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Intergenerational
Disconnect
Letter to Seneca Turner on Obama
By Floyd W Hayes,
III
February 14, 2009
Dear Seneca,
I am in
receipt of your last correspondence in which you ask:
(1) whether the political landscape has changed since
the presidential election of Barack Obama, and (2) what
now is the role of Black elders in these changing
times? We live in complicated and tragic times, but
this is not the first time this has occurred. The times
they are changing, but I am not sure I would
characterize this transition as a “paradigm shift.”
Clearly, we are not witnesses to the arrival of a
“post-racist” moment in American history! I do think
another kind of shift has been happening for nearly
three decades that can help to explain some of the
changes that are taking place now and that relate to the
questions you have raised.
In the
mid-1980s, I began to notice that younger and older
Blacks no longer seemed to be talking to each other in a
serious sense about life and living. More and more my
students were telling me that they and their parents
hardly talked much. One student said: “When I come into
the house, my parents are leaving; and when they come
in, I am leaving.” I came to refer to this phenomenon
as “intergenerational disconnect,” as I asserted
at the last Black Studies Conference at Olive Harvey
College in 2007 (please see the enclosed outline of my
talk, entitled “Social Change, Intergenerational
Disconnect, and Africana Studies: A Call for a
Scholarship of Indictment in a Culture of Decadence,
Disillusionment, and Death.”)
The
present intergenerational disconnect is the outcome of
the post-Civil Rights and post-Black Power Eras, which
declined for various external and internal complications
and contradictions. It could be argued that there were
earlier moments of intergenerational disconnect. Recall
that many Blacks born near the end of the 19th
century refused to tell the new generation much about
slavery and its immediate aftermath. I remember my
mother’s grand aunt, Mary; she was my maternal
grandmother’s aunt, and she had been born in 1869. She
used to visit us in Gary, IN, when I was very little;
and she took me shopping downtown.
My
mother has told me often how she tried in vain to get
Aunt Mary to talk about the family’s history; surely,
Aunt Mary’s mother had to have been a slave. But Aunt
Mary refused. She was an educated woman and a school
teacher in St. Louis, MO. And she looked pale white!
My mother and I think she was just embarrassed to
discuss family history, which obviously included a white
father and, thus, other white members. My mother
experienced intergenerational disconnect. History
stopped, perhaps as a result of conscious historical
amnesia! Blacks just didn’t talk much about the past.
Significantly, as a high school student in the late
1950s—I graduated in 1961—and during my first year at
North Carolina Central University in 1963, I knew
nothing about the early Pan-African (anti-colonial and
anti-racist) struggles waged among intellectual-warriors
from Africa, the Caribbean, and the USA. I knew nothing
of figures, such as Sylvester Williams, W. E. B. Du
Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, Paul Robeson,
Josephine Baker, and Richard Wright. The McCarthy Era
of US fascism had effectively crushed earlier radical
movements among Blacks and whites, creating an
intergenerational disconnect between my generation and
earlier ones.
I
didn’t begin to learn this history until about 1964,
when I became conscious of Malcolm X and the Nation of
Islam. I also met students from Africa and the
Caribbean. By that time, I was a second-year student at
NCCU, and I had begun taking courses in African and
Black American history with the renowned Professor
Caulbert A. Jones. It was because of his engrossing
lectures that I began to read this important history
with a vengeance. Yeah, I was a French major (and later
added political science), but I read African and Black
American history as if my life depended on that
knowledge!
In
addition to writing formal research papers in class, I
wrote 10-15 page letters home to my parents, excitedly
telling them all that I was learning in Jones’ classes.
Therefore, I gradually embraced a historical perspective
(with the aid of Carter G. Woodson and Du Bois) that
challenged everything I previously had learned about
American and Western history. Although I had not
experienced slavery or segregation, I came to embrace
those historical realities as if I had. Equally
important was my reading of radical scholarship of Marx,
Engels, Lenin, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, C. L. R.
James, Richard Wright, and Frantz Fanon.
I did
this reading independent of any course assignments.
This is the kind of existential experience and
intellectual strategy that led me into the late-1960s
and that has remained with me to the present. Moreover,
all my adult life, I have had older friends (like you
and Thais) who have taken time to school me about their
own experiences, knowledge, and ways of knowing the
world. I suspect that this was a conscious and personal
effort to bridge a possible intergenerational gap. We
were generations who knew the value of past and present
connections.
