Us Black Folk By Dennis Shipman

   

                                                                        Us Black Folks

                                                                        By Dennis Shipman

   Unlike any other ethnic group or, more accurately, sub-group in the United States, upwardly mobile Black folks have been all too willing to sacrifice cultural affinity on the self-serving altar of rugged individualism than any other group on earth. Individualism is a concept that does not exist among any indigenous group found in Africa. Social scientists often argue, only to be cast as apologists for tribalism, that this phenomenon is a lasting vestige of slavery.

   Communalism is a philosophy that binds Africans however tenuously to the whole but often gives rise to a dichotomy, which fuels frustration many conscious blacks in the progressive movement feel at an entrenched, intransigent segment of our community. A segment that openly fosters an unapologetic I-got-mine-you-get-yours ethos. It is a peculiar community, which eschews affirmative action, although many of its most prominent members are unabashed beneficiaries of race-based preferences either directly or indirectly and, ironically, can attribute their very success to the level playing field it provided to them on their career path.

   Separatism often garbed under the deceptive cloak of nationalism holds many ethnic groups to a shared talking point, which enables them to marshal their franchise to the benefit or detriment of the whole. We see evidence of this phenomenon when poor and lower-middle-class whites, comprising huge, influential swaths of the mid-west beset by a wholesale loss of high paying, manufacturing jobs, because of ill-conceived US-sponsored trade policies, voted against their very own economic interest to support an ultra-conservative platform in the 2000, 2004, and 2016 presidential elections, respectively.

   Poor and middle-class whites abhorred being identified with a party that has been associated traditionally with both black and liberal causes irrespective of the demonstrable benefits to them by an agenda, which mirrors that of poor and middle-class blacks: job security, affordable health care, and sane energy policies. Unfortunately, white self-identity is so closely tied to race, 75 million whites unhesitatingly sacrificed their own self-interest to assume the dubious mantle of bona fide card-carrying Republican.

     One of the best-known spokesmen for racial integration during the Civil Rights era was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King was himself a product of a solidly middle-class upbringing with all the pomp and circumstance that it entailed. As a result of the movement he reluctantly spearheaded despite revisionist depictions of history, most of the legal basis for racial segregation was repealed through the courts. The barriers to racial integration that remained were strictly social and customary ones, which could not be repealed as easily as could laws, however. 

   The Civil Rights movement was primarily funded, advocated for, and led by young, middle class, college-educated Blacks, equally young, liberal Jews, and a smattering of adventurous whites. The communities our forebears knew prior to the Civil Rights Movement ceased to exist largely due to the advent of integration in the mid-to-late 1960s. 

   Before that point, highly successful blacks had no choice but to live side by side with poor and lower-middle-class ones. Those communities had expectations of success and, more importantly, standards of conduct, which no longer exist in the inner city. An unintended consequence was that desegregation became a driving force behind the unspoken class divide we now see evident in the black community. Wedge issues like equal opportunity, gay rights, and abortion only serve to exacerbate the divide. 

   By the late 1960s, upper-middle-class blacks began fleeing the inner city as fast as their charter bus-sized station wagons and 20¢ per gallon lead gasoline would carry them straight to tangibly hostile, suspicious, barely welcoming suburbs; bused out neighborhoods cropping up like target duckies on the outskirts of major cities, which allowed these intrepid pilgrims to realize a vestige of the American dream. Urban decay, blight, and rampant criminality replaced the well-maintained communities, which characterized the once solidly middle-classed inner-city neighborhoods left in their wake.

   Fat, sleek, and well-fed, reviling in their own self-aggrandizement, posh country club memberships, exclusive secondary schools, fraternities, sororities, fawning adherence to prosperity ministries, and enviable vacation destinations such as Oaks Buff (long the vacation destination of the black elite. Oaks Buff is outside of Martha’s Vineyard, and was once derisively described by the famed jurist, the late, great Hon. Bruce Wright as “Spook’s Buff”), these well-to-do Blacks brought into the worldview, fed by wall-to-wall commentary, and regurgitated by highly paid touts: ill-informed, racist conservative talking heads on some of the most reactionary radio and television shows on the air - that they had made it, why can’t “you people” (conveniently ignoring the structural inequalities that make success for a large segment of the African American community an illusory dream)?

