Chapter 2
THIS CHAPTER considers another American debate concerning piety and peoplehood—that among African-American thinkers over Black Nationalism and its separatist conception of political community. That this form of racial nationalism is a reaction to the racist exclusion of blacks from full participation in the civic nation is a vivid reminder that the virtues most directly linked to the prospects of democracy are justice, friendship, generosity, and hope. For the erosion of these virtues rapidly undermines the trust in others and in the future that is essential to identification with the civic nation as a whole. If the next generation fails to keep democratic hope alive while defending itself against terrorism and responding to other pressing challenges, the most plausible explanation will be that the people were themselves too unjust and hateful to inspire trust in one another. When injustice is bad enough, in particular when large segments of the population have reason to feel humiliated and despised, then the community itself is apt to fall apart into essentially separate communities. One knows this has happened when the respective groups no longer take an interest in giving reasons to one another, in holding one another responsible by discursive means.
Throughout their history white Americans have been uncertain about whether to define their national identity in racial terms. Thinking of the people as a race is a mistake Emerson and Whitman themselves committed more than once, even when they were in the process of defending the abolition of slavery as a condition of securing a more perfect union. Politicians anxious to curry favor with Middle-American whites now repeat the same mistake routinely, if tacitly and with a knowing wink of the eye. White America’s racial nationalism has provoked corresponding forms of racial nationalism in the diasporic communities. Black Nationalism is the most important example of this reactive tendency. While it has not achieved any of its original political objectives in the United States, Black Nationalism remains a salient presence in American political culture. There is no denying that its proponents have just cause for desiring separation from a racially conceived American nation. But there is every reason to doubt that the goal of achieving such separation is preferable, all things considered, to the goal of redefining the civic nation in nonracial terms. Structurally speaking, Black Nationalism closely resembles the new religious traditionalism I will discuss in part 2 of this book. Both of these ideologies are reactions against an exclusionary definition of the democratic community, both involve forms of piety that obscure the relations of mutual dependence actually at work in democratic communities, and both have resulted in politically debilitating forms of separatism and cultural alienation. It is advisable to subject them to close scrutiny and to resist the temptations they present, but only after reminding ourselves that they would not have taken root in a society that had inspired trust in the first instance.
A former member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights recently told me over dinner, if I understood him correctly, that racial hatred of blacks is essentially a thing of the past in America. I told him that he had been spending too much time with his fellow commissioners and not enough with children from a community several blocks from where we were eating. I then recounted the story of one of those children, a black soccer player named Demont, who played on teams I coached throughout his adolescence. As I write this, he is entering his final year of college. Once, when we were at a tournament in France, a stadium full of Europeans cheered his selection as the most valuable player. But on playing fields throughout my own state, I have repeatedly heard Demont denigrated with racist epithets. Parents supporting opposing teams have jeered him, and occasionally encouraged their children to “take him out”—that is, to foul him in such a way that injury would prevent him from continuing. His sin was his hard, fearless play. A friend of mine from another part of the county tells me that a black player on his team received the same treatment. My friend taught his white players to say, “Yeah, we’re all niggers on this team.”
Many conservative intellectuals now sincerely believe that African-American activists are dreaming up white racism in order to improve their own position in a society corrupted by multiculturalism. They think the only form of racism still thriving among the American people is to be found in the hearts of these activists and the people they succeed in manipulating. But this is not a thought that can survive the test of experience. All one has to do to refute it is spend time, outside the corridors of power and privilege, with ordinary black people. By this I mean African-Americans who are neither leftist activists nor right-wing ideologues. In the university where I work, a handful of African-Americans are in fact treated rather well. But many of them have stories to tell about being harassed by police. And elsewhere in the same town, there is a largely black and Latino underclass that remains virtually invisible to most of the rest of us. You need not spend much time with those people before you realize that there is still white racism in America.
The American people are both much more deeply marred by their vices and much more capable of transcending those vices than intellectuals typically make them out to be. But how would intellectuals know? Few of them—on either the Right or the Left—today spend much time outside an academic and cultural enclave inhabited entirely by others like themselves.
My focal point here is the critique of Black Nationalism put forward a generation ago by two exemplary defenders of democratic ideals—namely, James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Ellison. Reexamining these two writers is a good way to restore our grasp on what the democratic tradition of social criticism has stood for (and against) in contexts where hatred and exclusion have given rise to separatist responses. It is a grave mistake to think that we have somehow outgrown the need to hear what they have to say.
THE STYLE OF BLACK NATIONALISM
To identify a group of people as blacks is to substitute one of their features—the color of their skin—for their whole persons. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the trope being employed, which rhetoricians call “synecdoche.” We do not object to the captain who calls out “Twenty sail!” when specifying the number of ships on the horizon or to the presiding officer who “counts noses” when trying to determine whether our assembly has a quorum. The trouble comes when substituting a visible feature for a person is linked with a second substitution—a metonymical reduction—intended to specify something else all members of the group in question essentially share, something that supposedly makes them what they are, qua group members. To make a double-substitution of this kind is to issue an inferential license. The license authorizes an inference from the visible presence of one thing, a feature that members of a group can be seen to share, to the existence of something else that constitutes their shared social identity. The visible feature comes to stand for both the person to whom it belongs and the underlying characteristic that is taken to confer social identity. Where the underlying characteristic is taken to explain or justify superior social status, the visible feature functions as an emblem of that status. Where the underlying characteristic is linked inferentially to inferior social status, the visible feature functions as a social stigma.
