FOR THE BROTHAS: AN INTRODUCTION

It must have been about 20 years ago when I first began thinking about creating a "Cultural Salon" as a reaction to the mundane social circles In Washington D.C. The richness of intellectual and artistic interchange had died, college friends had moved, the internet had not yet become the phenomenon it now is... I romanticised about the Salons of the mid to late 1800's in Paris, London and Berlin and the cultural dynamo of the Harlem Rennaisance. I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman, an artist who lived and traveled with James Baldwin... Jimmy he affectionately called him, and he spoke often of their small cottage in southern France and of the many Artists, Poets and Luminaries that dropped in to chat and relax. Well, the impressionists, cubists, modernists, etc. all hung out together famously in those days and shared their ideas with one another creating a creative greenhouse in a world that was rapidly changing. I longed to have lived in those times, to have met Cassat, Rodin, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Baker, Balwin, well I did finally meet Baldwin and others purely for the joy of intellection upon the arts. This was in the late 1980's and by the mid 2000's I happened to run into a friend of mine from Hampton University who had been living in New York since he graduated in the early 90s. Well, I was surprised to hear him comment that in all of the wonder that is New York he never met anyone who ever really had anything interesting to say about art, literature, architecture, science, fashion or anything... I was so surprised to hear this since it had also been my experience. Well here I am in 2011 attempting the Virtual Salon...

Saturday, November 1, 2014

TAMING THE BRUTE: A CANDID LOOK AT HOW BIGOTRY, CLASS AND APATHY HAVE FORGED THE IMAGE OF THE BLACK AMERICAN MAN ON BOTH SIDES OF THE RACE LINE



TAMING THE “BRUTE”: WHICH IS MOST CRIMINAL A MAN CORRUPTED BY HIS ENVIRONMENT OR THE COMMUNITY THAT CORRUPTED HIM?

The image of the Black American male is a topic that is necessarily woven into most of the articles and commentary I have written for “For The Brothas” since its creation.  After all For The Brothas was the brainchild of my passion to honestly examine every aspect of Black American manhood challenging its readers and members to view this phenomenon from a fresh and informed perspective.  Black American men live and thrive in a country that more often than not visualizes them as brutes, criminals and savages as part of a long standing tradition of racism.  Whether they are in actuality the social demons this culture markets them as is an issue that has been hotly debated for over 300 years in America.  In spite of the fact that this country has elected its first Black American male president for a second term the unrelenting rumour of racism has continued to shadow his administration.  In fact, the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States of America has actually had the unexpected effect of exacerbating the unresolved and dangling issue of racism and more specifically the divine right of one race to assume superiority over another.  As it did over 200 years ago when the ink of the Declaration of Independence and American Constitution were still wet upon the parchment the credibility of a black man as an equal in every respect to any and every other man upon this earth remains unresolved because it directly challenges the belief of those clinging to notions of racial superiority that black men are inferior in every way and inherently corrupt by virtue of their inferiority.  I like to believe that the framers of the Declaration of Independence in their wisdom planted the seeds of universal egalitarianism within that document understanding the times were not ripe for a wholesale implementation of that lofty ideal and trusting that a more enlightened time would sow them and bring them into glorious fruition.  In many ways history did play out in that selfsame way, overlong for black men yearning for freedom and opportunity in a land they had not chosen to live.  Even so Black American men have shown unparalleled strength, bravery, patience and virtue on their long an incomplete journey to freedom and being imperfect as are all men they have themselves created centuries-long conflicts among themselves. There is a huge disparity in America between educated and affluent black men such as Obama and those Black American men of more common stature and accomplishment who regardless of their pedigree find themselves collectively demonized as street thugs and criminals to be feared and therefore discriminated against by mainstream society.  Within this broad socioeconomic spectrum of black men are those who actually do live and thrive in some of America’s poorest ghettos and whether or not they are privy or to or part of the lewd diorama of depravity and lawlessness romanticized as the reality of that place find themselves branded as purveyors of what has become a signature stylization of ghetto culture in its most robust form.  Likewise, there is a lesser known and celebrated culture of Black American men who represent the black intelligentsia; a privileged and highly successful educated class of men whose history stretches back to and before the days of slavery in America and continues to broaden in both scope and accomplishment.  How we begin to compare these two categories of Black American men has nothing to do with their pedigree, it begins on a level playing field which in America universally classifies these men as brutes and savages, social dissidents and criminals who should be feared… For the universal overlay of critique is a superficial but mightily strong review superseding all underlying qualities and conditions as its primary point of reference and justification is the singular factor of skin color.  




