Boston Globe

2/23/04

 

COLOR BIND

Debra Dickerson argues that black Americans must abandon the manipulative myths and constraints of 'race'

By Glenn C. Loury, 2/22/2004

The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners

By Debra J. Dickerson

Pantheon, 306 pp., $24

Debra Dickerson has written a critique of the dominant civic and cultural views found among today's African-American intellectuals and activists. ''The End of Blackness" is a brave, original, and angry book.

Too many black spokespersons decry racism constantly, Dickerson says. Yet, if racism were to end tomorrow, nothing much would change in the inner-city ghettos, where, after all, it is blacks who prey on one another. Too many ''post-movement blacks," as she refers to them, are ''defining themselves out of America . . . because of bitterness over [the nation's] unfinished racial business." Yet, Dickerson says, blacks have a duty to feel like Americans, else our forebears would have labored in vain.

Too many '' 'woe is me' race men," as she calls them, lack ''civic confidence," are overly comfortable in their role as victims, and are living in bad faith. ''Their focus on racial grievances, however legitimate," Dickerson says, ''keeps them from having to fashion a constructive way of viewing their role in American life."

Concerning the gravest threats to black freedom today, Dickerson's view is that ''pressures and expectations arising from within the black community are usually more life-affecting than those from without." Succumbing to pressures for racial conformity, clinging to an outmoded notion of racial identity, too many talented black youngsters are chained ''to a view of the present that is shrink-wrapped to the circumscribed past."

Such is Dickerson's indictment, and the thought of it all makes her furious. She is seething -- not without reason, I would say -- but the palpable rage that shows on virtually every page can sometimes take away from the power, and diminish the persuasiveness, of what she has to say.

Over the last 35 years, since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s demise, some talented and richly blessed black folk have let us down, she argues, and she does not intend to sit idly by and watch this happen in yet another generation. That is very understandable, and I find much to agree with in the broad outlines of her argument: We Americans need to get out of the ''race" routine, and black folk must lead the way. We need new formations, new reflexes, new alliances, new (self- and collective) understandings.

What ever happened to the noble goal of racial integration? Dickerson asks. Implicit in her account, I think, is a new notion of what ''integration" might mean -- namely, the embrace, not merely the toleration, of transracial intimacy. That is, integration, rightly understood, ought to mean the active construction of new identities through creative acts of social reinvention.

I would take this point a step further, for it applies not only, or even mainly, to the bedroom. Racial integration's most powerful application, as I envision it, would be in the political arena. And the intimacy I have in mind there involves the sharing at close quarters of a civic vision and mobilization at the grass roots on behalf of a program of action that transcends race and is driven by a common quest for the kind of society we ought to become in this country. ''Black reparations" advocacy, on this account, is problematic not because (as Dickerson would have it) the people pushing it are quarrelsome bores (though they sometimes are). It is problematic, and bad for this country, and for black people ourselves, because it squanders blacks' dwindling political capital and misses our chance to show genuine moral leadership in this nation, as the early civil rights era heroes did.

Because she's so angry, Dickerson understates her political case. The end of blackness ought to mark the beginning of something better. We are still a multiracial nation, and will be far into the future. The moral and political issues most salient in the context of ''blackness" remain to be addressed (overcrowded prisons, ghettos from which opportunity for social betterment has fled, and so on), and ''compassionate conservatism" doesn't even begin to address them. The issue confronting those black leaders and intellectuals brave enough to think outside the box today is how to convert our historical inheritance of moral authority and our claim on the public's attention -- an inheritance grounded in the suffering and heroic triumphs of our ancestors -- into a moral currency that is relevant to our time. Mournful recitations of the old civil rights mantras are obviously inadequate to the task.

The end of blackness in this sense is worth striving for because there are no problems facing the black community that are not also problems for a vast number of brown, yellow, red, and white Americans. And there are no solutions for these problems that can, or should, be enacted solely (or even mainly) to assuage the legitimate concerns of blacks.

So, rather than digging up insurance company records from a century and a half back showing that one of today's Hartford-based financial giants is the successor entity of a now defunct corporation that wrote (perfectly legal) insurance policies on human cargo in the 1840s, black civil rights activists might better spend their time learning Spanish and speaking it fluently. Then they could rally today's troops for the profound social justice issues of our time (health care for everyone on demand, decent pay to those who clean toilets for a living, and so on).

Given our history and the powerful role that race has played in it, blacks are still first in line at the social justice megaphone. To whom much has been given, much is required. Whether they know it or not, black leaders carry a burden of responsibility that transcends race. Think how powerful their demands could be were they issued in universal, not parochial terms. That's what the end of blackness ought to signify, and that is a vision I think Dickerson shares. I only wish that her book had been less cluttered with invective and less colored by rage. Then, the political and moral truth of her argument might have come through more clearly.

Glenn C. Loury is a University Professor and professor of economics at Boston University. His most recent book is ''The Anatomy of Racial Inequality."

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