Racism, like sexism, relies on inference tickets that transform a person’s visible features into stigmata of his or her group’s inferior social status by implying explanations and rationalizations of the social identity he or she shares with others. Nationalism, because it cannot always denote social identity by convenient reference to visible features of the human body, such as skin color and genitalia, must often employ cultural artifacts to play the roles of emblems and stigmata. Uniforms and flags, for example, function as emblems of nationality on the battlefield. The Star of David functioned as a stigma during the reign of National Socialism. Once supplied with a suitable set of visible markers, nationalism can, and typically does, disseminate stigmatizing inference tickets of its own. That it often takes over, and thereby reinforces, the markers of race and gender should not be surprising.
Black Nationalism responds to denigration of blackness and glorification of whiteness not by eschewing the visible markers essential to white racism but by changing their valences. The more extravagant forms of Black Nationalism simply reverse the valences. That is to say, they authorize inferences concerning whiteness and blackness that invert those authorized in the social system of white superiority. As Baldwin put it, referring to the outlook of Elijah Muhammad, “the sentiment is old; only the color is new”:
We were offered, as Nation of Islam doctrine, historical and divine proof that all white people are cursed, and are devils, and are about to be brought down. … But very little time was spent on theology, for one did not need to prove to a Harlem audience that all white men were devils. They were merely glad to have, at last, divine corroboration of their experience, to hear—and it was a tremendous thing to hear—that they had been lied to all these years and generations, and that their captivity was ending, for God was black.1
A more moderate form of Black Nationalism might refrain from mere reversal of the valences of whiteness and blackness in white racism, but it would still have to change them. Black Nationalism need not denigrate whiteness per se, but it does seem always to involve treating blackness as emblematic of something worthy of respect or admiration. That this is one source of its appeal to black people who have been stigmatized by white racism should go without saying, but it does help explain Black Nationalism’s survival.
Of course, while all forms of Black Nationalism valorize blackness, they are hardly alone in doing so. Martin Luther King, Jr., is never classified as a Black Nationalist, yet he did use the concept of “negritude” to valorize blackness. He, like Elijah Muhammad, envisioned black Americans as a people. He, too, figured blackness as emblematic of something that black Americans share and in which they should take pride. But it seems likely that King was echoing the rhetoric of Black Nationalists when he made this move. The same can be said for other prominent critics of Black Nationalism, like Baldwin and Ellison, who also owed more than they always cared to admit to the movement they criticized.
Larry Neal was probably inflating such unacknowledged debts when, in an essay originally published in 1970, he termed Ellison a Black Nationalist. While distancing himself from Ellison’s famous remark that “style is more important than political ideologies,” Neal emphasized “the obvious theme of identity” in Invisible Man, the narrator’s relentless search for a “usable” African-American past, and Ellison’s deep engagement with “the murky world of [African-American] mythology and folklore, both of which are essential elements in the making of a people’s history.” Speaking more sweepingly, Neal went on to claim that “some form of nationalism is operative throughout all sections of the black community. The dominant political orientations shaping the sensibilities of many contemporary black writers fall roughly into the categories of cultural nationalism and revolutionary nationalism.”2 It is hard to know what to make of such remarks.
Since 1970 or so, debates over Black Nationalism, though often as heated as ever, have seldom been clear. Emotions run strong, but it is hard to say exactly what is at stake. It is common to find a pair of interlocutors locked in fierce disagreement over whether Black Nationalism is a good or a bad thing but unable to agree even on what it is that the one champions and the other abhors. But if the committed Black Nationalist favors one thing while the equally committed antinationalist opposes something else, on what do they really disagree? To what have they committed themselves apart from conflicting attitudes toward a label? Definitions and theories of Black Nationalism abound, yet their very abundance is apt to make one wonder whether there is anything specifiable for all of the sound and fury to signify, something that could retain the interest of disputants even when made clear.
The most instructive way of interpreting Neal’s remarks is to suppose that they tell us more about what was happening to Black Nationalism as the sixties came to a close than they tell us about Ellison. If Ellison could now be counted as a Black Nationalist, then Black Nationalism itself had changed. In the process of becoming more inclusive, Black Nationalism had begun trying to absorb into its own canon figures formerly counted as paradigmatic opponents of the movement. Something was happening to the notion of Black Nationalism itself. The rules governing application of the label were changing.
Neal clearly intended his inclusive use of the term “nationalism” as a conciliatory gesture. While moderating his own nationalism, Neal had come to see less of himself in the figure of Ras (Invisible Man’s unforgettable caricature of a Black Nationalist at the point of complete frustration). Meanwhile, he may have come to discern deeper concern in Ellison’s writing for the peoplehood of black people than he had previously suspected. Classifying Ellison as a cultural nationalist implied that, to count as a nationalist, one need not share the revolutionary nationalist’s aspiration to achieve some form of political sovereignty for African-Americans. But what would a cultural nationalist favor? Neal did not say. Because the political component of Black Nationalism was becoming fuzzy, the movement was increasingly concerned with promoting attitudes of a certain kind toward black culture.