   Although higher education has been the traditional means of upward mobility in the black community, any competent, graduate economic student can illustrate with precise mathematical graphs and charts, that the economy cannot absorb all the college-educated workers our colleges and universities graduate each year in the best of times. Conservative pundits like the late Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bob Grant all of whom barely fell out of high school. They did not allow the facts (demonstrating that white privilege is alive and kicking) to get in the way of hyperbole, though. 

   These talking heads adroitly spin the truth to lay the blame squarely at the foot of poor and middle-class Black students who major in “liberal arts,” as opposed to “hard sciences” such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering simplistically suggesting that poor career choices, drug and alcohol abuse, criminality or innate stupidity are what causes a large percentage to be underemployed - if they manage to obtain employment after graduation at all. The ones that do not, rarely ever manage to obtain work in the field with which they majored.

   Ultra-wealthy Black entertainers, businessmen, and politicians, many of whom originate from the black middle class, inwardly cringe in shame at the wholesale destruction of black inner-city neighborhoods, which their parents and grandparents abandoned en mass decades earlier, leaving a hopeless void only to be filled by unremitting self-hate, anger, and a prison mentality characterized by drooping britches leaving often soiled drawers in full view, which uninformed observers believe is reflective of Hip Hop culture. This fashion statement is only really reflective of the homo-thug culture popularized in jails and prisons throughout the country.

   Instead of taking direct action or working with community engagement, social activists, or other popular causes, their finite resources go into feel-good projects they boast about in self-congratulatory conversation over Earl Grey tea and sweet crumpets, which serves communalism in concept but also sadly illustrates an elitist, despair ridden, attitude that upper, middle-class (or wannabes) Blacks oblivious to reality that is, unfortunately, emblemized by disgraced, imprisoned, Comedian Bill Cosby who “took aim at blacks who don't take responsibility for their economic status, blame police for incarcerations, and teach their kids poor speaking habits,” have toward less fortunate Blacks. It is a phenomenon that has roots deeply planted in slavery.

   

   In the antebellum south, black mammies, often unconsciously perpetuated this enduring pathos; white supremacy playing out by adopting Eurocentric individualistic values in contrast to egalitarian ones represented by Afrocentric communalism, which ignores a straightforward sociological fact: whites given the choice will always hire, rent, and loan capital to people who look like them regardless of their competencies, character, or creditworthiness. Donald John Trump is the living embodiment of this fact.

   Mammies were socialized to enforce white supremacy with an iron hand among hapless house slaves but also wielded considerable influence in socializing backward field-hands ignorant of plantation protocol. During the civil war, these mammies were seen fiercely protecting Massa’s property often at the cost of their own lives. We now see this scraping obeisance to white supremacist values being played out in corporate America, entertainment, and to a much lesser degree in politics.

   Seventy percent of Black females are the primary breadwinners in their households. And they have been given positions of immense responsibility, influence, and authority because they are considered less threatening [read that: more subservient] than black men. But many squander the opportunity to bring up ambitious brothers at every turn all while bemoaning a dismal lack of marriage eligible (read that: tall, handsome, heterosexual, buff, no children, criminal record, good credit, formal education, or vocational skillsets) Black men in the same breath.

   These unconscious "sistas" have become the new Aunt Jemima's: materialistic gatekeepers stoking the embers of inequality, fiercely guarding the status quo because they got theirs, why cannot the brothers get theirs; utterly oblivious to the institutionalized racism that fueled America’s economic engine from its inception, they ignore pernicious evidence of inequality in a weave flinging, hip-swaying, sassy talking, finger-wagging, irrationally loyal effort to go-along-in-order-to-get-along.

   The image of the lone white hero still reigns supreme in popular culture. It is an image-driven by art imitating life, which is in turn informed by rugged individualism: a visceral Eurocentric need to dominate, emasculate, and own.

   No other culture ignores its own collective interest to achieve individual success like black folks generally and black women particularly. Although all can share equally in how this persistent pathology eviscerates an entire generation of black boys and girls, it is the responsibility of those WEB Dubois termed the “talented tenth” to affirmatively remediate the problem through education.

   We must educate each other to be conscious of the benefit to the whole, by raising up one. Dr. Dubois once wrote, “The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.