Significantly, even though past intergenerational
fissures occurred, younger generational members tried to
read about or in some other way gain and maintain some
knowledge about previous historical eras so that they
could pass their knowledge on to the next generations.
Many older folks studied as much as they could in order
to forestall absolute historical amnesia. Think of
figures like J. A. Rogers, Leo Hansberry, Dr. Ben, John
G. Jackson, Chancellor Williams, John Henrik Clarke, and
even the late book dealer Alfred Ligon in Los Angeles.
And there was Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal! These and
other historians preserved knowledge of the past for
many in my adult generation. They were the people I
read from the late 1960s to the present.
The
current intergenerational disconnect, however, may be
more severe; and it may result in more unsettling
consequences, than previous ones. During the past
thirty years, I think I have witnessed the rise of
generations of Blacks who are severely individualistic
and uncommonly anti-historical. I first noticed the
development of this contemporary intergenerational gap
while I at San Diego State University in the mid-1980s.
Students would tell me that they hardly ever spent time
talking with their parents about life and living. This
was the Age of Reagan; radical (and not so radical)
social movements of the late-1960s had been crushed.
Unlimited greed and unvarnished anti-Black racism, crass
individualism and cultural meanness, and mounting
anti-intellectualism and professionalism, became the
order of the day.
This
was the period of forced business acquisitions and
mergers, as the gangster Reagan regime allowed corporate
capitalism to go after mega-profits. It was in this
context that parents, even Black parents, sought not a
wealth in knowledge but a wealth in money. So busy were
they in search of this enterprise that they avoided or
neglected their children. These parents had little
interest in anti-racist struggle; they failed to pass on
to the next generation any knowledge or commitment to
collective Black struggle for liberation. Increasingly,
younger generations grew up with little or no knowledge
of the past. Never having experienced segregation, and
too young to remember radical social movements of the
1960s, Blacks born in the 1980s and early 1990s
constitute a new generation that is historically
rudderless and lost in turbulent seas of America’s
failing and decadent empire.
I refer
to this new generation as “personalist” and “presentist.”
Their knowledge and ways of knowing are personal, so
focused are they on the self. And because they are so
young, they view the present as superior to the past or
even the future. This is a here-and-now generation!
There is much indifference in this generation, even to
learning. Today’s university students read
substantially less than students of previous
generations. Is this also a result of advanced
technologies? But everything is contextual. Absentee
parents left this younger generation “dispossessed.”
Indeed, the last 20 years have given rise to a situation
in which younger and older folks scarcely talk with each
other about life and living.
Significantly, contemporary parent-child relationships
seem to be producing students whose value systems are
reflective of their parents’ acquisitive and indifferent
orientation. I find fewer and fewer students to be
intellectually inquisitive. Most of them read only what
they are assigned, and many read only a portion of those
assignments. Many of my students generally do not write
well. They all want “good” grades, but they seem
unwilling to put in the hard work necessary to earn
those grades. Intellectually indifferent, many members
of new generations even are disconnected from the
struggle for knowledge or quality education.
When I
speak of putting maximum effort in their scholarship,
students often look at me like I were from outer space!
Over the last 10 years, this reality has become
particularly evident. Most of my students know little
about earlier Black liberation struggles. The know
little about the history of Africa, the Caribbean, or
Black America. Moreover, they seem to possess neither
the will nor the commitment to engage in collective
struggle. Indeed, so many are individually
conflict-avoidant, much like President Obama appears to
be. But even he has studied Black history well, as a
reading of his books will indicate.
It is
against this background that one can look at the present
social and political transition and the role of elders
as the Obama administration seeks to manage American and
global affairs. There is no paradigm shift in terms of
white supremacy and anti-Black racism, yet. There is
some movement on the part of young whites and Blacks,
both of whom may be experiencing a good bit of
historical amnesia. This kind of amnesia also can alter
the role of Black elders, especially those who are the
parents of today’s younger generations. The
intergenerational disconnect of which I speak may very
well be resulting in shifting the ground beneath the
feet of Black elders. Historical amnesia prevents the
knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of elders’
traditional roles. Who has schooled the younger
generations about the conventional roles of elders? In
many respects, the phenomenon of intergenerational
disconnect has eclipsed those roles. So, one might ask
what role Obama might play in the lives of this new
generation. Will he inspire this new generation,
directly or indirectly, to recapture the value of
historical knowledge for the purpose of redesigning the
future of Black people around the world?