Ellison saw this development coming in this stunning passage from his marvelous essay from the late 1970s, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station”:
The proponents of ethnicity—ill concealing an underlying anxiety, and given a bizarre bebopish stridency by the obviously American vernacular inspiration of the costumes and rituals ragged out to dramatize their claims to ethnic (and genetic) insularity—have helped give our streets and campuses a rowdy, All Fool’s Day, carnival atmosphere. In many ways, then, the call for a new social order based upon the glorification of ancestral blood and ethnic background acts as a call to cultural and aesthetic chaos. Yet while this latest farcical phase in the drama of American social hierarchy unfolds, the irrepressible movement of American culture toward integration of its most diverse elements continues, confounding the circumlocutions of its staunchest opponents.3
Two decades later, “the irrepressible movement of American culture toward integration of its most diverse elements” has become a far more worrisome thing, played out on a global scale in terms dictated by transnational corporations anxious to cash in on the diasporic identifications of consumers. The culture into which Black Nationalist style is now being absorbed is one in which successful rap artists, novelists, and professors become blips on the screen of an unending infomercial. It is also one in which commodities of all sorts are packaged as emblems of ethnic identities and marketed scientifically to the appropriately susceptible demographic enclaves. The “All Fool’s Day, carnival atmosphere” is still here, and growing more chaotic, but now you can purchase its emblematic accoutrements from the local mall and subscribe to representations of diversity from your local cable provider. It is in the interest of the business elite to transform all forms of diasporic consciousness, functionally speaking, into obsession with life-style enclaves by commodifying the symbolic means of identification. People obsessed with buying their way into prestige within an ethnically defined life-style enclave are giving the business elite what they want in two ways: first, through the transfer of cash; second, by remaining oblivious to the widening gap between the managerial-professional class and the underclass in all racial groups.
Today many young people and merchandisers see Black Nationalism as a life-style that one literally buys into through the purchase of clothing reminiscent of Africa, sneakers endorsed by basketball stars, and tickets to the movies of Spike Lee. What teenagers and the business elite agree on tends these days to become social fact. The alternatives to cultural-nationalism-as-life-style are not ideologies, like democratic socialism and libertarian republicanism, but other life-styles made available on the same terms, like the one in which pretend colonialists drive Land Rovers while wearing clothing from Banana Republic. The former enclave is no more likely to provide resistance to the most important oppressive forces at work in this setting than the latter. If the Ellisonian dictum that “style is more important than political ideologies” now applies with a double-irony to Black Nationalism itself, this hardly means that the movement has gradually come around to accepting an Ellisonian notion of what makes style important. Ellison’s dictum expressed his commitment to the ethical-aesthetic ideal of living one’s life as if one were creating a work of art, an ideal he seems to have associated with both Emerson and Duke Ellington. The political significance of recalling this commitment today is that it projects the image of a human being too marked by individuality to be content with the life-style options the business elite is merchandising. The social practices Ellison valued were all ones in which individuality, and thus resistance to the commodification of identity, is cultivated. Resistance to the commodification of identity is now the essential starting point for a politics of resistance. Some nationalists may want to canonize Ellison retrospectively, but neither Invisible Man nor Ellison’s essay collections fit easily within their canon. His style offers a means for resisting the most important features of contemporary culture that is wholly lacking in the contemporary repertoire of Black Nationalism.
Two groups in particular appear to be insistent on defining Black Nationalism narrowly. The first is a cadre of radical political separatists intent on retaining the most extreme claims that have entered the movement’s rhetorical repertoire during its most militant moments. The second is a set of black conservatives intent on holding everyone to their left equally responsible for those claims. The former group is content to treat Black Nationalism as the badge of their rhetorical extremism. The latter group is really trying to make liberals pay for the breadth of their toleration. Hyperbolic Black Nationalism is just sublime enough, by virtue of the strong intimation of danger it offers, to mesmerize both parties. Their attitudes toward it, pro and con, are both forms of fixation on the sublime.
The question that really divides Neal from Ellison is how much and in what way African-Americans should care about their own peoplehood, given that there are other things (including the broader civic nation) that might be worth caring about. Answering this question well is infinitely more important than deciding which answers to count as nationalist. Beyond a certain point, the term just gets in the way. If nationalists want to redefine their “ism” for the purpose of converting their old opponents into so-called nationalists, and we find this confusing, we can always respond by using the new definition as a standing license to substitute definiens for definiendum. By thus eliminating the term “nationalism” itself when it seems a distraction, we can easily turn our attention back to the question of how much and in what way one should care about one’s ethnic or racial community under circumstances like ours.4
Black Nationalism puts the discourse of race and the discourse of nation together. It does so by projecting an imagined national community—a people—for whom blackness serves as an emblem. What is it, then, that black Americans share, as Black Nationalists imagine them? There have been many answers to this question, but here are some of them:
(a) a common biological or ontological essence;
(b) a common origin in a particular place, namely Africa;
(c) a common history of suffering and humiliation, based on attributions of racial identity linked to denigrated social status;
(d) a common culture, including music, food, folkways, stories, and rites;
(e) a common destiny, given the likelihood that the entire people will endure the same fate from here on out;
(f) a common interest in the achievement of certain ends, such as return to the place of origin, political sovereignty in some newly assigned territory, or economic and cultural self-determination; and
(g) a common interest in employing the means thought necessary to achieve their legitimate ends, such as mass emigration, revolutionary violence, or economic and cultural separatism.