The issue then and now remains the same because Black Americans so easily turn a blind-eye to the truth.  On many levels the perpetuation of racism in America comes directly from the black community where it grows like a cancer, its resilience continues to confound the efforts of freethinkers and civil rights leaders of all races who join in a unified front to reverse the effects of this disease. While this dilemma does not leave other exterior factions and communities blameless it certainly serves to put the entire picture of racism into a realistic perspective thereby forcing the black community to assume accountability for its own part in this unfortunate social drama. In essence, the criticism that the Black American community has not taken seriously the issue of racism within itself because it is overly defensive against racism inflicted upon it from other entities has to be more closely examined. The realness of it all is that black men in America face a great deal of external bias from all fronts simultaneously including from within themselves. Given the odds stacked against them, that black men are able to accomplish anything at all in this country besides falling into the myriad stereotypes they are assumed to represent is a testament to their true strength of will, character and intelligence.  The million dollar question is how to convince the rest of the world? There are many reasons why Black Americans choose not to challenge biased treatment of black men but two of them stand out amid the rest.  The larger of the two key problems is that acknowledging racism requires them to step out of a dysfunctional comfort zone they have created as a buffer for the certainty of a biased assault.  Secondly, giving notice to racism challenges them to process its unpleasant content forcing them to shape an objective and informed opinion from which to take positive action.  Racism is not a threat when it has been pushed out of sight and out of mind but as these 300 some years since the beginning of the enslavement of Africans has proven it is a resilient threat that appears not to be going away! The truth of the matter is that Black Americans really do have a sound and factual basis for their fears about racism.  In the past and present black people could be severely punished for supporting a black man or advocating a cause sympathetic with a black man.  Black American’s are victims of racial operant conditioning, a process of slow brainwashing used to train animals to perform certain tasks over and over and over again until it becomes second nature.  Over nearly 300 years of oppression has conditioned black people to resent the history of unjust punishment of black men and they fight back by assuming all black men are being unjustly treated by the law, for this behavior I have coined the term “Reparation Justice”, it is a feeling of entitlement for innocence based on a past history of injustice whether the man is innocent or not.  “This is why black people are hesitant to get involved when they see a black man being pulled over on the roadside or incarcerated on the sidewalk, this is why black people are afraid to speak up when they witness or have knowledge of a crime committed by a black man.  Racism must be intelligently and humanely dealt with but due to the thoroughness of operant conditioning it may never completely disappear in our lifetime.  Black Americans do not speak up readily whether it is to rid its communities of criminal vermin, to protest police violence, to vote for credible elected officials or to strike back against bias directed against them in the workplace or over the retail counters because of the history of operant conditioning that has taught them to shut up or face certain repercussions against themselves and loved ones.  It is a messy and ugly affair which is why it has been ignored and pushed to the back by those most affected by its violence; our black men!




The primary challenge for the Black American community is to develop and establish effective and resilient think-tanks to galvanize and empower itself in spite of racism in a manner that does not regurgitate the same biases it seeks to overcome.  What good is a think-tank designed to empower the black community that uses the same corrosive and inhumane policies as those factions it seeks to overcome? The objective of Black American empowerment cannot be to exact revenge on past injustices, it must be forward and positive thinking with the goal of healing and strengthening itself through the mutual healing of all moving towards a common goal of social, economic and political reform. It is a difficult task because these think tanks must be highly introspective, i.e. focused on the condition of Black American culture and yet responsive to those humans and cultures who share and/or do not share their struggle.  Accomplishing this task requires a highly specialized and diversified way of thinking.  The Black community has floundered overlong because of a critical disparity between its techniques for thinking these problems through.  In a truly Machiavellian diorama the black intelligentsia has fought and effectively lost its power struggle to the more brutish and barbaric faction that gets it power credibility from the street!   Today the black intelligentsia watches in anesthetic horror from the stained windows of their ivory towers as the decayed remnants of a once brilliant black community fail and become gentrified.  They bemoan the rich ethnic history they failed to capture there that has been replaced with the brutish history of the latest homicide, gang debacle or drug overdose.  On the fringes of these dwindling communities drug dealers continue to stand guard over territories for which they have no legal claim, the dynamics of whose ownership exceeds their ability to comprehend until the cold notice to vacate arrives forwarded through the attorneys of proprietors in another country.  Nothing could be more depressing…




