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Sensualization
of Pain
By Rudolph Lewis
Richard Wright &
Alexander Crummell
I have been off and
on meditating on Richard Wright's essay, "The Literature
of the Negro in the United States," found in his
White Man Listen! (1957). I began to type it up
for distribution on the internet—on ChickenBones
and through e-mail. But I type with two fingers and it
has been an unenviable task. In several writings, I have
however made reference to Wright’s two major concepts in
his discourse on Afro-American writing from Phillis
Wheatley up until his present:
| Entity, men integrated with their
culture, and identity, men who are at odds
with their culture, striving for personal
identification. |
Okonkwo, the lead
character of Achebe's
Things Fall Apart, had entity at the beginning
of the novel. By the end of the novel he had become a
man less than whole, fragmented, and unable to return to
that wholeness he knew—he hanged himself from a tree.
As far as
Afro-American writers, Wright identifies only Phyllis
Wheatley, "who wrote revolutionary poetry though her
skin was black and she was born in Africa," as a poet who
possessed "entity." "She "was at one with her culture."
He also points out the Russuan writer Alexander Pushkin and
the French writer Alexander Dumas
as writers who were "one" with their culture. He goes on
to look at the poetry of 19th and 20th century
Afro-American writers. Theirs he identifies as "Negro
writing." He clarifies what he means by "Negro":
|
Being a Negro has to do
with the American scene, with race hate,
rejection, ignorance, segregation,
discrimination, slavery, murder, fiery
crosses, and fear. |
Wright uses this
definition to point out these qualities in the poems of
Afro-American writers from George Moses Horton onward.
Here I am not so much concerned with those critiques.
They are rather successful within the parameters Wright
has set up for analysis. From the first reading of this
essay Wright makes what he sees as a rather self-evident
criticism of Negro folk culture; that is, that which
is centered among the Christian slaves of the Southland
and the inheritance of the freedmen who were more or
less re-enslaved by the Southern sharecropper system,
which basically did not end until about the mid-1960s,
when most farms became fully mechanized.
Wright sets up this
early stratification of Negro culture by dividing Negro
expression into two "tendencies" or "streams." One he
calls the "Narcissistic Level" and the other he named
more fancifully, as "The Forms of Things Unknown." The
Narcissistic Level existed among middle-class Negroes,
who "were in every respect the equal of whites; they
were valid examples of personality types of Western
culture; but they lived in a land where even insane
white people were counted above them." This level Wright
might have concluded produces bizarre individuals like
Clarence Thomas or Anatole Broyard.
Maybe I carry his
intentions too far in naming names. I mention that level
only in passing. My interest or focus is more on
Wright's second "tendency" among Negroes, namely, "The
Forms of Things Unknown," which he describes as follows:
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It can be said there were
Negroes who naively accepted what their
lives were, lived more or less unthinkingly
in their environment, mean as they found it,
and sought escape either in religion,
migration, alcohol, or in what I've called a sensualization of their sufferings
in the form of jazz and blues and work
songs. . . . There are two pools of this
black folk expression: The sacred and the
secular. |
This expression "sensualization
of their sufferings" has stuck in my brain for sometime
and I have not quite known what to do with it. Should I
just dismiss it as a bias of a rationalist? It has
pressed more upon my thinking since I began my reading
of Wilson J. Moses' biography
Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and
Discontent (1992). If I had Wilson's mastery of 19th
century African-American intellectual thought, I would
probably have less trouble figuring out the
philosophical and theological dilemma that Wright
sketches out in this essay and its relevance to our
contemporary times.
I bring Crummell
and Wright together partially because both were
expatriates and both made visits to Africa. Wright's was
limited to months; Crummell's lasted 20 years. (Moses
says it was actually about 16 years.) More
importantly they both responded to slave culture (sacred
and secular) and African tribal culture in a similar
derisive manner. Philosophically, they approached the
question of culture from different ideological places. Crummell was a preacher, a theologian, a priest of the
Protestant Episcopal Church. Wright was a Marxist and a
historical materialist—a novelist, poet, and left-wing
political activist. They both viewed the Enlightenment
as one of the significant periods in human history.
They both had a
certain high praise for European culture, though
Crummell limited his praise to English culture, to
Anglo-Saxon Civilization. Maybe one might say that
Wright was more partial to French Civilization. Wright
was not a Civilizationist but certainly Crummell
believed that English Christianity was the avenue by
which the African the Ethiopian would stretch his hand
out to God and eventually rule the world. Wright was
much more critical of European civilization.
