Globalizing the South

 By Rudolph Lewis

I hope I am not being cynical; at least, it is not my intent. What I seek is a realistic appraisal. What I want is a rhetoric that is not merely a talking to the choir. If you're going to have a "black psyche" it seems to me a critical mass is necessary. All is not necessary.  The cultural examples of the negative impact of Christian myths and the commercial influence of hair and body styles on blacks worldwide are indeed representative of a critical mass.

That is, if there is such a thing as a "black psyche", or a "white psyche" it is a psychology of fragmentation (shattered identity), not resulting from a medical condition but rather from an ethical one, primarily, the valuation of property over humanity. And that this modern valuation results partially from a great illiteracy, an inability to keep up with literate machinations of our corporate rulers and their political managers. This phenomena occur in the black worlds of  Africa and the Americas as well as in the industrialized, technological white West. The "black" oppressed have not had adequate skills or opportunity to read and study our best minds and those who have the skills have not had the time, and if time was available, in their isolation no right means to evaluate the thinking.. If they have indeed our best minds have been read, they have not been updated for changed circumstances. Pressed to make a life in a barred world, we always operate behind the curve of necessity. Some of our writers indeed anticipated the longevity of the problems before us and their vision remains clear.

I recommend Richard Wright’s White Man Listen!  His essay “The Literature of the Negro in the United States” is worthwhile rereading. He says the “Negro” once had a “simple, organic way of life” or “entity.” Maybe for that tribal person, there was such a thing we could call “psyche” in the sense of wholeness. But we are not at one with our culture. He speaks further of “stratification” and “atomization,” the development of numerous “personality types.”

There is a “strident individualism” that makes a "unified black psyche" or a “unified white psyche" an impossibility, for we are at war within, without—with others, as well as the imposed “we.” The "we" becomes difficult to situate. Whether Killens was aware of Wright's essay, I’m uncertain. If he had, he ignored it, in speaking of a racial “psyche” and its implications for post-60s realities. When asked at some point, Wright said he knew of no such phenomena as a "black psychology." Of course, a tribe of priests who argue for such a field of studies. But such specialists always rise in seeking professional advantage of the ignorant.

That is, the people (black and white) are severely programmed for the corporate interests of others and so overpowered they do not know what to think—they are “racial” zombies. Satellite TV, the internet (and other media hooked up globally) and globalism make this programming even more of a possibility and a dangerous threat to freedom and threat to human rights. And not knowing how to think and valuate, individuals and peoples look out for self-interest (individual interest), which has become the new first law of survival. Community everywhere has broken down under a militarized siege from a hostile without, by a commercial full court press.

I'm really thinking out loud, questioning. What? How we got into this racial mess we find ourselves in today. Killens (in 1965) says in a rather militant vein we will no longer “look through white eyes.” Well, it’s more than forty years later: my examples note that we are indeed still looking through "white eyes." And these "eyes" have to do with bourgeois corporate ethics more than race, with what is valued more than the color of the skin. And maybe more than ever, we are looking through “white eyes” that value property over human dignity.

Chenweizu points out such a crass expression of this "white-eyed" valuation in his recent article USAfrica A Mortal Danger:

Or we can cite from the recent story "African Maids Face Abuse in Lebanon":

You do not have to have a white skin to valuate "immorally" or "decadently." What happened to that determined "we" of which Killens speaks? Maybe the complexity of the "White Problem" was much more complex than Killens could imagine or dared to imagine openly in his time. And he thus did not weigh the “psyche” problem rightly for us now.

A friend suggested oppressive systems can adapt to militancy, to the aggression of those they wish to oppress; he pointed out the Germans have a term for that process, Verharmlosung."  Albert Murray suggests similarly in his The Omni-Americans. Murray says that corporations have special departments to deal with such militancy. My further question is: How then do we respond to such adaptations? For it seems to me Gabriel's pardoning at the request of the NAACP is such an adaptation.

I understand the "advanced thought of that time" concept. What I seek is an "advance thought" of our time, being cognizant of the shortcomings of the "advanced thought of that time." But I admire Killens. The "fault of his time" is not singularly his. We must point the fault out, nevertheless, in order to avoid that kind of fault in our time. To admire Killens we need not sustain his faults. 

I see no value or advantage in posing the existence of racial psychologies or racial psychoses. I do not think "racial" oppression results from a medical malady. That is what Marvin X is now arguing in his latest book. I would rather approach the nature of American racial oppression from another angle than that. It seems to me that even a Marxist or a neo-Marxist interpretation is exceedingly more beneficial than these medical or pseudo-medical analyses.

But I am not even certain that a Marxist interpretation is necessary for the situation in which we find ourselves. Killens' ethical view of the American dilemma is sufficient for me. Here is what he says:

Killens is at his best in DownSouth, UpSouth. Black people in America know what it means to be classified and treated as "real estate," as property. And they know it with a greater depth beyond such abstractions people now glibly call "slavery.” 

In "DownSouth, UpSouth" Killens avoids the more racialist rhetoric of his essay "Black Psyche," which goes too far into racialist esoteric, and one goes even farther in that direction with terms like "white social psychology" and the  "psychotic nature of  this culture" in trying to sustain Killens racialist rhetoric. But Killens says elsewhere rightly that all of America is the South. Well, we can say now that the entire globe has become the South.

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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created By Charles C. Mann I’m a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, in which he provides a sweeping and provocative examination of North and South America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched but so wonderfully written that it’s anything but exhausting to read. With his follow-up, 1493, Mann has taken it to a new, truly global level. Building on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby (author of The Columbian Exchange and, I’m proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer), Mann has written nothing less than the story of our world: how a planet of what were once several autonomous continents is quickly becoming a single, “globalized” entity. Mann not only talked to countless scientists and researchers; he visited the places he writes about, and as a consequence, the book has a marvelously wide-ranging yet personal feel as we follow Mann from one far-flung corner of the world to the next. And always, the prose is masterful. In telling the improbable story of how Spanish and Chinese cultures collided in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, he takes us to the island of Mindoro whose “southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato, tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue to do so until we are finally living on one integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth. Whether or not the human instigators of all this remarkable change will survive the process they helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and revelatory book, an open question.

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Ratification The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 By Pauline Maier A notable historian of the early republic, Maier devoted a decade to studying the immense documentation of the ratification of the Constitution. Scholars might approach her book’s footnotes first, but history fans who delve into her narrative will meet delegates to the state conventions whom most history books, absorbed with the Founders, have relegated to obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local counties and towns, they influenced a convention’s decision to accept or reject the Constitution. Their biographies and democratic credentials emerge in Maier’s accounts of their elections to a convention, the political attitudes they carried to the conclave, and their declamations from the floor. The latter expressed opponents’ objections to provisions of the Constitution, some of which seem anachronistic (election regulation raised hackles) and some of which are thoroughly contemporary (the power to tax individuals directly). Ripostes from proponents, the Federalists, animate the great detail Maier provides, as does her recounting how one state convention’s verdict affected another’s. Displaying the grudging grassroots blessing the Constitution originally received, Maier eruditely yet accessibly revives a neglected but critical passage in American history.—Booklist

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  /  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  /  Only a Pawn in Their Game

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posted 22 September 2007 / updated 12 June 2008