Items (a) through (d) are essentially retrospective and refer to the putative sources of African-American peoplehood. These items may be grouped thematically under the heading of piety. They have all been treated in Black Nationalism as sources on which African-Americans depend for their existence and progress through life and to which African Americans therefore ought to respond with appropriate expressions of gratitude and loyalty. Item (c) is also a focal point for the expression of anger. Items (e) through (g) are essentially prospective and refer to the people’s future. They may be grouped thematically under the heading of aspiration. The ends and means of Black Nationalists can themselves of course be broken down into political, economic, and cultural elements, which have received varying interpretations and varying degrees of emphasis at different times.
It should be obvious from the structure of this scheme that it provides for the possibility of countless permutations of the basic themes of Black Nationalism and no criterion for drawing the line, once and for all, between Black Nationalism and its siblings. This is as it should be, for it is unhelpfully ahistorical to assign Black Nationalism an unchanging essence. It would be possible to specify a type of Black Nationalism in relation to this scheme by assigning an appropriate interpretation to each item on the list. The spectrum of interpretations for each item ranges from weak to strong. With respect to most items, the more an interpretation emphasizes separation or difference of African-Americans from other groups, the stronger that interpretation would be. A thinker who assigned weak interpretations to each item would not count as a nationalist at all. A thinker who assigned strong interpretations to each item would count as an extreme nationalist. But it is also possible to assign strong interpretations to some items while assigning moderate or weak interpretations to others. The type Neal refers to as cultural nationalism, for example, would assign a strong reading to (d) and a strong reading to the cultural component of (f) while assigning weaker readings to some other variables.
The scheme also shows why Neal’s distinction between revolutionary and cultural types of Black Nationalism tends to confuse the issue. The notion of revolutionary nationalism focuses on a type of means for achieving nationalist aspirations, whereas the contrasting notion of cultural nationalism appears to focus on either a type of nationalist end, which may or may not exhaust a particular nationalist’s aspirations, or an object of nationalist piety. Neal increases the confusion by referring to both of his basic types as “political orientations.” He says neither whether they are exhaustive nor whether it is possible, without contradicting oneself, to hold both orientations at once. He does not say what qualifies cultural nationalism as cultural and what qualifies it as political. If the mark of cultural nationalism is that it aspires to achieve cultural objectives (or cultural objectives alone) by political means, whereas revolutionary nationalism aspires to achieve political objectives (as well as cultural ones?) by political means, what about the attempt to achieve political objectives by nonrevolutionary means? Neal’s typology and others like it had better be left aside.
Ellison and Baldwin both cared deeply but not exclusively about the peoplehood of American blacks. They embraced a conception of African-American peoplehood emphasizing, from the preceding list, (c) the community’s common history of suffering, (d) the value of its cultural heritage, and (e) its common destiny. They rejected (a) the notion of a shared biological or ontological essence. They acknowledged but played down the significance of (b) the notion of a common place of origin, by distinguishing it from (a) and assimilating it to (c) and (d). Africa, for them, was simply a mapmaker’s arbitrary name for an expansive, culturally diverse, geographical region in which many distinct peoples have lived. Having ancestors from part of what we now call Gambia would not connect anyone to an African essence equally instantiated in what we now call Egypt or Algeria. Ellison and Baldwin envisioned no such essence. Nor did they imagine that there was once an African golden age. The historical fantasies of today’s Afrocentrists would be grist for Ellisonian parody. Baldwin rejected the similar fantasies of an earlier generation when he said that “in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: in the present case, to accept the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter, that the Negro has been formed by this nation [i.e., America], for better or worse, and does not belong to any other—not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam.”5
Baldwin wished “that the Muslim movement [i.e., the Nation of Islam] had been able to inculcate in the demoralized Negro population a … more individual sense of its own worth.”6 He meant that the thing shared by the African-American people need not and should not be a sense of fusion, in which individuals experience a loss of separate identity as they merge collectively into an undifferentiated mass. The members of a community do not necessarily experience their bond intensely or agree with one another on a ranking of the highest values. Neither need they imagine themselves to be the vehicles of a common will.7 The African-American people, like other peoples, have only rarely and fleetingly, if ever, been bound together so tightly as that. This should be considered a good thing, a sign of the individuality that flourishes in free conditions, not something to be overcome by corrective measures.
Baldwin was also a critic of Black Nationalist piety. At their worst, nationalists everywhere have invented and then venerated wholly fabricated pasts, the phoniness of which is palpable to anyone not caught up in collective wishful thinking. Black Nationalists have concocted more than a few of their own. When Baldwin introduced his discussion of the Nation of Islam in “Down at the Cross” by reflecting at length on his early experiences in the Christian church, he simultaneously established ironic distance from both his own former piety and Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim variety. This rhetorical move allowed his doubts about the former to undercut the appeal of the latter as well. “Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre,” wrote Baldwin of his days as a youth preacher; “I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked.”8 The stage has been set for us to see through the illusions at work in Elijah Muhammad’s preaching as well:
This truth is that at the very beginning of time there was not one white face to be found in all the universe. Black men ruled the earth and the black man was perfect. This is the truth concerning the era that white men now refer to as prehistoric. They want black men to believe that they, like white men, once lived in caves and swung from trees and ate their meat raw and did not have the power of speech. But this is not true. Black men were never in such a condition.9
The cure for such illusions, as Baldwin put in “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” consisted of frank acknowledgment that black and white Americans, oppressed and oppressors, “both alike depend on the same reality.”10 The piety of the Nation of Islam simply could not, from Baldwin’s point of view, do justice to the realities of mutual dependence among peoples in America.