But neither
believed that Negro slave culture or African tribal culture
would be the means by which the Negro would rise from his
low rank in the estimation of the white world. That is,
one could not build a Civilization on Negro slave
culture (or as Wright called it "The Forms of Things
Unknown" or the "sensualization of sufferings”) or
tribal cultures. Maybe Wright was not as absolute in
this matter of culture as Crummell, for Wright was
surely aware of modern anthropology’s relativist view of
cultures.
According to Moses,
Crummell believed "The English language was the language
of freedom, and in it was enshrined 'those great
charters of liberty which are essential elements of free
governments, and the main guarantees of personal
liberty'." Wright would have never gone that far.
Wright would probably not have made Crummell's negative critique
of African languages, which he believed contained a
"predominance of animal propensities." But they probably
would have both agreed that "obeah" and other religious
practices found in slave culture as well as African
tribal cultures should be suppressed or obliterated.
Yet the tribal
African was a whole man, from Wright's perspective,
though incapable of competing in the modern world of
technological gadgets and organization. But he had entity,
wholeness. The educated
African, however, was a fragmented man, though skilled and capable
of competing in the modern world. Yet he was wholly neither European
nor African, thus suffering an "identity" crisis, a
spiritual malaise. He was alienated from his tribal past and
was not allowed to be fully European. He was an Other
from the perspective of whites as well as from his
illiterate tribesmen. In a way one could say the same of
Alexander Crummell, the African nationalist,
emigrationist, colonialist. He knew that he would never
be accepted as an equal by the best of his white friends
and benefactors, upon whom he was dependent financially
and spiritually, and thus the source of his African
nationalist stance, and his bitterness. I'm uncertain how to fit Wright into
this scheme.
My interest is
elsewhere—I return to the notion of the "sensualization of pain" as a
main aspect or mode of so-called African American culture. In
the 60s it was referred to by some as a "culture of
poverty." Of course it had become as well somewhat mixed with
numerous historical myths derived from the Bible and
classical sources, and now it’s rather over laden with
an unsystematic transference of some African tribal
cultural elements, as in libations, African names, elders,
and ancestors, and African like tribal rituals. So one may ask,
as Crummell may have asked, can a civilization be built
on such a culture?
Now I consider
these matters under the education criticisms of black
conservatives as Orlando Patterson, John Ogbu, Shelby
Steele, John McWhorter, as well as Bill Cosby and Alvin
Poussaint. At some point, all have mentioned that an
excessive number of black students view academic
learning as “white” or “acting white.” Dr. Ogbu, in his
study of Shaker Heights students,
Black American
Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic
Disengagement, argued that it is not merely a
“culture of poverty” among black students that causes
black academic failure.
For he discovered
in the better white schools rich black high school
students are also “disengaged”—the children of doctors,
lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers. From the recent
writings on Clarence Thomas at Yale in his bib overalls
and heavy black boots, he too was rather “disengaged”
and performed on a rather average level, though he stuck
it out and received his degree. Thomas seems to suggest
that Negro culture as represented in his grandfather was
a retardant force in his educational success. In these
cases, one must ask whether Wright’s “sensualization of
sufferings” played/play a role in the response of black
students to academic settings. Recall Wright says, the
Negro seeks to “escape [the psychic pain of his
existence] either in religion, migration, alcohol” or
his folk music, which today we might include hip hop,
and/or in sexuality and drugs.
As conservatives
love to say, African Americans are not a monolith. Or
put another way we all do not come into the world with
equal talents, abilities, and intellectual gifts. Nor do
black parents even if well off, for economic reasons or
because of an economic past do not have the wherewithal
to provide emotional, intellectual, and identity
supports in helping their children deal with today’s
academic classroom or educational curriculums or
philosophies. They have too much confidence in teachers
and educational institutions.
There is indeed
little in these classrooms to sustain a black male’s
struggle for identity or as Wright puts it his “striving
for personal identification.” In a recent
e-correspondence, Liz Aaronsohn, Ed.D., Teacher
Education, Central CT State University, speaks to the
cultural issue at Shaker Heights:
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that school is a white
institution, with dominant culture
expectations, styles, language, etc.—to
which Black students have to accommodate in order to
succeed, while white kids are raised from these at home,
and so have an advantage. He [Ogbu] also hears plenty of
Black student and parent voices, and records them, that
point to at least unconscious if not overt racism on the
part of teachers and some white families. |
I
know this classroom resistance mind intimately by multiple experiences as a “dropout” or
as a “quitter” in Negro as well as white schools. There is a great psychic pain
experienced by American black males in white classrooms
and on white jobs. This experience of being "driven out"
or allowing oneself to be "driven out" of classrooms and
institutions is all too prevalent and we have yet to
find ways to counter this phenomena in black experience.
Ogbu and other make
complain about “historical baggage”—the slave past, the
Jim Crow past, the present police and economic
repression as part of the psychic reality of today’s
black male student—but this is their black history, with
all its negations of wholeness!
