that we ourselves are as
much of an impediment to that as the redneck out in the sticks – because it is
just as uncomfortable for us to confront what we would rather not see as it is
for him – and we should be much better prepared to do so. I think it was Chappelle who said, “I am with
Colin Kaepernick. I will just take a knee
and watch these white guys duke it out.”
Well, if we are going to duke it out, we need to work on better arming
ourselves, including by recognizing how necessary we are, light and dark, to
each other, including because we can serve as mirrors to each other that will
afford a better understanding of ourselves – one that we would not be able to honestly
achieve on our own.
Of course, underlying all of this, is a conversation about the value of labor. How do we determine what work has what value? I don't know the answer to this. Especially as we approach a post industrial economy, this opens up even bigger questions - what do we do that is of value? The liberal redneck pointed out recently that both parties in this country are run by elites - and rely on people who work with their hands to support them. His position is that neither party actually cares for the vast majority of those who vote for them. In truth, of course, most of us care about those who are closest to us. It is truly hard to have a sense of the common good. Cone and Coates call on us to think about that, in spite of ourselves.
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I enjoyed reading this and the previous posts about Cone and Coates' messages. Another interesting attempt to address these issues comes from Deborah Irving in her 2015 book, "Waking up white". While I think her book suffers from many problems, it does a wonderful job showing how a person growing up in an incredibly privileged white world gradually comes to re-assess her views of African Americans and learn how her "whiteness" has afforded her access to an American dream not uniformly shared. Once having her world is turned upside down, she begins to take a very different approach to working across the racial divide. On a related topic, do be sure to read Coates' "Between the World and me" for insights into "growing up black".
ReplyDeleteThanks for these thoughts. I intend to read "between the world and me" and will likely report on that later. I think Irving's book and my post are, I hope, examples of what many of us are in the process of doing - waking up - to whoever and whatever we are and the world that we live in - which is partly a reflection of our constructed selves and partly very much at odds with it. Again, thanks for your observations and recommendations.
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