Ellison’s Invisible Man can be read, on one level, as a rigorous rethinking of what black Americans owe, culturally speaking, to the traditions of black-American life. It is this pious dimension of the novel that makes Neal want to canonize it. But the kind of piety Ellison expresses toward the traditions of his people, especially toward the tradition of the blues, is a more complicated and subtle thing than any form of Black Nationalism thus far developed in the United States appears able to accommodate. One reason for this is Ellison’s way of connecting it to the more general question of what all Americans owe, culturally speaking, to the multiple traditions of American life, black and white. Ellison’s detailed acknowledgment of dependence on the various cultural sources of American life is, to my mind, one of the supreme accomplishments of our literature. It is at odds with any form of piety grounded in identification with only one people.11
Black Nationalism is not only a vehicle for expressing piety, directed toward the past, but also a vehicle for expressing aspirations, directed toward the future. Ellison and Baldwin charged it with being as unrealistic on the second count as it was on the first. Even relatively curtailed forms of Black Nationalist aspiration seemed to them a tissue of fantasies. Where Black Nationalism in the United States amounts to anything more than vague calls for self-help, self-respect, and recognition—when, for example, it strives for some fairly definite form of separation from American culture, the broader economic system, or the civic nation—it comes up against some hard realities. First, the more ambitious objectives entertained by Black Nationalists, such as political sovereignty for black America, cannot be achieved by any known means. Second, few black Americans would be willing to emigrate to a homeland, either in Africa or somewhere in the United States, even if it somehow became available. Third, the milder forms of separatism, be they economic or cultural, would themselves entail costs that few black Americans would be willing to endure.
The declining significance of political goals within Black Nationalism now manifests itself in nostalgia for the sixties. Many people initially attracted to Black Nationalism have been prepared to admit that the political, economic, and cultural aspirations with which the movement started are unrealistic, but they have been reluctant nonetheless to abandon identification with the movement. Perhaps the reason they do not see themselves as having left the nationalist fold is that they retain the old aspirations of Black Nationalism in the modified form of velleities. Full-fledged aspiration involves intending an end, willing the means necessary for the achievement of that end, and believing that the end can be achieved. A velleity, in contrast, involves what might be called subjunctive or counterfactual willing: if the situation were different from the actual one in certain relevant respects, I would. … The velleities of contemporary Black Nationalism lend it a somewhat wistful tone. This tone expresses a longing for a previous state of affairs in which the original aspirations of the movement at least seemed credible.
If Black Nationalism has been weakened in the United States by the apparently unrealistic nature of its original aspirations, one reason for the movement’s success in attracting interest and respect in this context has been its capacity to express anger. Some blacks who would admit to finding the pieties of the movement puerile and the political program of the movement unpalatable still turn to Black Nationalist oratory for cathartic release of their outrage against injustice and hatred. They are attracted by its rhetoric of excess—the obviousness of the villains, the clarity of the passions invoked, the fantasy of imagined vengeance. They are looking for what Roland Barthes calls “excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning.”12 Barthes is referring here to professional wrestling, not to the speeches of Louis Farrakhan, but much of what he says would apply to the latter, as well. For blacks who take delight in Farrakhan’s rhetoric of excess without ever thinking of converting to his sect, the oratory conjures up a spectacle that functions expressively more or less as a professional wrestling match does. As Barthes argues in reference to wrestling, “What is … displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks. … Suffering which appeared without intelligible cause would not be understood. … On the contrary suffering appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction, for everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers” (M, 19f.). “But what wrestling is above all meant to portray,” Barthes continues, “is a purely moral concept: that of justice. The idea of ‘paying’ is essential to wrestling, and the crowd’s ‘Give it to him’ means above all else ‘Make him pay’ ” (M, 21).
The nastiest product of Farrakhan’s rhetoric, which has of course received much attention, is the scapegoating of Jews.13 Cornel West argues:
In fact, the media will project Farrakhan as attracting black folk because he is anti-Semitic and [imply that] black folk want to hear anti-Semitic rhetoric. There is no doubt in my mind that Farrakhan has deep xenophobic elements in his rhetoric, but that is not why the majority of black people come to listen to him, you see. They come to listen to him because he symbolizes boldness. And they don’t join his organization because they don’t see the kind of moral integrity they want.14
As I see it, Farrakhan’s boldness consists in having the courage of his pieties (which provide grounds for the assertion of black pride), his aspirations (which include the “Make them pay” element of fantasized vengeance against the forces of evil as he imagines them), and his anger (which is directed at the perpetrators of injustice as he imagines them). By increasing the audience’s sense of danger, an effect he achieves through mythic amplification and personification of the forces of evil, Farrakhan is able to make himself more believable in the audience’s eyes as a personification of boldness. But this means that “mythic amplification and personification of the forces of evil” are essential to the performance, even if we take the personification of hyperbolic boldness to be the main attraction for an audience too long made to feel meek and powerless. If I am right about this, two points deserve emphasis. First, scapegoating appears indispensable to the process through which Farrakhan “symbolizes boldness” in his own person. Second, the prospect of being emboldened, of having one’s self-image vicariously enlarged and empowered, can be part of what makes scapegoating so attractive psychologically to those who resort to it. For most members of the audience, the scapegoating of Jews may be an affair of the imagination that stops short of licensing actual violence, but this hardly suffices to make the sentiments being expressed ethically acceptable.