The black men standing on the streets feel as if they own them and as if they have gone through some ancient warriors rites of passage to earn the right to stand there guard their ancestral territory to the death.  But the absurdity of this premise only becomes gruesomely evident when the coroners truck carts away their corpse.  Who knows what trials they endured to earn the right to stand in the place where they were ultimately killed, who knows what level of street knowledge they achieved what standard of street credibility they earned in order to stand up and be cut down where they stood? The legendary skills of the streetwise have been passed on generation to generation from the plantation to  the city from the ex-con to the eager ring of unfocused and unparented youths foolish enough to listen and they have withstood the slavemaster’s whip and the gangsters bullet, they are weapons and tools forged for use in a deadly and viscous cycle human suffering and depravity.   The streetwise method of thinking can in fact be qualified as a comprehensive philosophy driven by the notion of an over-romanticized ghetto culture that is highly survivalist and desperate in nature.  Street sense relies on raw, spontaneous instinct, it is adrenaline based and therefore highly effective in dangerous situations but can be virtually worthless when a more cerebral and phased out solution is required.  Many people believe that the man who invests his existence only in street sense does so because he visualizes his life as a transient phenomenon with the expectation of little accomplishment beyond the stolen pleasures he might wrest from the incessant conflicts threatening his freedom and his life.  He knows these pleasures are not legitimately earned but rationalizes them by citing the corruption of humanity in general as justification for seizing the material objectives without regard their morality.  He may believe that because all men covet money, possessions and power his methodology is no more immoral or unethical as the next villain.  Street sense can never solve the problems of racism because it is focused on securing a basic level survival lasting only for the moment; a state of existence that will be in desperate chaos almost as soon as it becomes gratified due to its lack of long-term planning.  Recidivism and many other social dysfunctions that case people to become locked into addictions, economic hardship, over-dependency on social welfare, and other debilitating syndrome are some typical corrosive hallmarks of street-wisdom.  Street wisdom and philosophy is not sustainable as the foundation for a culture or community outside of an esoteric ring of gangsters, outlaws or thieves… It cannot support the critical inter-cultural relationships that  diverse, twenty-first century American culture demands.  The world has radically changed around the street corners of American ghettos, it is a far different world than the one that created it.  The social experiments of the twentieth century that placed black people close to jobs and vital resources hoping it would take advantage is pulling back its short-term offerings of reparation.  There are many reasons why the social projects of the 1950's through the 1980's failed in our inner cities and none of them leaves the black community blameless!  Neighborhoods where the streets became mortuaries are now gentrified but overall far happier places than before. Moreover the people who once violently lived and died there gave no reason for anyone to justify their perpetuation.  When did just being poor mean that one had to be depraved?  On closer observation you might even say that the black community got poverty all messed up! That they misconstrued the unique brand of poverty in which they were immersed.  It was a forgiving poverty that said, "You will be given free housing, healthcare, food and education, social services including job training and with these essential tools you will pull yourselves up from poverty"!  I know nothing is ever that simple but I also know that many but not nearly enough people did utilize the gifts available to them to uplift themselves.  The burning question for our black communities and think-tanks moving forward into the twenty-first century is what went wrong and I do mean specifically and how can we turn this unfortunate flow of events around to get a favorable outcome?  Well we all know the tough answers to this question are all linked to unpopular topics such as welfare, prison and child support law reform just to name a few... but these are topics for another discussion which had to be mentioned here because they are key ingredients of the soup that got us here with such distaste upon our palettes.  Like Spike Lee says at the terminus of every one of his landmark films I want to run outside and scream, "WAKE UP"!






When viewed from a purely statistical perspective it is easy to see that there is a real population of Black Americans that identify with the ideological system or philosophy marketed in the media as "Ghetto". Ghetto is a term that got re-minted in the second half of the twentieth century having originated from the ancient Roman term, “Ghetto”  but alluded to as a similar condition to that endured by oppressed Jews during the Holocaust in Europe.  Again, statistically that population of people that might be referenced as ghetto significantly outnumbers the black intelligentsia and that is why street sense and street credibility collectively known as ghetto culture reigns as the predominant force of leadership within the black community today.  For some this truth was personified by the mid 1970's funk/Soul band called War in their single, "The World Is A Ghetto".  Unlike most cultures which experience internal decline, Black American culture and specifically the culture of the black intelligentsia did not lose power primarily through attrition as its ranks were always historically minimized by slavery.   Slavery as we well know was an inherently strangling phenomenon wherein the education and socioeconomic empowerment of black men was institutionally aborted.  During the period of slavery when only freedmen could pursue education and the manifest destiny embodied within their limited scope of careers they did represent their community as the black intelligentsia. After slavery many black men were able to advance themselves in the example of the black intelligentsia with resources made available to them during the reconstruction but their numbers were still heavily outweighed by uneducated and unsophisticated black men who often had no choice but to cling to the fetters of post-slavery reality.  After the brief blessing of reconstruction black men were again plunged into an abysmal state of existence begrudging them their lawful emancipation replacing it with laws both on and off the books that would effectively reverse the 13th amendment and lock them out of the nation’s burgeoning industrial economy.  