Their black present. And one cannot be just flippant
about this hurtful and burdensome experience. Our young scholars do not have a Teflon sense of
history privileged with a white skin or a white
certificate of acceptance; they do not have a Teflon
sensibility. That is to expect too much of these young
black men and women—to be like whites when there is
a lack of sharing of any sensibility of their burdens
from either their peers or their teachers.
As Wright speaks of the spirituals, the
work songs, the blues, and jazz and their practical cultural
utility in Negro survival techniques, hip hop culture not only
“sensualizes” that psychic pain of today's black youth
and their black male reality,
but it is also a conscious culture of resistance to
racist objectification and commodification. It’s similar
to Wright’s educated African unaccepted as fully equal
to his European colleague or the black Yale law school
graduate unable to find a preferred position with a
large law firm. This consciousness also leads to a
despair that cannot be so flippantly cast off by the
will, as some educators suggest.
The American Negro
knows sensually a three-century experience that
he is not going to be accepted as an equal; yet he does
not know a third route to take to become whole. His
horns are locked with his enemy. The identity
struggle persists by necessity. The weight on such
young men and a growing number of females grows heavier.
And their non-participation or grudging acquiescence in status quo venues that
deny their reality, experience, perceptions, and offer
no way out of their cultural dilemma in an "American
scene, with race hate, rejection, ignorance,
segregation, discrimination, slavery, murder, fiery
crosses, and fear” will produce yet another book like
that of Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint's
Come on People on the Path from Victims to Victors
(2007). As long as these human denials
remain, our youth will continue their resistance until
they can discover some confidence of full acceptance in
a receptive
American civilization.
A civilization
might not be able to be built on the components of
African American culture. Yet they will not just disappear
because of an accumulation of wealth. Moreover, many of
these components have become so integrated into the
larger culture that they have become invisible and their
ethnic origins are not openly recognized—Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking
from Black Culture.. Surely no
peace will be had in an American Civilization that
denies unfairly Negro culture being mirrored within the
larger American culture and its
valid representation of the dignity of black humanity.
Black students cannot merely discard their “striving for
personal [and group] identification” as if it were mere
“baggage.” They are targets as individuals within
and of a group that is despised or depreciated in
numerous socio-political settings and legislation. The resistance will continue and blood
spilling will be part of that rebellion (including black
on black muder), which one must
conclude is also an aspect of Wright's
“sensualization of sufferings.”
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* * *
Scapegoat Criticism—Hip hop vs.
Black Churches
“The
enemy—namely the bad guys in the gangsta rap industry
and their white enablers—is calling this a culture.” Bill Cosby
My choice scapegoat for the
failure of mind and will among our young people are the
Negro churches that emphasize feelings and emotional
worship and their subservient preachers. They seem to me
as blameworthy with their otherworldly religions for the
drop out rates and the other moral maladies of which
Cosby, Patterson, McWhorter and others speak.
Many of these churches exist
within these communities of despair and they lack the
will, the character, and the message to service these
"dropouts" and "quitters."
Instead of sending missions to Africa, they should send
educators and missionaries right around the corner or
into the alleys where these children, young men and
women can be found, languishing in spiritual squalor.
These churches and their style
of worship are definitely far more influential among the
mothers of these children than Nas or 50 cent, though
they are rapping too in the churches as well and dancing
too. Alexander Crummell would be appalled at the
character of worship occurring in today's Baptist
and Methodist and other enthusiastic dominations to
which Negro women flock. You can easily find
representations of these evangelical inspired
worshippers on cable TV, every Sunday, and at times
during the work week. There are just as many women users
(haters) among the Negro clergy as there are among the
so called gangsta rappers and probably just as many
homophobes, as well. Is this news? How did Cosby and
Poussaint overlook this disastrous and moral situation?
Are they or are we just
afraid to speak up, because of the idolization of black
cultural components or because so many of these
enthusiastic reverend cheerleaders wear the ornaments of
success, derived in large part from the misuse of black
women. These seminary-trained leaders of Negro churches
and other church leaders are no more educated or moral
than Nas and no less ostentatious than 50 cent. There is
a scandal a week in black churches.
There are lots of places where
one can bring down the bludgeon of blame for the lack of
social progress among the black poor and working
classes. Why just settle on the hip hop industry? Isn't
there something wrong, Crummell may ask, with the
overall Negro culture that exists in America, and not
just in the music industry. The tendency of his day to
reach down and pull up has been lost in selfishness and
greed. In the era of the gospel of success, there is
just as much gross sinning among churchgoers and the
unchurched.