Some black intellectuals who distance themselves from anti-Semitism maintain, nonetheless, that only a rhetoric of excess can do expressive justice to the realities of black anger and descriptive justice to the brutalities that have provoked it. Their hope, apparently, is that the scapegoating function of the rhetoric, in which white devils and Jews are made to personify the evils that flow from racial oppression, can be separated from the rhetoric’s other devices for expressing the full depth and extent of those evils. They read the early speeches of Malcolm X for the same reason they read Richard Wright’s novels, as witnesses responding in the only appropriate way to an excessively bad situation. They suspect that Baldwin and Ellison, who criticized both Black Nationalist rhetoric and Wright’s “protest novels” for their excesses, simply failed to respond adequately to the experience of suffering and injustice blacks have endured in this country.
Why need readers feel compelled to choose between Malcolm X’s speeches and Wright’s novels, on the one hand, and the writings of Baldwin and Ellison, on the other? There are good reasons for keeping all of them on our shelves and syllabi. They do different things for their audiences that need doing. Critics who dismiss Baldwin and Ellison underestimate the resources they offer for coming to terms with outrage and with outrageous circumstances. The point of departure for Ellison’s fiction was the realization “that it was not enough” for him simply to be angry, or simply to present horrendous events or ironic events.15 He transmuted his anger into the literary analogue of a blues sensibility, which hovers at the borderline between tragedy and comedy, borrowing tonalities from each. Anyone who thinks that the anger is not there or is not deep is not reading very carefully. The comic elements are called upon in accordance with the maxim that the “greater the stress within society the stronger the comic antidote required.”16 But they are called upon in such a way that they are never allowed to cancel out the force of the tragic elements to which they respond. The comic elements in Ellison’s prose are deliberately compensatory, which is to say that they keep close company with grief and despair but ultimately modify and transcend them.
A RAFT OF HOPE
Ellison’s doubts about Wright’s success as a novelist aspiring to social realism centered on the incongruity between Wright’s depiction of black-American circumstances and Wright’s own existence as a writer. There seemed to be nothing in the depiction that could account for the possibility of someone “as intelligent, as creative or as dedicated as [Wright] himself.”17 Ellison concluded that Wright had not adequately accounted for the cultural sources of his own existence and progress through life. Ellison therefore set himself the literary task of reimagining his social circumstances as a black American so that an articulate protagonist—one capable of a blues sensibility, like his own—could be rendered intelligible in them. The narrator-protagonist of Invisible Man would be “a blues-toned laugher-at-wounds who included himself in his indictment of the human condition.”18 The prime difficulty Ellison had to face in rendering such a character intelligible was that of describing evils of the kind he had experienced and the life of an articulate, spiritually resilient protagonist as products of the same situation. (This is Ellison’s version of the problem of point of view that we meet again in the new traditionalism.) The ethical and political interest of the task lay in its requirement that he attend simultaneously to the reasons for anger, the temptations to despair, and the grounds for hope in his situation. It is no accident that Ellison’s preface refers to the novel as “a raft of hope,” or that the novel ends by referring to “the lower frequencies” as the register in which he “speaks for” his reader.19 What did Ellison mean by a raft of hope? It would seem to be what Kenneth Burke, his friend and interlocutor, meant by a “structure of encouragement” in the following passage:
Suppose that, gnarled as I am, I did not consider it enough simply to seek payment for my gnarledness, the establishment of communion [between writer and reader] through evils held in common? Suppose I would also erect a structure of encouragement, for all of us? How should I go about it, in the sequence of imagery, not merely to bring us most poignantly into hell, but also out again?20
The best social criticism, it seems to me, takes precisely this form.
There are, I think, two main reasons for the survival of Black Nationalism. The first, which I have already emphasized, is simply the depth of justified anger into which Black Nationalism has so successfully tapped. The second is simply a paucity of political alternatives for addressing the underlying injustices. Both of these reasons ought to be of serious concern to the entire body politic. The rhetorical excess of Black Nationalism reflects the gravity of the wrongs to which it responds. We have allowed ourselves to slip into a cycle of mistrust that makes it hard to persuade those who have ceased to identify with the civic nation that there is something tangible to be gained by identifying with it. The only fully adequate response to the anger being expressed is to remove the injustices that have provoked it. It still needs to be said, however, that Black Nationalism, like the new traditionalism, reduces the possibility of building large-scale coalitions of the kind needed to achieve large-scale reforms. Without the coalitions, there will be no such reforms. Without the reforms, the underlying injustices will remain.