Now, I
have written in general terms, looking at trends,
developments, and contradictions. Nothing is absolute.
But these elements may suggest future challenges to
Black people in the USA. Will post-Civil Rights and
post-Black Power generations think that anti-Black
racism is over in America and give up a concern for and
commitment to the struggle for Black liberation? Can or
will elders and younger generations find common ground
and begin to bridge the communicative disconnect? Can
they learn to value each other; can they learn to listen
to each other; can they learn from each?
Sincerely,
Floyd
Floyd W. Hayes, III, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer,
Department of Political Science
Coordinator of Programs and Undergraduate Studies
Center for Africana Studies,
The Johns Hopkins University
Greenhouse 107 /
3400 N. Charles Street /
Baltimore, MD 21218
Phone: 410-516-7659 /
FAX: 410-516-7312 /
fwhayes3@jhu.edu
http://web.jhu.edu/africana/index.html
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Response
Floyd, thanks ever so much for sharing your work and
thoughts with us. I quite agree that these cultural
transmissions can be cyclical. One might say that these
cultural transmissions of poverty result from the
high rate of illiteracy in our communities, even Colin
Powell spoke recently of the 50 per cent rate of school
drop out.
You spoke of the lack of reading and
study within our communities: teachers in working class
high schools complain much about it, as well. But they
themselves are not scholars, writers, and readers. Their
emphasis is on individual career rather than community
struggle. Then the accounting standards for public
school education emphasize test taking as the least
common denominator.
After more than a hundred years we have
yet to develop, like the Jews, a culture of literacy and
interpretation. Our emphasis is on performance and
cultural aspects of poverty, namely, gangsterism and
stylization. How we break this present cycle of the
cultural of poverty, since the 90s, is beyond me.
I hope the Obama Era will start a new
beginning, a new cycle, a new drive for literacy and
thoughtfulness among black youth. $100 billion has been
pressed into the stimulus bill for education. I am
certain that resolving some of the difficulties of urban
poverty, different from just being poor, is tied to this
problem of valuing learning.—Rudy
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Dear friends,
The percentage of
urban blacks who value learning is very small, to be
sure. Regardless of ethnicity, many of us poor working
class folk who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s faced a
cultural divisiveness imposed on us by middle and
higher classes.
For example,
because I was a factory worker's kid, I was not supposed
to sit first chair clarinet. The son of a school
Principal was supposed to sit in that chair and win all
the challenges. The challenge system was blind and I won
all of them, which angered the professional caste. I
also faced opposition from my family, who rather wanted
me to play football and win an Oklahoma University
athletic scholarship. The men all thought I was a
"sissy." Then, as now, for a youth growing up in the
violent culture of football, war mongering and the John
Wayne or gangster or styling cultures of masculinity we
have discussed before, one has to be stronger than
strong. I was and triumphed as did many others across
the nation. That should not be in the so-called "land of
the free."
I preached
about some February born changers of history in church
today: Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, and Darwin.
Very different
personalities to be sure, ranging from fierce,
determined struggler to self-educated, outgoing,
extroverted attorney to the quiet, shy, careful,
scholarly son of well off English people. Their sheer
variety reminded me of a training game NASA uses for
astronauts.
The so-called
NASA game has participants imagine they are stranded on
the Moon. They have a list of 14 steps listed in random
order. When properly and precisely ordered, the 14 steps
will enable them to get off the Moon and come home. The
groups dominated by one or two loud mouthed people never
get off the Moon. The groups where everyone gets to
speak up and matters to everyone else usually make the
right list and get off the Moon and back to Earth.
I believe in
this kind of process. If black urban education leaders
come together with the parents and youth they teach and
really speak to and hear each other and value everyone
in the group, then maybe, just maybe, we can "get off
the Moon" of illiteracy and the culture of
self-destruction and "come home" to a culture of valuing
really valuable learning. Maybe. Ralph
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|
Go, Tell Michelle
African American Women Write to the New First Lady
Edited Barbara A. Seals Nevergold and Peggy
Brooks-Bertram
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posted 15 February 2009 |