In fairness, we must point our
immoralities throughout American society and not just
those within black communities. What about the
deportations of hundreds of thousands from their homes
and the refusal to let them return to their homes in New
Orleans? What about the slaughter going on in Iraq,
American style? What about the turning of the back on
the poor and the refusal to raise the minimum wage for a
decade? What about the police brutality that goes on
daily within our communities against the poor and on the
basis of color? What about the outrageous numerous of
arrests and outrageous sentences?
To suggest that black kids only learn immoralities and
inappropriate behavior from hip hop CDs & DVDs seems
highly incredulous to me. I'm not for being open-minded
and loose with respect to moral guidelines in behavior.
I agree that's a problem. But I am not about being
close-minded, either. I do not want to participate in
propagating another set of stereotypes and harmful myths
about black life and culture.
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|
American Creation
Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding
of the Republic
By Joseph J. Ellis
This subtle,
brilliant examination of the period
between the War of Independence and the
Louisiana Purchase puts Pulitzer-winner
Ellis (Founding
Brothers)
among the finest of America's narrative
historians. Six stories, each centering
on a significant creative achievement or
failure, combine to portray often flawed
men and their efforts to lay the
republic's foundation. Set against the
extraordinary establishment of the most
liberal nation-state in the history of
Western Civilization... in the most
extensive and richly endowed plot of
ground on the planet are the terrible
costs of victory, including the
perpetuation of slavery and the cruel
oppression of Native Americans. Ellis
blames the founders' failures on their
decision to opt for an evolutionary
revolution, not a risky severance with
tradition (as would happen, murderously,
in France, which necessitated
compromises, like retaining slavery).
Despite the injustices and brutalities
that resulted, Ellis argues, this
deferral strategy was a profound insight
rooted in a realistic appraisal of how
enduring social change best happens.
Ellis's lucid, illuminating and ironic
prose will make this a holiday season
hit.—
Publishers Weekly /
American Creation (Joseph Ellis
interview) |
 |
* *
* * *
 |
The Revolution: A Manifesto
By Ron Paul
Congressman,
Republican Presidential candidate and author Paul (A
Foreign Policy of Freedom) says "Let the revolution
begin" with this libertarian plea for a return to "the
principles of our Founding Fathers: liberty,
self-government, the Constitution, and a
noninterventionist foreign policy." Specific examples
demonstrate how far U.S. law has strayed from this path,
particularly over the past century, as well as Paul's
firm grasp of history and dedication to meaningful
debate: "it is revolutionary to ask whether we need
troops in 130 countries . . . whether the accumulation
of more and more power in Washington has been good for
us . . . to ask fundamental questions about privacy,
police-state measures, taxation, social policy." Though
he can rant, Paul is informative and impassioned, giving
readers of any political bent food for thought. With
harsh words for both Democrats and Republicans, and
especially George W. Bush, Paul's no-nonsense text
questions the "imperialist" foreign policy that's led to
the war in Iraq ("one of the most ill considered, poorly
planned, and . . . unnecessary military conflicts in
American history"), the economic situation and rampant
federalism treading on states' rights and identities
("The Founding Fathers did not intend for every American
neighborhood to be exactly the same"). Though his policy
suggestions can seem extreme, Paul's book gives new life
to old debates.—Publishers Weekly |
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|
King of the Mountain
The Nature of Political Leadership
By Arnold M. Ludwig
“People may choose to ignore their animal heritage by interpreting their behavior as divinely inspired, socially purposeful, or even self-serving, all of which they attribute to being human, but they masticate, fornicate, and procreate, much as chimps and apes do, so they should have little cause to get upset if they learn that they act like other primates when they politically agitate, debate, abdicate, placate, and administrate, too."—from the book King of the Mountain presents the startling findings of Arnold M. Ludwig's eighteen-year investigation into why people want to rule. The answer may seem obvious—power, privilege, and perks—but any adequate answer also needs to explain why so many rulers cling to power even when they are miserable, trust nobody, feel besieged, and face almost certain death. Ludwig's results suggest that leaders of nations tend to act remarkably like monkeys and apes in the way they come to power, govern, and rule. Profiling every ruler of a recognized country in the twentieth century—over 1,900 people in all, Ludwig establishes how rulers came to power, how they lost power, the dangers they faced, and the odds of their being assassinated, committing suicide, or dying a natural death. Then, concentrating on a smaller sub-set of 377 rulers for whom more extensive personal information was available, he compares six different kinds of leaders, examining their characteristics, their childhoods, and their mental stability or instability to identify the main predictors of later political success. Ludwig's penetrating observations, though presented in a lighthearted and entertaining way, offer important insight into why humans have engaged in war throughout recorded history as well as suggesting how they might live together in peace. |
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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)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
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posted 23 October 2007 / update
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