“Today blood magic and blood thinking, never really dormant in American society, are rampant among us. … And while this goes on,” Ellison remarked some time ago, “the challenge of arriving at an adequate definition of American cultural identity goes unanswered.”21 We have all in the meantime become complicit in social arrangements that condemn the wretched of all races and nations to consume, if anything at all, a stream of images, insignia, and other substances that dull their sensibilities. But what shall we do? What alternatives do we have?
When accounting for which reformist political movements from the fifties and sixties are surviving in the early years of a new millennium, it is important to keep in mind the nature of the new environment. Communism has dropped out of the picture altogether, for obvious reasons relating to global political change and its own history of horrific injustices. Black Nationalism seems to have adapted in part by allowing its political aspirations to be transformed into a pattern of velleities and life-style ambitions. In the democratic Left, the velleity aspect is somewhat present, for lack of consensus about how to make things better. The life-style aspect combines backpack green, bohemian black, and hard-rock loud. Its representative voices are a handful of intellectuals, activists, and rock artists whose images strike the infotainment producers as a salable product. The sound bites sound radical, but the political effect remains unclear. Perhaps adapting to the new setting in this way is not necessarily a good thing. As Ellison taught, there are advantages as well as disadvantages to being invisible.
One can take some consolation from the thought that things have been this bad, or worse, before. Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau found a way to make a difference even when the battle over the meaning of democracy degenerated into civil war. The tide against which Ellison launched his “raft of hope” a century later must have seemed nearly as bleak as that—bleak enough to require strong compensatory measures. In what, then, did his hope reside? In the style of the raft and the integrity of its maker, in the place he stood upon when crafting it, in the materials from which he built it. It also resided in the traditions, African and American and European, from which he drew those materials; and in all the people and practices and institutions, fragile and fallible as they might be, that inspired and sustained him in the making. These things are all grounds for hope in our lives today. The same democratic legacy can be our inheritance, should we choose to claim it.
No religious thinker has recently done more to identify and revive the Baldwin-Ellison critique of Black Nationalism than Cornel West. His model of public engagement also offers a self-consciously democratic alternative to the implicitly antidemocratic forms of traditionalism now gaining influence in many religious communities. West and I both identify with a pragmatic intellectual tradition in which Emerson, Whitman, and Dewey—as well as Baldwin and Ellison—figure prominently. But we differ over the grounds of democratic hope in a way that leaves me closer to Ellison and him closer to an Augustinian like Reinhold Niebuhr. West’s hope is the fruit of a leap of faith in the face of facts that are not hopeful. It is a hope against hope, always mindful of tragic realities around him. He is a Christian, he says, because otherwise he would go insane.22 His criticism is cast in the prophetic mode—inspirational in tone, progressive in vision, and admonitory in content. His writings and speeches are often tinged with images of evil and death, two themes he thinks his fellow pragmatists have rarely confronted with sufficient candor. Ours is a “twilight civilization,” he says, echoing Eliot’s imagery of the wasteland but with a political intent unlike Eliot’s.23
As responses to evil go, Ellison’s comic compensations strike me as preferable to Eliot’s elegant moaning.24 The former seems more profound to my ear than the latter. Ellison’s spirituality expresses itself in a blues-influenced recognition that even though things are always quite bad in many respects, it is an artist’s business to catalogue the details in a style that leaves room for humor and for hope. The artful trick is to hold the grounds for hope and the catalogue of evils together in the same style, with neither cancelled out by the other. Eliot’s wasteland mood is shallow optimism standing on its head. It is a form of alienation that is of a piece with his Anglophilia and traditionalism, both of which look away from his own people to find hope and value in some other place and time. My democratic wager is that the grounds for this-worldly hope and the evils we need to resist are both to be found among the people.
Because he grounds his hope religiously in sources that transcend our social situation, the prophetic social critic might be tempted to dismiss Ellison’s effort at finding grounds for hope in that situation as unnecessary and self-deceptive. Prophets of a supernatural God, whether nationalist or universalist, Muslim or Christian, are not merely singing the blues when they lament this-worldly pain, excoriate this-worldly evil, and proclaim hope in a transcendent redeemer. In their eyes, the intimations of goodness in our current social situation, including the prophet’s own voice, always have transcendent sources, so the prophet can easily slide into describing the situation itself as essentially rotten without causing a problem of self-referential consistency for the describer. Meanwhile, anger and despair can be given full play in a rhetoric of excess, because the hoped-for compensatory factors are believed to be both wholly other and backed by omnipotent force. The rhetorical exercise of a familiar sort of prophet is to bring oneself (and the audience) as close to despair as possible, in the name of a realistic view of evil. Then, after pausing for breath, the prophet veers heavenward at the last moment, thanking Allah or Jesus for the gift of hope against hope.
The theological antidote for this rhetoric of excess, at least from a mainstream Augustinian perspective, has always been to stress that God not only created this world, but also declared it good, and remains its gracious ruler despite the temporary triumphs of sin. If the world is essentially good, but thrown out of whack by sin, the fitting response to it is not rejection, but an ambivalent mixture of affirmation and condemnation. The affirmative component of this attitude involves a constant search for signs of divine creative energy and redemptive spirit in the workings of the world. At his best, West faithfully expounds this sort of Augustinianism, which he learned from reading Niebuhr’s writings from the 1930s. But there are also moments, as in The Future of the Race, when he sounds less like Niebuhr and more like Eliot or Wright.