Now the black intelligentsia was able to make remarkable progress after the emancipation of black peoples.  Aided by the overlay of Victorian culture the black intelligentsia assumed a more prominent role in the newly formed black community of freedmen.  Historically the black intelligentsia comprised of clergymen, farmers and businessmen as well as some slaves who held prominent positions within the plantation system was always the ethical and political rock of the bisected black community.  Whenever there was any racial conflict the men of the black intelligentsia were first consulted by both black and white stakeholders toward a resolution.  Then as now slaves, ex slaves as well as their descendants were forced to comply with the wishes of these black leaders whether they agreed with them or not because of the rigidity of the social structure; that they greatly resented and envied them their affluence cannot be discounted as there would have been a huge gulf in their respective standards of living.  Such men certainly might have viewed the black intelligentsia with the same disdain they held for men they more clearly understood to be their oppressors.  So it is quite easy to understand how institutionally enforced oppression, poverty and ignorance has always been the source of the black man’s hatred and resentment of authority, and education or intelligence.  Moreover, the gulf between the black intelligentsia and the general population of the black community that began to lessen in the late nineteenth century, stabilize during the first half of the twentieth century only to destabilize and widen again during the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first century is a clear indicator that this internal trauma has not been managed.  In reality there has been no attempt to address this disparity; the black community continues to ignore its existence as if it were at the bottom of their substantial pile of problems.  So the resentment, animosity and jealousy coming from the poor and uneducated classes of Black Americans intensified over the long years during and after slavery to the present as a rising black middle class turned its noses up at its less fortunate brothers and sisters and as the underclasses snubbed the black intelligentsia back.  The poor of the black community were amply frustrated with their own struggles to find advancement and they began to claim that the economically successful talented tenth had merely adopted the ways of their oppressors and embarked on a wholesale rejection of the black intelligentsia including their values mostly as a weak means of defense against forces they did not wholly understand. 




Our nineteenth and early twentieth century black intellectuals were wrong in their assumption that their poor brothers and sisters were morally corrupt and ignorant and therefore deserving of the cruel vicissitudes of life exacted upon them.  In those days such painful reminders of the inequity in justice would commonly be personified by a frequent lynching or incarceration for no other reason than being a black man vulnerable and guilty by virtue of his powerlessness.  Yes, we can honestly and regrettably say that the black intelligentsia were and are continue to be guilty of bias against poor, uneducated, and unsophisticated black man by even partially condoning the lynching’s and sentencing’s of those assumed to be brutish and ethically corrupt brothers without first challenging the legitimacy of their sentence and the motive of their accusers. 



This brings us full circle to expose the nature of the black community that would allow it to ignore itself through the illusion that some standard of normalcy was being preserved whilst the opposite, its very foundation was being liquefied and vaporized through a determined combination of destructive external and internal forces which are invested in the opportunistic exploitation of apathy to seize total control.  Even more responsibility lies on the heads of those living in troubled communities for turning the tide around making it necessary for them to wake up and name the undefined line they are attempting to avoid crossing.  Someone must cross that line! The line must be drawn where black men who conspire to or actually committed crimes are first held accountable by their own communities.  Because the legal power structure in America has historically excluded Black Americans from taking part in their own governance blacks have always quietly awaited the sting of their masters whip knowing nothing else as the definition of justice.  This is why the disdain for snitching has always enabled the “Brute” to escape justice in his own community as if lying could become a form of civil disobedience as well as means to empower the powerless with their own homegrown recipe for jurisprudence.  The game of “reparation-justice” the black community has played for over 150 years now to evade taking responsibility for the cultivation of a humane and civilized community has grown equally as old as the game of continued racism against black men.  No man is innocent simply because he is black and his accusers are either white and or racists. A man is only guilty if he is truly guilty and we must all brace ourselves to demand and then confront the truth of a man’s choices as well as well as demanding and confronting the truth of his accusers!   Anyone of the black intelligentsia can turn a blind-eye to justice choosing not to hold a black man accountable because of fear, ignorance or bias and for that matter so can the black community at the other end of the socioeconomic and political spectrum; neither of them can ever be right in so doing!  On the other end of the spectrum the prevalent phenomenon of racism in America which aggressively holds black men to unreasonable extremes of legal, ethical and moral accountability it does not impose upon others must continue to be unequivocally challenged wherever and whenever it occurs on a unified front led by the black community.  The black community is a diversified front should not be dominated by the black intelligentsia or any other faction to the extent that it becomes unable to bend its substantial power to ensure that justice is duly served to every Black American man.

FIN.




WRITTEN BY: BIGDADDY BLUES



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