Ellison’s blues sensibility, although quite distinct in its religious content, has much in common with Niebuhrian ambivalence at the practical level. He was aware of the style of prophetic excess, and self-consciously avoided it in his own prose. In the Ellisonian blues, good and evil, powers divine and satanic, are all mixed up both in our social situation and in ourselves and are to be dealt with by means of whatever this-worldly social magic and lyrical coping we can muster. Once Ellison embraced this quasi-religious outlook, he had no choice, on pain of despair, but to locate grounds for hope in the social situation itself. His hopefulness, which he sometimes misleadingly called “optimism,” did not derive from gilding the lily. He took evil and anger as seriously as has any American writer. Coping lyrically with evil is not a way of ignoring it or minimizing it but a way of surviving it, of enduring.
Democratic hope, whether tempered by Augustinian ambivalence or a blues sensibility like Ellison’s, is the hope of making a difference for the better by democratic means. The question of hope is whether a difference can be made, not whether progress is being made or whether human beings will work it all out in the end. You are still making a difference when you are engaged in a successful holding action against forces that are conspiring to make things worse than they are. You are even making a difference when your actions simply keep things from worsening to the extent they would have worsened if you had not acted. The failure to achieve progress, though common enough in democratic experience, should not be allowed to sap democratic aspiration altogether. There is still a beneficial role for democratic efforts even in regressive eras, if only a difference can be made. If you make hope depend on the thought that things are going to keep getting better, or on the thought that things will all work out in the end, then you are bound to be demoralized before long. There is no persuasive evidence for members of our generation that things are getting better on the whole or that everything will work out in historical time. If, however, you set your sights on making a difference, you can give hope a foothold in the life of the people itself. Hope is not the only ingredient that goes into the work of justice. Courage, imagination, practical wisdom, generosity, sympathy, and luck all play their parts. But without hope, the other ingredients count for nothing. It is therefore no small matter for democratic citizens to find reasons for hope in the here and now, whatever their religious differences might be. This is a task that Augustinians can share with the likes of Ellison and Emerson.
A democratic critic is disposed to condone certain sorts of practices, traits, and institutions, and to denounce others. Commitment to democracy obliges a critic to discriminate the one from the other. Yet a danger arises right away, because the act of critical discrimination, if performed without care and tact as well as suspicion of privilege, threatens to dismember the people, inviting one faction to exclude another from participation in the body politic.
For critics inclined to think that good and evil come in large, unalloyed units, needing only to be weighed on the universal scale and labeled like a package at the post office, the task appears straightforward. One need only call every form of evil by its name, identify with its victims, and fight the good fight. But if good and evil are both here and there, forever alloyed, in my heart and my party (and perhaps even in the standards I employ), as well as in those of my plutocratic or racist enemy, then the task is bound to be delicate and difficult. Democratic criticism begins at home, with omissions and commissions our allies would sooner ignore. In the act of finding fault with the people as they are, in holding them largely “canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten,” but identifying oneself with that people all the while, one aims to forge a people capable of democracy. It is remarkable that Whitman and Ellison can say such negative things about the people, and mean them, in the context of essays intended mainly to be generous and encouraging.
Surgeons are not praised for the depth of their rage against disease but for their contribution to a patient’s survival and well-being. We want their incisions to be wisely chosen and supple in execution, not as deep as can be. Leaving the patient intact is a minimal criterion of success. Yet we stupidly prize the wrong kinds of depth in our critics, forgetting that a democratic critic, who serves the people as a whole, should leave the people whole at the end of the day. Even the line between the friends and foes of democracy cannot be drawn too violently without defeating its purpose.
An account of the ethical life of democracy, if it wishes to remain democratic in its consequences, must therefore temper its invective against injustice with generosity. Courage and generosity are both cardinal virtues of democratic intellectuals. If a critic’s indictment of society is too general, if the debunking becomes too thorough, it is only fair to ask how the critic, as a member of the society in question, proposes to keep the indictment unindicted. An overly general indictment self-destructs like a letter bomb upon delivery. When critics go too far, their opponents rightly charge them with self-contradiction, with an inability to account consistently for the critique itself. The temptation is then to sidestep the charge by claiming a perspective distinct from that of the society under indictment. But this entails that anyone who attains the critic’s perspective acquires membership in a morally privileged group, above or apart from the people. It is but a small step from this claim to an antidemocratic politics.
I take for granted that our condition is always bad enough in some respects to disturb anybody with a conscience—bad enough today, surely, to bring a democrat close to despair. Because these respects change somewhat over time, a critic does well to say what they are in precise language free of cant and resentment. I also take for granted, as a postulate of practical faith, that there are grounds for hope and humor if we look hard enough in the right places. This was true for the survivors of the Holocaust and for the victims of chattel slavery, so it must be true for us. There being no virtue in demoralization, a social critic had better keep an eye out for inspiring incidents and comic relief as well as portents of disaster. By mentioning the former along with the latter, Ellison meant to mitigate not outrage but despair. As his namesake, Emerson, wrote, “I do not wish to push my criticism on the state of things around me to that extravagant mark, that shall compel me to suicide, or to an absolute isolation from the advantages of civil society.”25